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Written in fRoots issue 230/231, 2002

BALKANTO VERO
Margarita’s Dream
ZOKU 07243 537 944 2 2 (2002)

Judging by the label’s sampler in the goody-bag at Rotterdam Womex, Belgian EMI subsidiary Zoku is home to a lot of interesting, well-made and well-recorded cross-cultural music that hadn’t until then been widely noised among the world-music inclined throng.
      Here’s an example.
      The Serbian group Balkanto Vero is led by accordionist Ivica Vucelja, who for many years earned a living by playing in Gypsy bands, according to the brief press release which gives his music the cop-out designation “impossible to describe”. But a reviewer’s job is to describe (and, I suppose, to opine), so…
      The first track opens with soulful solo violin, but after a few bars in comes a Latinish rhythm, a smooth crooner, and syncopated brass. Track two, accordion leading brass and strings in a stop-start waltz with hints of Spain, morphing to serene oboe doubling with a high wordless female film-score vocal over a chugging rhythm, pausing, surging and joined by the accordeon and strings. Track three, intricate accordion and clarinet over bass, darabuka and shuffling percussion in 5/8 time. Track four: another asymmetric rhythm, played fast over tuba with lyrical solos on clarinet and trumpet. Five: a sombre smoky rubato male vocal over bass drone, then enter quiet female backing vocals, jumping into a fast waltz-time repeating pattern on accordion and darabuka, building into a big song with wild recitative and scampering trumpets. Later, a sad female vocal in a klezmer-tinged lullaby…
      I won’t go on, suffice it to say that after it’s been on a while one has to check that it’s still the same album and that, in my estimation, is A Good Thing.
      Perceptive as Zoku seems to be in terms of choice of the music on its label, on this album at least it seems, by accident or design concept, to have overlooked the buyer’s interest in who’s playing it and the musicians’ right to recognition. On the CD packaging and booklet (entirely in English, curiously considering the nationality of the label, the group’s origins and the place of recording, Radio Belgrade), though there are credits to various families and individuals in Belgrade, Sanad and Krajisnik, and to “all the musicians of Belgrade that cooperated in this project”, it doesn’t mention who the other musicians or singers are, or who plays what, apart from saying that they’re from Serbia, Macedonia and Bosnia. Indeed the only mentions of Vucelja himself are a name-check as producer, and his email address - not even an indication that he wrote the material, a fact available only on the press release.
      Whoever did what, they’re damned fine players and this is a classy example of new European music with tough, border-crossing roots.


© 2002 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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