![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lproven(This is by nature of both a brief interlude from the account of the Bosnian trip, which I'll get back to Real Soon Now, I promise, and indeed of the #projectBrno posts in general.)
One of innumerable small cultural differences I've noticed in the Slavic world is musical. All the same kind of stuff is popular here, from Tchaikovsky to Taylor Swift. I've heard metal, deep house, country & western, Richard Cheese -- you name it. (Not much goth and bleep, alas -- I think that's more a thing of the German sprachbund.)
But there's another, less familiar kind that enjoys wide popularity: Balkan dance music. I'd never really heard it before. The only thing I'd heard before that it resembles is Klezmer. Think of a fast, bouncing rhythm, minimal drums - bass, a snare, a cymbal. Maybe some accordion or fiddle, but lots of brass. And I do mean lots. Trumpet, tuba, anything staccato -- so not much trombone, which I presume is just too slow. It's leagues away from the sort of Bavarian oompah-band stuff you might think of as continental brass band music. This is frenetic, jazzy, with high twiddly trumpet or cornet playing in the lead.
It's more versatile than you might think, too. I hear covers of western pop, I hear occasional Mariachi-band-type stuff, I hear snatches of classical and traditional ballroom-dance; anything goes.
There were DJs playing an entire evening of this stuff in Kraków last New Year's Eve. Sorry, "Sylvester" - that's what NYE is called here. (That was confusing.) I've also been -- albeit a tad reluctantly -- to a club night of it in Brno.
It really was not my thing. Some of the recognisable covers were fun, but mostly, it was noisy, frantic, samey and repetitive and overall just annoying. Whole evenings of it got old very quickly.
But the local kids love it. Actually, not just the kids. It induces foot-tapping from seven to seventy. It gets nightclub and festival crowds dancing just as effectively as commercial pop hits do, here as everywhere else. But you'll also hear Balkan tunes drifting from cars and bars and homes and picnics on the many hot sunny summer days.
Here in Central Europe, it's exotic, foreign and a bit kitsch. Not so down in the actual Balkans.
Back in June, I joined a few friends on a touring activity holiday in Bosnia and Herzegovina (plus afternoons in Serbia and Croatia). I got a real taste of the Balkans then. Bosnia has its own distinct character: this is Slavic Europe, but for centuries it was part of the Ottoman Empire, and that has left it with a strong flavourings of Turkish, and thus Arabic and Muslim.
Despite the mosques everywhere, Arabic inscriptions and occasional djellaba, it's still Europe. There's beer advertising and girls in sexy clothes both on the streets and the billboards, everywhere. And regular bursts of wild skirling traditional Balkan dance music.
So it was half unwittingly that, a few weeks ago, I went to a free festival of it in central Serbia. A Polish friend from the Couchsurfing Winter Camp needed a co-driver for herself and her three friends who were doing an overnight dash from Warsaw all the way down to the mountains of central Serbia, slightly south of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, where I spent a few nights in June. That's a seriously long drive, crossing much of Poland, right across the Czech Republic, a corner of Slovakia and then of Austria, all of Hungary and then half of Serbia.
Continents are big.
When Agnieska asked me if I fancied going to a trumpet festival -- and more to the point, if I had a current driving licence -- I didn't know what to expect. So I Googled it.
I found hyperbole, but then, when don't you? One review said it was better than Glastonbury and an exceptional festival experience. Another said it got 250,000 people. (I think they may have slipped an extra zero in there.) They all agreed that it was remote, weird, interesting and free.
So I went.
I had not expected to be collected at 3AM and to have to take over the driving half an hour later. I've driven a few hundred kilometres on the right side of the road thanks to my little farm-sitting experience back in April, but that was in an imported British car, so right-hand drive, like I'm used to. I'd only driven left-hand drive once: my flatmate's car to the local 24-hour hypermarket a few kilometres away. Suffice it to say that he gibbered a bit and drove us back.
But I did it, and we all lived, and we got there after a final 15km of narrow, winding mountain roads, completely off Aga's satnav's map, in a slowly growing convoy of vehicles and an exponentially-increasing torrent of advertising of Jelen Beer, Molson-Coors' local bland brand of generic Eurolager.
