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Orthodox Christian Serbs, Croatian Catholics and Bosnian Muslims had happi- ly rubbed shoulders together in the vibrant cultural melting-pot that was, and still is, Sarajevo.


The concert in Trafalgar Square was, she said, “Like magic. The first time we met, ten of us each representing a differ- ent Balkan country was absolutely fabu- lous.” Without acknowledging the draw that she would have been in getting every- one together, she explains: “We created special arrangements of traditional songs for that occasion and in some cases we made new compositions for the existing lyrics. We really got along very well.” Given the enormity of their achievement they all felt it a shame to confine it to just one gig. It was Amira who “turned the whole world upside down to organise another performance for the group in Sarajevo. We had a concert in this beauti- ful hall, which holds a thousand people. It was a full house. They even brought addi- tional chairs to fit more people in. It was absolutely beautiful. My idea is to have a concert in each of the countries, so I hope to go to Sofia, to Zagreb, to Istanbul, to Athens, to Tirana to share that message of unity,” she smiles.


She is keen to stress that her motiva- tion has nothing to do with nostalgia for the old Yugoslavia, but springs from a desire “to make the point that the Balkans is much more than the problems you read about in the papers; to say to everyone, ‘look, this is the joint tradition that we have. It’s beautiful. We have more in com- mon than that which divides us.’”


Amira explains that “Sevdalinka as a song type really belongs to Bosnia; it’s the authentic musical form of Bosnia Herze- govina, but when you think about sevdah as an emotional state or a specific state of mind or as a way of expressing your feel- ings through music or song, then it can be found in all these other traditional musics – in Serbian traditional music, in Monte - negran, in Macedonian, there is sevdah: that’s the beauty of it.”


She says “There are so many similari- ties between these traditions you can hardly see a difference. Sometimes it’s hard to say where the songs are from when you just hear the music itself, the instrumental part. Then the lyrics, the sto- ries told can give you information about the origin of the song, but the general feeling is really very mutual for all these traditions.”


Whilst Amira Medunjanin enjoyed singing as a child and sevdah was regularly played on the radio and on TV, it was the aftermath of war that crystallised her musical ambition. Wanting to move on but looking around at the mess of politics and the legacy of hate the war had left she found that for her, music was the best way to “remind us of who we really are”.


When Amira first threw herself into researching her musical tradition, sevdah was considered the preserve of old people, who jealously guarded its ‘proper perfor- mance’ and harked back to a golden age in the ’60s and ’70s which popularised it. It was not thought of as cool by the majority of her generation or the one coming up behind her. They were embracing local indie rock, manufactured pop and espe- cially turbo folk with an avid fervour.


Now, she says, there are a lot of young new bands in Sarajevo coming up who are focusing on sevdah and that there is a


I


renaissance in the tradition. This is in no small part due to her. Since she first started discovering old songs through her parents and grandparents and others of their gen- eration, unearthing old song books, or going through the fantastic archive recordings at Radio Sarajevo and finding songs that “have been neglected, or had some injustice done to them”, she always considers how they might be made to sound contemporary whilst respecting and staying true to the form.


n 2003 the results of her studies had remained largely unheard and unrecorded. But in that year she dis- covered that the band Mostar Sevdah Reunion were thinking along the same lines. So she asked them if she might sing a sevdalinka for them. They were sceptical. How could a young woman pos- sibly convey the necessary depth, or know how to meet the demands of sevdah? But they gave her a chance. And were so blown away by the authenticity and imme- diacy in her singing that they immediately asked her to perform on their album A Secret Gate (2003 Snail Records).


Snail Records put out Amira’s first solo


album Rosa in 2005. With its blues tinges it appealed to a wider audience than that of traditional sevdah aficionados and Amira began to attract a following matching the acclaim given to her voice. By 2013 this had grown so much that the Balkans’ biggest pop star, Dino Merlin, invited her to sing at a 70,000-seater stadium gig. “He wanted me to sing one song to the kids who come to listen to him to try and put them off listening to turbo folk. He’s not turbo folk, he’s pop music. He’s alright. I sang a traditional a cappella song in front of 70,000 people. And they all sang along. 70,000 people as one voice. I was really blown away.”


