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Bregovic: Music's A Common Language
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Lucid Forge, Bregovic: Music's A Common Language >>
alkan superstar Goran Bregovic didn’t start out wanting to make a party album. It just so happened that he had a really good night playing music in front of thousands of people at a brass festival.
“There’s a festival of gypsy brass bands competing, and they invited me to do a show,” he says, smiling at the memory. He and his Weddings and Funerals Orchestra traveled to Guca, a small village in Western Serbia, in 2007. The village hosts Dragacevski Sabor, one of the largest festivals of its kind, that features over twenty brass bands competing with one another for the title of the top Gypsy brass band of Serbia.
Bregovic is internationally renowned for composing and touring his own unique brand of gypsy-punk joy. He mixes Balkan folk sounds with European choral and orchestral traditions, and adds a dash of rock and roll. The effect has been greeted with open arms by his legion of worldwide fans, and his reputation for legendary live shows is being cemented through his current North American tour.
When it came to playing the brass festival, Bregovic opted “to play something we play when we have some fun.” Also, he notes with a laugh, “I was drinking really good… usually in my concert, I drink one glass, but there I was drinking well! So this is where is started to think I’d make a record for drinking –a drinking record.”
So it’s no surprise Bregovic’s latest album is called Alkohol. It’s the Balkan musician’s first North American release, and while its first part, “Sljivovica,” (named after the strong plum brandy) is boozy, fast party music, its second half, “Champagne,” will be a more subdued orchestral affair. Along with a Best Of collection covering the wide range of Bregovic’s musical endeavours, each is a suitable introductions for those as yet unacquainted with his joyous, passionate brand of gypsy soul. To put it plainly, this is music to laugh, cry, cook, smoke, drink, dance, toast, and make love to.
Bregovic was recently in Toronto for a series of two concerts as part of the Luminato Festival of Arts and Creativity. Playing to a crowded Yonge-Dundas Square one night (reports on attendance ranged from 10 to 20,000) and giving a CD release concert the following night, Bregovic is every inch the showman.
Dressed in his trademark white threads and looking none of his 59 years, Bregovic flashed a smile and took his seat beside percussionist/vocalist Alen Adamovic, before launching into a riotous, two-hour-plus concert that was greeted with ecstatic jubilation by a singing, stomping, cheering crowd.
He was joined onstage by eighteen musicians in total, including two female singers in traditional Balkan dress and numerous brass players in typical gypsy gear, hoisting huge, battered-looking instruments, as well as four string players and a male choir. It was a busy, audacious, lively affair.
Amusingly, Bregovic was initially told he had no musical talent. Born to a Serbian mother and a Croatian father in Sarajevo, his passion for music began early when he heard the likes of The Beatles and Elvis Presley as a child. He was even enrolled as a student within the conservatory system. “Luckily I was kicked out early,” he says with a mischievous grin.
While the weight of formal music training didn’t bear down on his development, political life in Tito’s Yugoslavia did. He began playing rock and roll as a response to the repressive communist regime that ruled the country at the time.
“Rock and roll was very important,” he says carefully. “It was much more important than for you –oh yes, for us, it was very important, because somehow a completely opposite system of values was there. It was important I think, much more socially than musically.”
As if to underline the rebellious nature of the music he loved, he cut his chops playing in strip bars and taking part in what he terms “the endless game between artists and communism.”
“I started very early, 16, 17,” he says, “and to tell you the truth, our idea of strip bars is different from your idea of strip bars –it was a place of intellectuals and artists. It wasn’t just about naked women –it was a place where you can feel a lot of intellectuals around.” Still, he admits the locale had its perks, ones that weren’t entirely about deep thinking. “When I was 17, I saw more naked girls than all the kids in Yugoslavia put together.”
Just like millions of kids whose passion for music is ignited at an early age, Bregovic encountered disapproval from his parents. “From where I am, being a musician or … being with music, it’s considered a gypsy job.” Gypsy is a deeply derogatory term, particularly in Eastern Europe, where gypsies, or the Roma as they are called, are deemed socially unacceptable by many. “I remember [hearing] my father, [after] I made my first money from a music job very early, and he said, “you have a gypsy job… it’s just a gypsy job”…”
Bregovic went on to prove gypsy jobs are good jobs, becoming a bona fide rock star with the wildly successful Bijelo Dugme (or White Button), one of Europe’s biggest rock bands. From 1974 to their disbanding in 1989, the band sold out stadiums across Europe and went on to sell more than 6 million albums. They wore their hard-rock influences on their sleeves too –in one early clip, there’s a clear Led Zeppelin-esque vibe to their sound, and Bregovic bears a distinct resemblance to Jimmy Page in both playing style and physical appearance. They also embraced gypsy-style instrumentation along with traditional harmonies, something Bregovic, as the band’s main songwriter, creatively incorporated into their rock and roll sound.