At 9PM we found ourselves in a melée of smoke, legions of drunken Serbs staggering everywhere, policemen and festival staff (well, we hope they were, we paid them) attempting to marshal more traffic than this little town sees in the rest of the year.
We parked, pitched our tents in the dark, and strolled into town.
It was... hectic. Narrow streets, crammed with stalls. Festival food here means whole pigs and occasionally sheep being spit-roasted, huge clay pots of a cabbage stew sitting in open fires, directly on the ground. Stalls selling all the usual tat -- T-shirts, sunglasses, fridge magnets, vuvuzelas, wacky hats, but also the usual vendors of a mountain market town: pots and pans, underwear, car parts, second-hand books, Rotavators, cheap fashion knock-offs, phone cases, sunglasses, caged birds. One of the festival sponsors, Villager, make agricultural equipment. A truly remarkable miscellany.
Streets and bars all absolutely thronged with people. Many bars have bands playing or practising -- it's kinda hard to tell -- in them, and they play LOUD. If a band couldn't snag a band, then they're playing recorded music and trying their damnedest to drown out the competition, even if the competition is the bar next door.
Even in small out-of-the-way bars, bands serenade the patrons at ear-splitting volume.
There are many revellers with tambourines or plastic toy trumpets with reeds, banging or blowing them madly. Apparently they feel it's too quiet. Helen Keller would disagree.
Oh, and Jelen hasn't improved since I tried it in Bosnia, but at least Serbia's cheap. A Serbian dinar is worth less than €0.01 but a tinny tends to be about 100 dinars. The slight snag is that, after what I presume was some valuation crash, they've not re-denominated the currency, so only ones and fives are coins -- from 10 dinar up, it's banknotes. Huge wads of greasy used notes are being exchanged for beers, kebabs, huge misshapen sausages-on-sticks. The traders' takings makes them look like millionaires. They probably are, come to that, but it doesn't mean much.
After staggering around randomly for a while, we find the main stadium. There's a pat-down at the gate but it seems to mainly be for bottles, presumably to preserve revenue. The crowd isn't huge, but it's certainly enthusiastic. Ages range from squeakers in the high single digits to grannies, but most of them are dancing happily. On stage, there's a battle-of-the-bands occurring: two bands are on stage at a time, taking turns to attempt to outperform one another. It's shrill -- one reviewer said "I had no idea trumpets could make a noise like that," and now I know what they meant.
But I have to confess... it's a lot better live. OK, it took a culture-shocked quarter of an hour, standing there reeling at the racket, thinking "WTF have I done?" before I started to relax into it, but so many happy people make it infectious. It's a joyous, raw, passionate music -- the bands mostly don't have much professional polish, and some give a strong sense that they're just a gang of lads from some village with hand-me-down instruments who've worked out how to get a noise out of them and just run with it.
But it's hard to resist. There are flags being waved over the heads of the crowd -- sure, Serbian, but also Polish, Swedish, Austrian, German, Chilean and more. People are dancing like at any other live band, but groups of locals regularly segue into a little folk dancing -- the footwork isn't complex, or at least it doesn't look like it until you try to copy them. There are couples, groups, lines and rings, all dancing in step.
Most of the bands don't have singers -- it's all instrumental. The records booming from the bars do, though. In Serbo-Croat, of course, or Serbian as we must call it now. In writing I can get more of it than the Polish girls, although their Cyrillic reading is way better than mine. But in song? Nothing. Except a regular refrain:
GAS! GAS! GAS! GAS!
I don't know why, or what it means. This seems to be the intro for many songs. Or maybe it's one song that's in everyone's repertoire, it's a bit hard to tell, really. The vocals are very rhythmic and chant-like and the Poles improvise their own second line:
GAS! GAS! GAS! GAS!
KA! LASH! NI! KOV!
Soon afterwards, they buy their own tambourines and a new band is born. Two lines seem to be enough.
