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Written in fRoots issue 202, 2000

MOSTAR SEVDAH REUNION
Mostar Sevdah Reunion
World Connection WC 43011 (1999)

A jewel from a war-torn land.
      Sevdah music, whose name is thought to derive from the Arabic word meaning love, desire or ecstasy, arose after the Turks arrived in medieval Bosnia. Over time it expanded from being a small-audience music, accompanied just by saz, in the houses of wealthy Muslims, to become a widespread popular form in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Like, for example, Portuguese fado, it has a strong component of improvisation, an expression of the passion of the moment.
      At the height of the Bosnian war singer Ilijaz Delić, accordionist Mustafa Šantić and others continued to play Sevdah wherever a group of people could be gathered, sometimes by candlelight. At the end of 1998 they reunited to record some demos, and in 1999 went into Mostar’s Music Centre Pavarotti to make this album.
      The songs speak of bittersweet love, a pasha dying in Istanbul, a seduction in the Mostar bazaar, and more love and desire. Delic’s worldly-wise baritone soars over Šantić’s eloquent rippling, surging accordion in oratorical melodies, notes long-held, with guitars, violin, bass and sometimes drumkit. Guitar virtuosi Mišo Petrović and Sandi Duraković were added to the basic ensemble for the recording, and Macedonian Roma singer Esma Redžepova came to Mostar to deliver some impassioned wordless vocalising and a very fine duet with Šantić in the heftily rhythmic Moj Dilbere.
      The effect is of the emotional and voluptuous styles of Roma and Mediterranean musics, Arabic scales and Balkan intricacy all fusing in a warm, involving whole.
      “When the war finishes, the whole world will know of Sevdah”. So it should.


© 2000 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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