But looking to bust out of the rock and roll sound for which he’d become known, and seeking a change of pace, Bregovic began doing film composing for his friend, the filmmaker Emir Kusturica. His work on 1988’s Time of the Gypsies put Bregovic’s name on the international map, winning critical and commercial acclaim.
“I did Time Of The Gypsies for friendship,” he states. “I was a rock star then –and a rock star doesn’t make film soundtracks! Or, well, not for any kind of glory. I did it for friendship.”
In 1991, the war in Yugoslavia began. Bregovic was in Paris, and found himself having to start over. “The only job I had was as a composer, because I lost everything at the beginning of the war, so I had a period during the war when I worked in the movies.” He contributed to the 1995 Palm D’Or winning Underground (also directed by Kusturica) working with Cape Verde’s own barefoot Contessa, Cesaria Evora, on several tracks for the film.
His composing lead to his working with punk icon Iggy Pop on the haunting ballad “In The Death Car” used in Kusturica’s 1993 film Arizona Dream, which featured Johnny Depp. The luxuriously Eastern melodic refrain of the song, and the spoken lyrics suggest a darkness within easy grasp: “In the death car / we’re alive…” Pop and Bregovic worked together on three other tracks, and the two share a mutual admiration.
“He was a fan of my Time Of The Gypsies record,” Bregovic says of Pop. “He’s got something of a European attitude. He’s curious about things.”
Bregovic’s own substantial body of work includes a re-envisioning of the Bizet opera Carmen as Karmen (With A Happy End), composing the scores of Patrice Chereau’s Queen Margot, Nana Djorjaze's A Chef in Love, Radu Mahaileanu’s 1999 award-winning Train of Life, as well as composing and acting in the 2002 film Music for Weddings & Funerals and an Italian work from 2004, Giorni di Abandono (“The Days of Abandon”). His music gained widespread appeal after it was used in the 2006 comedy Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Despite all this, Bregovic doesn’t consider himself a real film composer.
“Nooo,” he says, chuckling, “I don’t think of myself as a good movie composer because I think my music is too melodic, and so aggressive… I was just lucky to be [involved] on a few, that’s all.”
For all of this creative aggression, Bregovic takes an interestingly passive approach in his live shows, preferring to be placed upstage, and performing seated, guitar on his lap. He directs –sparingly –from his central locale, sandwiched between male choristers on the left and strings on his right, with brass instruments spread evenly on both sides and the trusty Adamovic beating out rhythms to his immediate right.
Still, for all the authentic brass sounds and Karatchi-style beats, there are a handful of those who don’t trust his methods of composition. In embracing a more polymorphous sound exemplified by traditional gypsy rhythms and instruments, he has been accused of outright theft. It’s a view he considers unfair, both because of the size of his homeland, and the ways in which musicians have borrowed pieces of older melodies for reinvention and reinterpretation.
“The problem with music is that composers are always local,” he says passionately. “You cannot avoid (being) local. As a composer from such a small musical culture, I’m very local, but the method of making music comes from tradition. It was always (about) ideas. Stravinsky, Gershwin, McCartney Lennon, each one of them, if you [separate them from] tradition, you don’t have much. What your ideas of making music are, you steal from tradition, and then you leave behind something to be stolen after you. This is the endless cycle of stealing and leaving-behind –so being an artist is not the same job as being a priest. It’s not a moral job –you always steal.”
Stolen or not, Bregovic was greeted with a hero’s welcome when he recently played Toronto as part of the Luminato Festival of Arts and Creativity. Fans of all ages fervently sang, cheered, threw reams of colourful carnations, and danced. It made for the kind of celebratory environment captured on Alkohol. Those new to Bregovic’s work were treated to what’s been termed one of the world’s best live shows.
“They say scientifically, music is the first human language –it was there before we learned how to speak,” Bregovic explains about the special appeal of his work, “and… this is the only really common language human beings have. It always goes and travels. It’s nice people are curious to discover such a thing.”
Does he ever worry about the language barrier? There’s a curiously North American tendency to dismiss work that isn’t in English. “It doesn’t matter,” he smiles. “The music is our common language. If you play good music, in Papua, New Guinea, it will be the same. People will get it.” 06/22/09 >> go there
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