I think the lyrical inspiration came in part from the T-shirts being sold and worn. Sure there are lots of cartoons, sometimes crude sexual ones, and what are presumably Serbian witticisms. But there are also military crests, portraits of bearded Serbian Marshals and Generals. Some have names -- none that we knew. One, we piece together from the Cyrillic caption, phonetically: he's been renamed to, roughly, ČE GYUVE VA RA. Che Guevara. Another shows a coat of arms, with SERBIAN REPUBLIC arcing across the top and something I freely translate as FREEDOM OR DEATH below.
Charming rustic whimsy, eh?
Vladimir Putin features strongly, too.
WHAT I PUT IN, STAYS THERE.
MR PUTIN -- HE'S THE BOSS
(Vladimir Vladimirovich with crudely-Photoshopped extended fist, middle finger raised.)
And so on. Many more in Cyrillic which I couldn't follow.
(Aside: my ability to read Cyrillic is very limited, but it's improving. It's very rare in Czechia, but you do see it now and then -- indeed Brno Tuřany airport has trilingual signage in Czech, English and Russian. (More bizarrely, Prague Airport's signage is in Czech, English and Korean, for no readily-apparent reason. Hangeul is one script I cannot read at all and I've not met a single Korean in the country yet, nor seen a Korean restaurant or shop or anything. In Vienna, yes; Czechia, no.) I'm slowly improving, which also means learning the (significant) differences between Russian Cyrillic and the variants used in Serbia, Bulgaria and so on, which have quite a few different letters. What I didn't expect was that, as my Czech vocabulary glacially advances, now, when I slowly sound out a word in Russian in my head, quite often I get to the end and its meaning snaps into place like a random-dot stereogram -- i.e. those "Magic Eye" posters. Once you know a bit of a Latin-script Slavic language, Russian stops being nearly so impenetrable.)
Putin seems unexpectedly popular in Serbia, which Poles and Brit alike found frankly alarming. In fact so is the whole militaristic, nationalistic, patriotic attitude. Even the headwear. A popular local hat is a field service cap, also known as a flight, garrison or side cap. I have only known these things as uniform headgear of serving troops. Lots of stalls sold them, in olive drab or black or blue, emblazoned with badges. They look as military as all hell to me, but to be fair, on the road back, looking for them, I saw farmers wearing them while ploughing fields and people in markets and restaurants -- for all I know, they might be traditional around here.
Then again, it's the Balkans. Making war on your neighbours is traditional around here.
But I am meant to be writing about a music festival, so let's talk about the music.
When I think trumpets, I think brass bands. Actually, as I write, I'm returning from Yorkshire (from a very very different sort of music festival), where brass band music means large bands, playing dance music, not unrelated to military marching-band music and nineteenth to early-twentieth century music hall and ballroom-dancing music. The bands were often associated with mining towns and communities. The only other kind I really know is Bavarian music -- what I call "oompah band" music. Both are relatively stately, with fairly fixed rhythms, suitable for choral sing-alongs or figure dancing: waltzes, foxtrots and so on. (Apologies, I'm pretty hazy on the terminology of this stuff.)
Balkan music is... not like that. Very not like that. The instrumentation may be similar, but nothing else.
It's fast and furious and very intense. You can dance to it if you know how, but it's the synchronized-kicking sort of line dancing, not so much slowly-moving couples with fancy footwork. There are a mix of instruments, both deeper- and higher-pitched, but everyone plays extremely fast, with a lot of tongue work -- the sound is a rapid, high-pitched, warbling tremolo. It often sounds as if the members of the bands are all independently playing entirely different tunes, broadly in the same tempo, and quite possibly mostly improvised. There typically seems to be one lead trumpeter, playing what could if one were feeling generous be called a main melody, and a few backing trumpeters trying to keep up with him -- it's almost always men -- and the chaps on the bigger, lower horns emitting something between a bass-line and the horn equivalent of rhythm guitar.
It's also very, very loud. As in, painfully, I-didn't-realise-that-acoustic-instruments-could-produce-that-much-noise-without-amplification, loud.
