Goran Bregovic - A Balkan Epic

"My music? It's a blend, born on the Balkan frontier, a mysterious land where three cultures meet: Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim". Goran Bregovic (b. 1950, Sarajevo) speaks relaxed, fluent Italian, showing up for the interview with no formalities: swimsuit and towel after a dip in the pool, sunglasses on. He has the air of a calm, self-assured man. His compositions, a mix of Balkan folk and refined technology, have swept across Europe - helped along by his fruitful partnership with Emir Kusturica, his fellow Sarajevan and director of masterpieces like "Time of the Gypsies" and "Underground". Bregovic has composed the soundtracks for many of his films, including Arizona Dream, the Bosnian director's "American dream", starring the likes of Jerry Lewis and Johnny Depp, and featuring a song - "Tv Screen" - sung by the "Iguana" Iggy Pop, formerly of the Stooges.

"War had just broken out in the former Yugoslavia - Bregovic recalls. Emir and I fled to America to shoot the film. Then we ended up in Paris together, along with a lot of friends from Sarajevo". Right, the friends: the intellectuals and artists of that cultured, peaceful Bosnia wiped out by shellfire; the regulars of the clubs where Kusturica screened his first films and played bass in a punk band. A similar background to the young Goran's, a rock star fronting his own band by the age of sixteen, while also studying philosophy. Sarajevo rock. "Rock was the only way to express our discontent without risking ending up in jail, or close to it...". But let's get one thing straight: Emir and I never played together; he was an amateur, I was a musician, he clarifies, in a tone that's only half-joking and more than a little cocky. Something clearly soured between the two of them. So much so that Bregovic's music no longer appears in Kusturica's latest film, "Black Cat, White Cat" - in the meantime Bregovic went on to record the score for Train de Vie, the little gem by Franco-Romanian director Radu Mihaileanu. At the root of the "feud", it seems, was Kusturica's resentment over how the music from his films was being used in Bregovic's concerts. But on this point the Bosnian musician prefers to skate over it: "Emir and I went our separate ways, that's all".

But let's go back to pre-war "underground" Sarajevo. This is where the young Bregovic first set audiences alight with rock bands like Bestie, Kodeks, Jutro and above all White Button (Bijelo Dugme), the band that stayed with him for fifteen years. Then, tired of being a teen idol, he decided to change course. Time of the Gypsies, a memorable portrait of the Roma people poised between realism and unbridled fantasy, marked the start of his collaboration with Kusturica. But soon the winds of war would begin to blow over a Yugoslavia left orphaned by Tito's death. And there would be no more room for art. Goran tells the story with the apparent detachment of someone who has cut ties with his own roots.

But there's a note of nostalgia in his voice as he recalls the Sarajevo of those days, so far removed from the ghost town it became after the war. "I don't live there anymore. It's not 'practical' - the power often goes out, and I can't use my computers, there aren't even the basic conditions needed to work. These days I split my time between Paris and Belgrade, but I'm almost always on tour". War and music. With a Serbian mother and a Croatian father, like so many Bosnian citizens, Bregovic is almost a symbol of multiethnic Bosnia. And yet even he, today, sounds resigned: "It's very romantic to think that we artists can change things. Unfortunately, though, the history of Yugoslavia is made by soldiers, not musicians. The problem is the lack of a democratic culture. Under communism it was imposed from above, and afterwards it never developed. In France, the worst thing imaginable is the moderate right allying itself with fascists; here, our politicians are ready to have a hundred thousand people killed just to impose their ideas". It's easier, on the other hand, to change the history of music - say, by launching a new style and introducing people to a culture that many, as he admits with a smile, "only remember because of Ivo Andric's Nobel Prize-winning novel 'The Bridge on the Drina'".

And so, room for the music: thunderous, wild, slightly tipsy sounds carried by the brass, alternating with other, more solemn and moving ones, like the theme from "Time of the Gypsies", Ederlezi, which also gives its name to the anthology CD of Bregovic's film scores. It's a sparkling mixture, fusing Bartok and jazz, tangos and Slavic folk rhythms, Turkish touches and Bulgarian vocals, sacred Orthodox polyphony and modern pop beats.

Can it be called "world music"? Maybe. What's certain is that, for this cosmopolitan gypsy, the idea of "ethnic-national" music - forcibly fashionable today in the countries of the former Yugoslavia - sounds ridiculous: "It's absurd to look for differences within a language, Serbo-Croatian, that has always been one and the same, or even within the music. Our peoples have always been very close in culture and tradition. But today, in many quarters, there's an attempt to rewrite history".

The spectacle of his concerts doesn't come from special effects, but from the musicians on stage. On one side, the austere Belgrade Orchestra, in black and white; on the other, the Bulgarian Voices, four extraordinary vocalists in colorful folk costumes; in the middle, Bregovic, dressed in white with electric guitar in hand, alongside the burly conductor-percussionist Ognjen Radivojevic; behind them, the "Wedding & Funerals Band", a brass fanfare updating the tradition of Ottoman and Roma ensembles. "They really do play at weddings and funerals. It's the Orthodox tradition: after the funeral rite, people eat, drink, and for a while grief makes way for music".

