49 f Mostar System Producer Dragi Šesti´ c is on a fresh mission,
after having put sevdah on the international musical map. Robert Rigney hears about his latest projects.
know you are in the Muslim part of town because of the green-fringed Islamic obitu- ary notices posted to the ruined buildings.
W
Not much has changed in Mostar by the looks of it since the end of the war in 1995. New are the tourists, who come up here in droves from the Dalmatian coast, mainly to have a look at the famous 16th Century Turkish bridge, built by the Ottoman architect achitect Sinan, destroyed in the Bosnian war and rebuilt in 2004 – the Stari Most, the old bridge.
In the words of Ottoman travel writer Evliya Çelebi, the bridge “rises into the sky like a rainbow, spanning the water from one cliff to the other, a single arch like the Vault of Chosroes in Baghdad. The Neretva River flows beneath in the middle of the city of Mostar. Each end of the bridge is a forti- fied castle, so it is impossible to pass from one side of the city to the other without crossing this bridge.”
On a good day in the summer you can watch as young men swan-dive from the bridge into the Neretva river, as they did in Çelebi’s time, leaping into the water.
eed-overgrown, bombed- out and bullet-riddled houses still line Maršala Tita street on the Muslim side of Mostar – and you
“Some brave boys stand ready at the edge of the bridge and, in the presence of the viziers, cry ‘Ya Allah’ and leap into the river, flying like birds,” writes Çelebi. “Each boy displays a different skill, whether som- ersaulting or plunging upside-down or sit- ting cross-legged; or they go in twos or threes, embracing each other and leaping into the water. God keeps them unharmed and they immediately clamber onto the shore and up the cliffs at the head of the bridge where they get rewards from the viziers and notables.”
Thus it was in the heyday of the Ottoman empire, thus it was in Tito’s Yugoslavia, when Dragi Šesti´
c lived in
Mostar listening to his father’s rich and varied collection of world music LPs, Span- ish flamenco, Portuguese fado, French chanson, Russian and Hungarian romance,
jazz, blues, Mexican mariachi and Italian canzone, dreaming of American blues and far-away places
Šesti´ c is one of Mostar’s most famous
sons, a visionary, rediscoverer, master pro- ducer, most well-known as the manager of Mostar Sevdah Reunion, a kind of Bosnian Buena Vista Social Club, who brought sev- dah music – Bosnia’s blues – to Western concert halls.
It’s been 21 years since Šesti´ the city of his birth.
“Upon coming back to Mostar, what struck me first was the dirt,” says Šesti´
c.
But he had to come back. There was no question. The city was, and is, for him an inspiration – and he needed it like a breath of fresh air. As it was, most of his projects involved the Balkans in some form or another, and in affluent and well-organised Holland he was cut off from the source of his livelihood.
Today Šesti´ c is involved in
a new venture which promises to win over Western ears, maybe in the same way that Bosnian sevdah tantalised the ears of Western audiences at the end of the 1990s and beginning of the 2010s.
c left
Mostar to move to Holland with his Dutch photojournalist wife. Now after a little more than two decades, Šesti´
c is back in
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