I don't think I heard any vocals at all from any of the traditional bands all weekend, but the audience often recognised the tunes and joined in. The recorded stuff being broadcast from stalls and bars did sometimes have a singer.
It is often difficult for the unskilled and unfamiliar ear to discern overall, er, well, tunes. To be honest, apart from the odd cover version, every band could mostly have been playing the same tune over and over, with slightly different flourishes, and I'd have been none the wiser. Sometimes the cover versions are just interpolated into a longer performance -- these often run to ten to fifteen minutes, perhaps wandering through 3 or 4 recognisable pop or classical hits mingled with a lot of super-fast traditional stuff.
To try to summarize it in words, I kept thinking of an old joke by British alternative comedian Alexei Sayle. In one of his routines, talking about music, he heaps scorn upon the pretentiousness of jazz fans:
"Let me tell you about jazz. This is jazz. SKIDDLY-BIDDLY-BIDDLY-BIDDLY-BIDDLY. That's jazz."
There was a lot of skiddly-biddly-biddly-biddly-biddly. At times I think my brain was vibrating in a rhythm of skiddly-biddly-biddly-biddly-biddly.
Mind you, Sayle also said:
"There are two kinds of jazz, traditional and modern, and they're both crap."
He's not a fan.
We went to the Friday and Sunday night performances. On Saturday we spent so much time in bars and restaurants and mooching around that we didn't make it into the arena until 1AM, when the performances were over. The main format seemed to be a Battle of the Bands: two bands on stage at once, performing in a call-and-response pattern: one band does a tune, then stands and listens -- and rests and catches its breath -- while the other performs. Each does a couple then both retire, replaced by another pair.
To our non-discerning ears, there was not a huge amount of difference between them on Friday night. Very raucous and not very synchronized, compared to marginally more together -- all performing tunes by the same composer, at least.
Sunday night was different. First there was a non-traditional, more pop-like band, Sanja Ilić and Balkanika. This had an extraordinarily full lineup -- keyboards, two drummers, horn section, 3 backing singers, even a bagpipe player. There were songs in English, rap sections and more. An amazing performance and highly recommended.
Then, afterwards, as the audience stood there, steaming and panting in the hot summer night, huge moths circling the spotlights...
... And I do mean huge... this thing was 10-15cm across, bigger than my hand...
... the prize-winning bands were brought on to receive awards and give encore performances. Then it became apparent that they really were not all much of a muchness: some had soaring virtuoso trumpet leads, playing much more like Western big-band or jazz or classical trumpet soloists. Some had two or three trumpeters all playing the same melody in chorus, sounding rather like Mexican Mariachi music. All the winners gave really tight, coordinated performances -- the amount of rehearsal and practice and skill really shone through.
And then we staggered back out to one of the other stages, sponsored by, yes, Jelen again, to where another mixed traditional/modern band did a set which mixed together Balkan style dance with hard-rock-style vocals and excellent electric guitar work at one point, segueing into Ska at another.
Muscially speaking, Guča is the most narrowly-focussed music festival I've ever been to. Even Infest, Bradford's electronic music festival, the journey to and from which this piece has mostly been written during -- is more varied, ranging from Electronic Body Music to synthpop, krautrock and industrial. This year's Saturday night headliners, mind.in.a.box, veer into prog rock territory.
But Guča is also the most intense. It's considerably smaller than something like Colours of Ostrava, spread over a disused steelworks in Silesia, Czechia's industrial Black Country. This year's Colours attracted about 30,000 people and the programme ranged from synthpop to R&B to indie rock to Polish folk music. But for all that, it was a big, commercial, outdoor summer pop festival. Guča isn't. It's a manic village street party grown wildly out of control.
(This exhibits another tendency of the former Yugoslavians -- litter. Litter everywhere. The pretty fish-filled river through the down quickly looked like the Ganges after mela, which gave the newborn Polish quartet its name: the Ganges Gang. On Sunday afternoon we actually walked out of town upstream and spent a delightful few hours bathing in the cool, shallow water.)
I've never been to anything like Guča before.
I recommend trying it for yourself.