It's impossible, in fact, to resist the spell of this intoxicating Balkan cocktail. So every time, even in austere settings like Rome's Accademia di Santa Cecilia, where Bregovic has performed on several occasions, the same ritual plays out: the audience abandons their seats and lets loose in whirling dances in front of the stage. Everyone together, young and old, children included, swept up by the rhythms of "Kalasnjikov" and "Mesecina", the driving tracks from the soundtrack of Underground. The film was branded "Serbian propaganda" by its detractors. "You need special glasses to see it that way," Bregovic retorts, "and besides, I really don't think the Serbs would want to be portrayed like that. It's just a love story between three people, set against a slice of our country's history".

But in reality the film - which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes - held something more: "Underground", the cellar where the protagonists were kept in the dark about real events, was a tragicomic metaphor for the Yugoslav drama, for the regime and for the terrible secrets of the war.

Since the start of the conflict in Bosnia, Bregovic has written many film scores, including the one for Patrice Chereau's La Reine Margot. These days, though, he says he no longer needs to "make money". He admits it without false modesty: "In Yugoslavia, you had to pay ninety percent tax on every record. It killed your urge to compose. It was only once I moved abroad that I really started working seriously". While he's long been a star in countries like France and Greece, in Italy he was discovered later. "At eighteen," he recalls, "I was already playing in Ischia and Capri, but people were less curious back then. Today there's much more interest in these sounds. Of course, when I found out I'd sold a hundred thousand copies in France, I asked myself: 'Who are these people, why are they buying my records?'". Today Bregovic has become a star in Italy too. Some of his appearances have even seemed a bit much, like his TV duet with Adriano Celentano on "Ventiquattromila baci", a classic by the "Molleggiato" and - incredible as it sounds - the most popular Italian song ever in Yugoslavia (just watch Emir Kusturica's "Do You Remember Dolly Bell" to see for yourself). And Bregovic, who recently recorded a new album together with Polish singer Kayah (unknown in the West, but capable of selling millions of records in her home country), even took the stage at the Teatro Ariston in Sanremo during one edition of the Festival, also taking part in the "quality jury".

Tales And Songs From Weddings And Funerals, from 2002, brings Bregovic back to his trademark sound. As critic Riccardo Bertoncelli writes, it's an album that "leaps up into the skies of fantasy and play, yet isn't afraid to get its hands dirty with life's hardships; that entertains and moves, that dreams and aches amid a shifting soundscape of gypsy fanfares and electronic treatments, mournful horns and glasses used as percussion, and an alarm clock as a metronome". There are eight songs and seven spoken stories, tightly woven together between humor and melancholy. Among the tracks is the hilarious "Polizia molto arabbiata" (complete with a deliberate grammatical mistake), which calls out the mistreatment of Slavic immigrants in Italy. The vocal contributions from Goran Demirovic and Vaska Jankovska are excellent, but what really gives the album its color and soul is, as ever, the sprawling "wedding and funeral orchestra". But despite the good business tied to his unstoppable popularity, Bregovic announces he wants to make room for experimentation: "I'm not interested in a career right now, only in music. I enjoy trying everything, from children's songs to the most complex symphonies". One thing, for the Bosnian musician, remains constant: "A gypsy band, even an out-of-tune one, is always better than a 'Madame Butterfly' embalmed by routine".

In 2012 the Sarajevo-born composer returned with Champagne For Gypsies, which, besides being a candidate for the trashiest album title of all time, turns out to be a pleasant record and nothing more, without a single real spark to it. Let's start with what's worth saving. "On A Leash": polyphonies like Laura Nyro on acid, preceded by a thoroughly respectable arrangement and followed by a crescendo that will truly blow your mind. Everyone can find what they're looking for in it: the soundtracks to early Emir Kusturica films, a gypsy-flavored Lydia Lunch, a lucky-day Nelly Furtado. Whatever you want, really. It lasts just over three minutes, but every second is worth it. And then, around the middle of the album, "Ciribella Ciribella": perhaps the only vaguely "experimental" track. Picture a Bregovic-flavored Laurie Anderson or an off-beat Queen, and you'll be pretty close. With freaky tones and a final twist capable of making half the bands with "-ska" tacked onto their names sound like rank amateurs.

The rest of the album centers on Balkan sounds that - thanks in part to Bregovic himself - no longer have any borders. The picture that emerges is always the same: that of a secular shepherd watching over his work, fixed on the idea that salvation for him and his people lies in music. Across several tracks, the tendency seems to be to touch again on the usual theme of the Roma people and their music, the difficulty of being accepted and the ghettoization they've suffered. But faced with the conformity of certain choices, even such a praiseworthy intent loses its shine, to the point of stacking three or four tracks in a row ("Hopa Cupa", "Omule", "Champagne for Gypsies") that are hard not to shrug off and move past.

Irish singer Selena O'Leary and Romanian Florin Salam are backed by Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello (a touch too self-indulgent on "Be That Man" and a little less so on "Quantum Utopia") and by the resurrected Gypsy Kings ("Presidente" and "Balkaneros": two stereotype-songs, each in its own way). Not to mention the utterly predictable "Bella Ciao" and "Boogie Unca Woogie", already performed live many times with the Wedding and Funeral Band.

Twelve songs to celebrate, dance and have fun. A tribute to a career that began way back in 1977. But a name and the ability to entertain aren't enough to make an album a good one.

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