Turbo folk is an issue amongst musi- cians in Sarajevo who reject it as simplistic, shallow and empty and despise its divisive and often nationalistic content. It’s churned out to make money for those in the business. “It’s a phenomenon,” says Amira. “The girls on the street try to imi- tate the turbo folk singers that have barely any clothing on them – and so much plastic surgery. It’s like mass hypnosis. A hundred thousand people will fill a stadium for a turbo folk concert. It’s really scary to me. Why is this happening? What does it say about us? Are we really that shallow?”


She is fully aware of how her country- men are perceived, partly because she used to work for the European Commission office, a job she only gave up some time between the release of Rosa and Zumra, the album that followed in 2009. “I met people from all over the world and they generally perceived us as problematic peo- ple with a bad history and fighting each other every fifteen years. They only know about the bad things, about the dire eco- nomic situation and the political corrup- tion. But we are not the only country like that. I thought maybe if people outside that part of the world understand who we truly are, it would be better for us: people would start visiting us more often, it wouldn’t be a twilight zone any more.”


And so to the horror of her parents, Amira gave up her well-paid job in an environment of 55 percent unemployment and dedicated herself to her music.


Zumra (Gramophone 2009/Harmonia Mundi 2010) saw Amira move away from the blues and experiment with the use of


classical accordeon in sevdah. And not wanting to repeat herself, her following album Amulette (Harmonia Mundi 2012) featured the celebrated Serbian avant- garde jazz pianist Bojan Zulficarpasic (Bojan Z), whose playing, she says, “boggles your mind! You have to think about the songs, the music – and the energy that’s happen- ing involves you completely. It’s intellectual- ly quite demanding. I love it.”


For his part, Bojan, whose solo work has gained him acclaim the world over (including from our Editor, a long time fan), says that “Working with Amira is a rewarding experience. She has such a mag- ical voice, she both inhabits and puts a sparkling crown on all these beautiful tra- ditional songs that all of us from the Balkans have somewhere in our cell mem- ory. She is a rare phenomenon. Totally self- taught, Amira has deep understanding and love for the different music genres and she strives to give new life to the musical heritage of south Slavic Europe. For me, as a contemporary musician, it is simply a pleasure being a part of this music making and sharing.”


The two met at a festival in Sarajevo where the theme was to bring musicians from different genres together on stage for the first time, with “no rehearsal, noth- ing”. He was the ‘artist in honour’ and Amira was invited to sing a duet with him. They clicked, quickly agreeing to tour and record together. The pair then invited Nenad Vasolich to join them on double bass. Currently living in Vienna, Vasolich is originally from Nis in south Serbia, where, Amira explains “Black sevdah exists. It’s really heavy stuff, beautiful.”


Amulette was not the first album to use piano in sevdah, Amira had done that with Kim Burton performing on Rosa. Kim recalls: “We recorded a track that was in a kind of harmonic language Amira hadn't sung with before, but she latched on straight away. She had so much trust in the song, in herself, and in me, that we drew ourselves into one another’s worlds. It was a beautiful thing. When she sang it wasn’t as though she was a different person – she was so much the same person – more that all of that person was concentrated to a single purpose, the line of the song. She stopped time, stopped our breaths. People talk about the purity of her voice, how it’s crystalline. There is purity, but it’s the puri- ty of an acetylene flame. Fiercely concen- trated, dazzling, transformative – and dangerous. And she’s one of the funniest women I know.”


Amulette did not chalk up a first in mixing jazz and sevdah either. Damir Imamovic was doing just that back in 2007. But by mixing Bojan Z’s unique style with traditional music, they have created a timeless sound. Sometimes minimal, some- times complex, sometimes challenging and always extraordinary, it’s totally different from everything she’s done so far.


As I write she is mixing and mastering her next, as yet un-named album, again with Bojan Z and Nenad Vasilic. The songs on it are almost all traditional from Croat- ia, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia and Monte - negro. She’s excited by it. Croatian tradi- tional music, she says, is very rich with many different traditions which are totally different to Bosnian music, though there are certain types of song where the feeling of sevdah is inescapable.


Again incorporating new instruments into the form, her line-up includes oud


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