[I took few photos, but fellow-traveller Olimpia did, which you can see if you've sold your soul to Facebook here.]
One of innumerable small cultural differences I've noticed in the Slavic world is musical. All the same kind of stuff is popular here, from Tchaikovsky to Taylor Swift. I've heard metal, deep house, country & western, Richard Cheese -- you name it. (Not much goth and bleep, alas -- I think that's more a thing of the German sprachbund.)
But there's another, less familiar kind that enjoys wide popularity: Balkan dance music. I'd never really heard it before. The only thing I'd heard before that it resembles is Klezmer. Think of a fast, bouncing rhythm, minimal drums - bass, a snare, a cymbal. Maybe some accordion or fiddle, but lots of brass. And I do mean lots. Trumpet, tuba, anything staccato -- so not much trombone, which I presume is just too slow. It's leagues away from the sort of Bavarian oompah-band stuff you might think of as continental brass band music. This is frenetic, jazzy, with high twiddly trumpet or cornet playing in the lead.
It's more versatile than you might think, too. I hear covers of western pop, I hear occasional Mariachi-band-type stuff, I hear snatches of classical and traditional ballroom-dance; anything goes.
There were DJs playing an entire evening of this stuff in Kraków last New Year's Eve. Sorry, "Sylvester" - that's what NYE is called here. (That was confusing.) I've also been -- albeit a tad reluctantly -- to a club night of it in Brno.
It really was not my thing. Some of the recognisable covers were fun, but mostly, it was noisy, frantic, samey and repetitive and overall just annoying. Whole evenings of it got old very quickly.
But the local kids love it. Actually, not just the kids. It induces foot-tapping from seven to seventy. It gets nightclub and festival crowds dancing just as effectively as commercial pop hits do, here as everywhere else. But you'll also hear Balkan tunes drifting from cars and bars and homes and picnics on the many hot sunny summer days.
Here in Central Europe, it's exotic, foreign and a bit kitsch. Not so down in the actual Balkans.
Back in June, I joined a few friends on a touring activity holiday in Bosnia and Herzegovina (plus afternoons in Serbia and Croatia). I got a real taste of the Balkans then. Bosnia has its own distinct character: this is Slavic Europe, but for centuries it was part of the Ottoman Empire, and that has left it with a strong flavourings of Turkish, and thus Arabic and Muslim.
Despite the mosques everywhere, Arabic inscriptions and occasional djellaba, it's still Europe. There's beer advertising and girls in sexy clothes both on the streets and the billboards, everywhere. And regular bursts of wild skirling traditional Balkan dance music.
So it was half unwittingly that, a few weeks ago, I went to a free festival of it in central Serbia. A Polish friend from the Couchsurfing Winter Camp needed a co-driver for herself and her three friends who were doing an overnight dash from Warsaw all the way down to the mountains of central Serbia, slightly south of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, where I spent a few nights in June. That's a seriously long drive, crossing much of Poland, right across the Czech Republic, a corner of Slovakia and then of Austria, all of Hungary and then half of Serbia.
Continents are big.
When Agnieska asked me if I fancied going to a trumpet festival -- and more to the point, if I had a current driving licence -- I didn't know what to expect. So I Googled it.
I found hyperbole, but then, when don't you? One review said it was better than Glastonbury and an exceptional festival experience. Another said it got 250,000 people. (I think they may have slipped an extra zero in there.) They all agreed that it was remote, weird, interesting and free.
So I went.
I had not expected to be collected at 3AM and to have to take over the driving half an hour later. I've driven a few hundred kilometres on the right side of the road thanks to my little farm-sitting experience back in April, but that was in an imported British car, so right-hand drive, like I'm used to. I'd only driven left-hand drive once: my flatmate's car to the local 24-hour hypermarket a few kilometres away. Suffice it to say that he gibbered a bit and drove us back.
But I did it, and we all lived, and we got there after a final 15km of narrow, winding mountain roads, completely off Aga's satnav's map, in a slowly growing convoy of vehicles and an exponentially-increasing torrent of advertising of Jelen Beer, Molson-Coors' local bland brand of generic Eurolager.
