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Written in fRoots issue 198, 1999

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Souffles De L’Âme - Balkan Blues
Network 33.858

The English title harks back to Network’s very successful Desert Blues compilation, but reflects what seems to be a world-music marketing tendency to refer to anything ethnic with passion, sadness and slow parts in terms it’s presumably thought the Anglophone audience might recognise. So rembetika - “Greek blues”, fado - “Portuguese blues”...
      Anyway, Balkan this double CD certainly is, and full of fine stuff from leading musicians. It’s a classy long-form package of music from Greece, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Bosnia and Macedonia, that area that balances so excitingly musically, and politically often painfully, between western European and Middle Eastern cultures. It’s largely a compilation from existing commercial releases, on Network and other labels, but it’s the first appearance of at least three tracks, two featuring reeds-player Ferus Mustafov and accordionist Milan Safkov, which were recorded in 1999 in Skopje, and one of a Serbian brass band from Vranje from a WDR recording. Many tracks were only previously available on vinyl, on such labels as Romania’s Electrecord (source of 10 of the 34 tracks) or Bulgaria’s Balkanton.
      Soulful, passionate voices, dense polyphonies (including Albania’s magnificent Tirana Ensemble) and slow sliding or scampering playing on many of the rich array of wind and string instruments from the Balkans and around - taragot and other clarinets, gadulka, cimbalom, Cretan lyra, lutes and much more - voluptuous eastern modes in compulsive time signatures, an overwhelming abundance of great, characterful, real-thing musicianship.
      There are a lot of different traditions here, and as with any interesting compilation the desire for further exploration is frequently prompted. The booklet is only partially helpful with working out who’s doing what. Recording sources are listed, but other information on specific tracks is mixed in with rest of the notes, whose six pages of cultural and musicological background are so densely compressed that they can make pretty opaque reading in the English translation.
      Example: “If the blues can be regarded as an intensive musical expression of regionally linked cultural identities, nowhere in Europe do we find such a rich variety of blues as we do in the Balkans.” (For “blues” read “folk music”, perhaps?)


© 1999 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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