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Written in fRoots issue 321, 2010
 

GORDANA EVACIC
Sneha
Scardona CD 152 (2009)

AFION
Cudni Svati
Aquarius CD 221-08 (2009)

DUNJA KNEBL
Spevala Mi Papiga
Dancing Bear DB CD 220 (2009)

Three albums from Croatia, all fronted by female vocals, dealing with traditional music in different post-traditional ways and using largely non-traditional instrumentation.
     Gordana Evacic has till now been the supplier of vocals and characterful hammered dulcimer to her husband Miroslav’s slide-guitar blues. In Sneha she moves to the front with an album of her own. It shows her a bold and distinctive singer, backed by unusual and attractively eccentric instrumentation in an album that somehow fuses Croatian traditional music with the fun raggety feel of the adventurous end of American old-timey stringband and jugband music and is certainly unique in Croatia.
It’s a set of mostly traditional songs and tunes from Croatia’s northern parts, particularly Podravina, where Croatian, Hungarian and other peoples and musics have mixed for centuries; indeed Gordana’s dulcimer is a feature of Hungarian rather than Croatian music. On it she favours a very damped sound with virtually none of the ringing sustain of the multiple strings, producing a fat, upfront, springy plunky sound, economical in its notes, that’s augmented in very nicely quirky accompaniments by Miroslav on bass, banjo, guitar, tambura and percussion, joined by New York mandolinist John Kruth of Tribecastan for a jug-band-ish treatment of a wedding song, and clarinettist Volkan Jocic brings a hint of klezmer to a song of a soldier leaving his lover in the care of a friend. After the nine tracks are tagged on three featuring Gordana from 2003 and 2006 albums by Miroslav; ‘bonus’ tracks can unbalance an album, but these fit pretty well and it’s useful to have Gordana’s good stuff gathered together in one place. www.scardona.hr

     So far rather few acoustic/electric folk bands doing traditional material in a contemporary way have emerged in Croatia; Kries, Cinkusi and Afion spring to mind. Afion, more acoustic and less gritty in sound than Kries but nevertheless, as on the 7/8 Mitra Delija, sometimes rising to dancey energy, is fronted by Lidija Dokuzovic’s appealing vocals. She has a still calmness and fine control about her that occasionally reminds of today’s Hungarian female trad-rooted singers, and with a communicative, unaffected vocal delivery she clearly cherishes the stories.
     Afion’s material on Cudni Svati isn’t limited to Croatia but ranges wider across the Balkans, with a Bosnian sevdalinka and the seductive asymmetric rhythms of further east in several Macedonian songs. The album title means ‘strange wedding’; most of the songs allude to the dark side of love and marriage. At the time of its first album in 2006 the band had no regional-traditional instruments, but now gathered around Lidija’s vocals with guitarist Danijel Maodus are Aleksandar Jovevski on kaval, tambura and bagpipe, plus bassist Josep Mazic and percussionist/drummer Nenad Kovacic. In an album that shows further development and refinement from its refreshing predecessor (reviewed in fR 297) they treat well-chosen songs with an interesting and intelligent articulacy of arrangement, pace and instrumental texture, and their gigging seems to be ever-widening, including in 2008 shows at Shetland Festival. www.afion.net, www.aquarius-records.com.

     At last Dunja Knebl has forsaken her nylon-strung guitar and rudimentary dum-ching picking that made much of her earlier work with the Croatian traditional material that she has been devotedly researching and reviving over the years sound samey and not a little twee. In this album of songs and ballads mainly from Medimurje and other northern regions, of lovers, a cruel mother, magic, and the singing talking parrot of the title track Spevala Mi Papiga, her gamine head-tone voice is this time set against the robust and inventive acoustic and electric guitar work of Afion’s Danijel Maodus, joined by flute, bass, cello and percussion, that much more effectively brings out the melodies, and sometimes a greater strength in Dunja’s singing, in varied and even quite dark arrangements. www.dunjaknebl.com


© 2009 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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