At 9PM we found ourselves in a melée of smoke, legions of drunken Serbs staggering everywhere, policemen and festival staff (well, we hope they were, we paid them) attempting to marshal more traffic than this little town sees in the rest of the year.
We parked, pitched our tents in the dark, and strolled into town.
It was... hectic. Narrow streets, crammed with stalls. Festival food here means whole pigs and occasionally sheep being spit-roasted, huge clay pots of a cabbage stew sitting in open fires, directly on the ground. Stalls selling all the usual tat -- T-shirts, sunglasses, fridge magnets, vuvuzelas, wacky hats, but also the usual vendors of a mountain market town: pots and pans, underwear, car parts, second-hand books, Rotavators, cheap fashion knock-offs, phone cases, sunglasses, caged birds. One of the festival sponsors, Villager, make agricultural equipment. A truly remarkable miscellany.
Streets and bars all absolutely thronged with people. Many bars have bands playing or practising -- it's kinda hard to tell -- in them, and they play LOUD. If a band couldn't snag a band, then they're playing recorded music and trying their damnedest to drown out the competition, even if the competition is the bar next door.
Even in small out-of-the-way bars, bands serenade the patrons at ear-splitting volume.
There are many revellers with tambourines or plastic toy trumpets with reeds, banging or blowing them madly. Apparently they feel it's too quiet. Helen Keller would disagree.
Oh, and Jelen hasn't improved since I tried it in Bosnia, but at least Serbia's cheap. A Serbian dinar is worth less than €0.01 but a tinny tends to be about 100 dinars. The slight snag is that, after what I presume was some valuation crash, they've not re-denominated the currency, so only ones and fives are coins -- from 10 dinar up, it's banknotes. Huge wads of greasy used notes are being exchanged for beers, kebabs, huge misshapen sausages-on-sticks. The traders' takings makes them look like millionaires. They probably are, come to that, but it doesn't mean much.
After staggering around randomly for a while, we find the main stadium. There's a pat-down at the gate but it seems to mainly be for bottles, presumably to preserve revenue. The crowd isn't huge, but it's certainly enthusiastic. Ages range from squeakers in the high single digits to grannies, but most of them are dancing happily. On stage, there's a battle-of-the-bands occurring: two bands are on stage at a time, taking turns to attempt to outperform one another. It's shrill -- one reviewer said "I had no idea trumpets could make a noise like that," and now I know what they meant.
But I have to confess... it's a lot better live. OK, it took a culture-shocked quarter of an hour, standing there reeling at the racket, thinking "WTF have I done?" before I started to relax into it, but so many happy people make it infectious. It's a joyous, raw, passionate music -- the bands mostly don't have much professional polish, and some give a strong sense that they're just a gang of lads from some village with hand-me-down instruments who've worked out how to get a noise out of them and just run with it.
But it's hard to resist. There are flags being waved over the heads of the crowd -- sure, Serbian, but also Polish, Swedish, Austrian, German, Chilean and more. People are dancing like at any other live band, but groups of locals regularly segue into a little folk dancing -- the footwork isn't complex, or at least it doesn't look like it until you try to copy them. There are couples, groups, lines and rings, all dancing in step.
Most of the bands don't have singers -- it's all instrumental. The records booming from the bars do, though. In Serbo-Croat, of course, or Serbian as we must call it now. In writing I can get more of it than the Polish girls, although their Cyrillic reading is way better than mine. But in song? Nothing. Except a regular refrain:
GAS! GAS! GAS! GAS!
I don't know why, or what it means. This seems to be the intro for many songs. Or maybe it's one song that's in everyone's repertoire, it's a bit hard to tell, really. The vocals are very rhythmic and chant-like and the Poles improvise their own second line:
GAS! GAS! GAS! GAS!
KA! LASH! NI! KOV!
Soon afterwards, they buy their own tambourines and a new band is born. Two lines seem to be enough.
