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Written in fRoots issue 265, 2005
 

BOOK
Princes Amongst Men
Garth Cartwright
Serpent’s Tail ISBN 1-85242-877-5

This is a book that needed writing, and whether one’s attracted to Balkan Roma music or not it’s full of enlightenment. A sign of a good book about a musical world is that it makes one want to go and see and listen, regard the musicians in a new light and revisit records one already has, and this does.
      Though there is some chronological flow, it’s more a series of lively magazine pieces than a through-read. Most chapters focus on a particular musician or Roma musical scene and the author’s trips to track them down in four of the Balkan countries: Serbia, FYR Macedonia, Romania and Bulgaria. We get human stories, vivid pictures of the ways in which these very different musicians and their families live, plus directly-expressed, well-researched presentation of the tough facts of political and historical background.
      Though many others make appearances, the main highlighted musicians and bands are singers Esma Redžepova, Šaban Bajramović and Jony Iliev, saxist Ferus Mustafov, trumpeters Boban Marković and Naat Veliov, brass band Fanfare Ciocarliă, accordionist Fulgerică, Clejani’s wild combo Taraf de Haïdouks, and, coming as a surprise near the end, Bulgaria’s outrageous Roma male diva and now unlikely Roma figurehead and politician, Azis.
      Four scene-setting or background-giving chapters are printed entirely in italics, making them harder on the eye, which is unfortunate because one in particular is strong stuff: 'The Great Devouring', an essay, written in a more concentrated style than most of the book, on the oft-ignored Second World War horror of the Roma Holocaust.
      Despite not speaking any of the relevant languages and relying largely on translating friends, Cartwright’s fascination and empathy with Roma culture is evident, but it’s a realistic, not idealised view. Tracking down and hanging out with his subjects, or sometimes failing to, he gives a subjectively honest sense of the places and people, including sometimes less than flattering portraits; I guess he’ll have to hope that his description of Ferus Mustafov’s physical appearance and personality doesn’t get back to its subject.
      The ever-changing cast of musicians, family members and contacts, referred to after their first appearance by first name only, gets confusing and calls for a ‘who’s who’ appendix to go with the selective biography, discography and filmography. Cartwright’s writing style lurches periodically into the kind of Hunter S. Thompson laddishness that perhaps the minor celebrity who wrote the book’s inapt cover strapline - “High times and hard times in the Balkans” - had in mind. I found it worked best to take breakfast with a chapter a day over a couple of weeks, leaving the images to settle before biting into a further chunk with the next day’s coffee. The Mustafov piece published in last month’s fRoots provides a good taster.
      That extract, incidentally, features much better-reproduced photos than this book’s lumpily screened, dark black-and-white renderings on coarse paper of what were presumably originally decent colour shots. One expects better for £11.99 from a UK publisher. It’s ironic that publishing economics and last-century printing technology should assign shades of drab cheapskate grey to people whose lives and music are, as Cartwright shows, so full of colour and resilience, and whose hereditary musical brilliance has for so long had such an animating influence throughout Europe and beyond.


© 2005 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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