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Written in fRoots issue 238, 2003

SANJA ILIĆ & BALKANIKA
Balkan 2000
Biveco CD145 (2000)

Despite being a diligent scourer of the listings pages of Time Out I seem to have missed the only UK appearance of Serbian pop and film musician Sanja Ilić with his Balkanika group, at St. Cyprian’s Church in October 2002. Being the opening concert of the London ArtsFest it was probably hiding under “classical”. I’ve just happened across an online review, and very enthusiastic it is. Damn.
      Balkan 2000, a large-scale production of Balkan and Byzantine instruments and a variety of singers with lush but appealing orchestration, was written and directed by Ilić and recorded in Belgrade during the bombardment of early 1999. It turned into a TV spectacular, and during 2002 piano and organ player Ilić and his Balkanika group of six musicians and five female singers played concerts worldwide, arriving in London from Mexico just four hours before the gig.
      The album has a much larger cast, which Ilic uses to make filmic tableaux that constantly shift scene. No single track can be picked for, say, airplay, that gives the whole picture, but a jump in at number eight should impel further exploration. It’s a Bulgarian-style slow-breathing, beautifully chorded, aching, wind-blown tight-throat female vocal in the general territory of Nadka Karadjova’s Lambkin. But the opening number, with squealing gaida over pounding drums, chanting male vocals, then gutty oud line and Bulgarian female vocal harmony, should do the job too. Or the limpid kaval fluttering over serene shifting drones that opens the title track, leading into trilling Greek bouzoukis and voices in an insistent 7/8. Or the expansive film-theme style of Violet Saz, or the elegiac piano progressions and orchestral strings of Simonida, the Byzantine male plainsong of Hilandar; I could go on. There’s a new vista at every turn, and it’s full of memorable melodic lines.
      I’m sure there are those who would sniff at its lush expansiveness and joyful ranging across styles right up to the borders of kitsch, but anyway that would be exotic foreign-movie kitsch rather than the dull home-grown variety, and for me that just adds to the delight of what would have been one of my albums of the year, if it hadn’t taken so long to get here.
      Exactly how it did get here, and how to get hold of it, I’m not at present sure. There are no contact details for Biveco, but it’s based in Ljubljana, and the album also seems to have been released as CD 412790 by RTS Records in Belgrade.


© 2002 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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