I think the lyrical inspiration came in part from the T-shirts being sold and worn. Sure there are lots of cartoons, sometimes crude sexual ones, and what are presumably Serbian witticisms. But there are also military crests, portraits of bearded Serbian Marshals and Generals. Some have names -- none that we knew. One, we piece together from the Cyrillic caption, phonetically: he's been renamed to, roughly, ČE GYUVE VA RA. Che Guevara. Another shows a coat of arms, with SERBIAN REPUBLIC arcing across the top and something I freely translate as FREEDOM OR DEATH below.
Charming rustic whimsy, eh?
Vladimir Putin features strongly, too.
WHAT I PUT IN, STAYS THERE.
MR PUTIN -- HE'S THE BOSS
(Vladimir Vladimirovich with crudely-Photoshopped extended fist, middle finger raised.)
And so on. Many more in Cyrillic which I couldn't follow.
(Aside: my ability to read Cyrillic is very limited, but it's improving. It's very rare in Czechia, but you do see it now and then -- indeed Brno Tuřany airport has trilingual signage in Czech, English and Russian. (More bizarrely, Prague Airport's signage is in Czech, English and Korean, for no readily-apparent reason. Hangeul is one script I cannot read at all and I've not met a single Korean in the country yet, nor seen a Korean restaurant or shop or anything. In Vienna, yes; Czechia, no.) I'm slowly improving, which also means learning the (significant) differences between Russian Cyrillic and the variants used in Serbia, Bulgaria and so on, which have quite a few different letters. What I didn't expect was that, as my Czech vocabulary glacially advances, now, when I slowly sound out a word in Russian in my head, quite often I get to the end and its meaning snaps into place like a random-dot stereogram -- i.e. those "Magic Eye" posters. Once you know a bit of a Latin-script Slavic language, Russian stops being nearly so impenetrable.)
Putin seems unexpectedly popular in Serbia, which Poles and Brit alike found frankly alarming. In fact so is the whole militaristic, nationalistic, patriotic attitude. Even the headwear. A popular local hat is a field service cap, also known as a flight, garrison or side cap. I have only known these things as uniform headgear of serving troops. Lots of stalls sold them, in olive drab or black or blue, emblazoned with badges. They look as military as all hell to me, but to be fair, on the road back, looking for them, I saw farmers wearing them while ploughing fields and people in markets and restaurants -- for all I know, they might be traditional around here.
Then again, it's the Balkans. Making war on your neighbours is traditional around here.
But I am meant to be writing about a music festival, so let's talk about the music.
When I think trumpets, I think brass bands. Actually, as I write, I'm returning from Yorkshire (from a very very different sort of music festival), where brass band music means large bands, playing dance music, not unrelated to military marching-band music and nineteenth to early-twentieth century music hall and ballroom-dancing music. The bands were often associated with mining towns and communities. The only other kind I really know is Bavarian music -- what I call "oompah band" music. Both are relatively stately, with fairly fixed rhythms, suitable for choral sing-alongs or figure dancing: waltzes, foxtrots and so on. (Apologies, I'm pretty hazy on the terminology of this stuff.)
Balkan music is... not like that. Very not like that. The instrumentation may be similar, but nothing else.
It's fast and furious and very intense. You can dance to it if you know how, but it's the synchronized-kicking sort of line dancing, not so much slowly-moving couples with fancy footwork. There are a mix of instruments, both deeper- and higher-pitched, but everyone plays extremely fast, with a lot of tongue work -- the sound is a rapid, high-pitched, warbling tremolo. It often sounds as if the members of the bands are all independently playing entirely different tunes, broadly in the same tempo, and quite possibly mostly improvised. There typically seems to be one lead trumpeter, playing what could if one were feeling generous be called a main melody, and a few backing trumpeters trying to keep up with him -- it's almost always men -- and the chaps on the bigger, lower horns emitting something between a bass-line and the horn equivalent of rhythm guitar.
It's also very, very loud. As in, painfully, I-didn't-realise-that-acoustic-instruments-could-produce-that-much-noise-without-amplification, loud.
I don't think I heard any vocals at all from any of the traditional bands all weekend, but the audience often recognised the tunes and joined in. The recorded stuff being broadcast from stalls and bars did sometimes have a singer.
