Global Hit

The Guca festival

By The World August 14, 2009

With all the talk of the 40th Woodstock anniversary, we’re going to take note of another festival that has been celebrating music every year since the sixties. The Serbian town of Guca: it’s slowly getting back to normal today, a week after it was invaded by close to 150,000 people. Guca’s usual population is 20,000.

But in August, Guca’s population swells to the hundreds of thousands for a three-day music festival. In Serbian, it’s called the Dragacevo Assembly. That translates as the “Trumpet Gathering.” It’s a dignified title for an event that can be … not-so-dignified.

That’s the great Serbian singer and songwriter Goran Bregovic and the title track from his latest recording “Alkohol.” It was recorded at the 2007 edition of the Guca trumpet summit.

And “alcohol” isn’t just Goran Bregovic being cheeky. The Guca festival may be billed as a Trumpet Gathering. But it’s also about lots of drinking — beer and slivovitz, or plum brandy — eating lots of grilled meat, and oh yeah, listening to trumpets racing around insane rhythms.

This year, the US Naval band actually flew up from Naples, Italy to perform in Guca. That was more of a sober curiosity against the backdrop of the Serbian bands. Because as Goran Bregovic reminds us, it all comes back to alcohol and trumpets.
His song “Streets Are Drunk,” is one of those reminders. Bregovic has a complex relationship with alcohol. He sings about it because he knows it’s a part of Serbian culture. And, as Bregovic has explained before, his mother left his father, because he drank too much. After that the father gave up drinking.

When Bregovic’s mother was dying of leukemia, the father would sit under his ex-wife’s hospital window smoking cigarettes. After her death, the father moved back to his home village near Hungary and planted a vineyard that gave him more than 1000 bottles of wine per year. Bregovic says his dad pretty much drank that wine on his own.

It’s a sad story that Bregovic acknowledges with both introspection and glee on his latest recording, which is dedicated to his parents.

The album is “Alkohol” by Goran Bregovic, recorded in Guca, Serbia in 2007.