Muzika Balkanska

When I first listened to Dave Brubeck seriously a few years ago, I was really impressed by their innovative attempts to break into different time signatures. I had read somewhere - I think on the CD inset for Time Further Out - that they had been inspired after listening to musicians in places like Turkey, but had never really seen the connection. Something about the fact that they had met brilliant drummers, who were outstanding technically, but just couldn't play in 4/4 or 3/4 time - that is the time signatures of 99.9% of all western music, including rock'n'roll, classical music & Jazz.

I never really thought about it again until I attended a wedding in Serbia in 2002. The audience all got up and danced, in some circular fashion, to the Serbian folk song Šano Dušo (a love song: roughly "My Beloved Shano"). I was amazed and impressed that the usual collection of arrhythmic wedding attendees were dancing in sync to this song, who's rhythm I just couldn't figure out immediately. I eventually deduced while watching that it is 7/4 or 7/16 depending on how you count it, though apparently it is also sometimes played in the more western friendly 3/4. Speed it up, I thought, and you start to get towards Brubeck's Unsquare Dance with that infectious, but confusing (to Western ears) 1-2-1-2-1-2-3 beat.

Later on, we met a musician friend of Gs, who played for us music from a Novi Sad (I think) band call Ljube [If anybody knows if they are still around, I would love to know]. They, of course, play Šano Dušo, but they also played a lot of music from the deep south, and by this I mostly mean Macedonia. Here, I heard things like Lihnida: a song about a bereaved woman on Lake Ohrid. It is also mostly 7/4 time, with some odd beats in the middle for effect (4/4 if memory serves). Skipped betas are familiar to anybody who has tried to dance to Chain of Fools (there is a 2/4 in the middle of an otherwise 4/4 song; another is present in Street Life). More impressive, however, are the mind-boggling 9/8 melodies like Čoček Bakije Bakića. The first time I heard that song I thought that the band must have just memorised the whole thing, since the timing seamed so martian to me. Actually, it is just as Brubeck's "Blue Rondo a la Turk" 1-2-1-2-1-2-1-2-3, and eventually some Bosnian musician just pointed this out to me. Incidentally, as you might have guessed, I'm something of an amateur musician myself.

These beats are yet another quaint surviving influence of the Turks, who have always played music with these oriental time signatures. And as one might expect, there are fewer songs with beats like this in Slovenia or Croatia, where, at least in my humble opinion, the traditional music is more dull or at least more Western and over-familiar, and frankly prone to a few too many oompa beats for my liking. In Serbia, Bosnia & Macedonia the Turkish influence lives on, and it always impresses me to see people simply just understand these beats without thinking about it. I mean come on: dancing to 7/4 - are you kidding me? Until I spent more time experiencing the music in its original form, I always thought it was some kind of (all-too-typical) attempt by musicians to appear clever. Yet, in Šano Dušo or Lihnida it just flows beautifully.

Years later, now I find myself tapping these beats, out of habit, and indeed, I taught myself to play Lihnida on the piano, with vague plans to make some Jazz version of it. And I continuously try to redo Jazz standards in unusual signatures (I do a 5/4 version of Summertime, though I note with some envy that Jacqui Naylor does an 11/4 version on her album The Color Five). And I guess if you look for it, unusual beats are around in western music. Think of Pink Floyd's Money (7/4) or Sheryl Crow's Strong Enough (6/4).

And on the other hand, I do like 4/4 songs from the former Yugoslavia. Having seen the film Grbavica I was very taken by Kemal Monteno's Sarajevo Ljubavi Moja. Which, in a roundabout way, brings me back to yet another linguistic curiosity. A Croatian linguist friend visiting last month, was reading through some of my books on learning Croatian/Serbian, and asked, rightly enough, why they were using the word Grad (city) to illustrate the vocative (i.e. command) case. When on earth would you have to address a city as you would (say) a person or a dog? I immediately began to sing the opening lines to Kemal Monteno's song:

Zajedno smo rasli, grade ja i ti... [We grew up together, my city, you and I...]

More rambling soon... I'm not done with the music, but I need a new train of thought.