It is often difficult for the unskilled and unfamiliar ear to discern overall, er, well, tunes. To be honest, apart from the odd cover version, every band could mostly have been playing the same tune over and over, with slightly different flourishes, and I'd have been none the wiser. Sometimes the cover versions are just interpolated into a longer performance -- these often run to ten to fifteen minutes, perhaps wandering through 3 or 4 recognisable pop or classical hits mingled with a lot of super-fast traditional stuff.
To try to summarize it in words, I kept thinking of an old joke by British alternative comedian Alexei Sayle. In one of his routines, talking about music, he heaps scorn upon the pretentiousness of jazz fans:
"Let me tell you about jazz. This is jazz. SKIDDLY-BIDDLY-BIDDLY-BIDDLY-BIDDLY. That's jazz."
There was a lot of skiddly-biddly-biddly-biddly-biddly. At times I think my brain was vibrating in a rhythm of skiddly-biddly-biddly-biddly-biddly.
Mind you, Sayle also said:
"There are two kinds of jazz, traditional and modern, and they're both crap."
He's not a fan.
We went to the Friday and Sunday night performances. On Saturday we spent so much time in bars and restaurants and mooching around that we didn't make it into the arena until 1AM, when the performances were over. The main format seemed to be a Battle of the Bands: two bands on stage at once, performing in a call-and-response pattern: one band does a tune, then stands and listens -- and rests and catches its breath -- while the other performs. Each does a couple then both retire, replaced by another pair.
To our non-discerning ears, there was not a huge amount of difference between them on Friday night. Very raucous and not very synchronized, compared to marginally more together -- all performing tunes by the same composer, at least.
Sunday night was different. First there was a non-traditional, more pop-like band, Sanja Ilić and Balkanika. This had an extraordinarily full lineup -- keyboards, two drummers, horn section, 3 backing singers, even a bagpipe player. There were songs in English, rap sections and more. An amazing performance and highly recommended.
Then, afterwards, as the audience stood there, steaming and panting in the hot summer night, huge moths circling the spotlights...
... And I do mean huge... this thing was 10-15cm across, bigger than my hand...
... the prize-winning bands were brought on to receive awards and give encore performances. Then it became apparent that they really were not all much of a muchness: some had soaring virtuoso trumpet leads, playing much more like Western big-band or jazz or classical trumpet soloists. Some had two or three trumpeters all playing the same melody in chorus, sounding rather like Mexican Mariachi music. All the winners gave really tight, coordinated performances -- the amount of rehearsal and practice and skill really shone through.
And then we staggered back out to one of the other stages, sponsored by, yes, Jelen again, to where another mixed traditional/modern band did a set which mixed together Balkan style dance with hard-rock-style vocals and excellent electric guitar work at one point, segueing into Ska at another.
Muscially speaking, Guča is the most narrowly-focussed music festival I've ever been to. Even Infest, Bradford's electronic music festival, the journey to and from which this piece has mostly been written during -- is more varied, ranging from Electronic Body Music to synthpop, krautrock and industrial. This year's Saturday night headliners, mind.in.a.box, veer into prog rock territory.
But Guča is also the most intense. It's considerably smaller than something like Colours of Ostrava, spread over a disused steelworks in Silesia, Czechia's industrial Black Country. This year's Colours attracted about 30,000 people and the programme ranged from synthpop to R&B to indie rock to Polish folk music. But for all that, it was a big, commercial, outdoor summer pop festival. Guča isn't. It's a manic village street party grown wildly out of control.
(This exhibits another tendency of the former Yugoslavians -- litter. Litter everywhere. The pretty fish-filled river through the down quickly looked like the Ganges after mela, which gave the newborn Polish quartet its name: the Ganges Gang. On Sunday afternoon we actually walked out of town upstream and spent a delightful few hours bathing in the cool, shallow water.)
I've never been to anything like Guča before.
I recommend trying it for yourself.
[I took few photos, but fellow-traveller Olimpia did, which you can see if you've sold your soul to Facebook here.]
