Robert Christgau, senior editor of the Village Voice, writing for the LA Times, December 29, 2002
It’s a beautiful and important work recommended to anyone who cares about how ordinary outsiders get by and get over.
Alan Trachtenberg, author of Reading American Photographs. letter to Wesleyan, C. Feb 20, 2002
Dick Blau’s amazing photographs give the book a sense of presence, an inviting pulse, an inwardness that takes human shape.
When you get Bright Balkan Morning you are
likely to open it up and then leaf through it, looking at the
photographs. After a few minutes of this you'll remove the CD from the
inside back cover and put it on. Then you continue looking at the
photos while listening to the sounds.
That in itself is a rich and satisfying experience. But don't stop there. Read the text!
It
tells of Roma (aka Gypsy) musicians who have cornered the market on
live music in polyglot Greek Macedonia. While they are at the bottom of
the social order, anyone who wishes a proper wedding, festival, or
party of any kind hires these musicians. The musicians generally
perform in trios, one playing a bass drum while the other two play the
zurna - a double-reed woodwind found throughout Eurasia and Africa.
Their repertoire is drawn from the peoples who live in the area, or
passed through at one time, and is sometimes more Oriental, sometimes
more European - whatever the customer wants.
Keil and Keil give
detailed accounts of several performances - a baptism, a wedding, and a
saint's day festival - tell the life stories of a dozen or so musicians
& family, and recount the broad history of the Roma in the
Mediterranean as well as presenting a more focused account of their
sojourn in Greek Macedonia. Blau's photographs range from intimate
portraits, to dancers in full party whirl, through street scenes
jumbled or measured, to serene landscapes. Some of his shots are so
strikingly composed - the cover image, for example - that the effect is
both subjective (Blau's aesthetic) and objective (we're looking at
things, out there, in the world). Steven Feld's soundscapes give us the
living flow of sound. Not only do we hear the twin zurnas flying
through drum rhythms, but dancing feet, shouts of joy and exertion,
motors churning, sheep braying, and Stevie Wonder piped in through a
tinny sound system.
Bright Balkan Morning is a milestone. See it, hear it, read it. Take pleasure in it.
This book is, in a word, extraordinary; so is
the accompanying CD recording, which gives in addition to music of the
Macedonian Romany people, a slice of their life in cafes and markets.
One hears their daily activities, the sale of pita, and various wares,
as well as juke boxes and street sounds as the Mahala awakens.
Mahala, for those unaware, is the village ghetto to which Rom
people are generally confined, although the anthropologists who
compiled this book do not seem to know that it is Arabic for ghetto,
and the same word used in North Africa and other Middle Eastern Muslim
nations to describe the Jewish and Christian ghettos in which those
dhimmi groups are similarly confined. Dhimmis are the non-Muslim
minorities in Muslim lands, and their treatment (and in Muslim nation
remains) generally described and defined by the Islamic laws of jihad.
Unlike most other recent books about the Rom, this one contains a
massive amount of research on the lives and music of these people, as
they live it; but what I like the most are the oral histories that
provide readers with a real sense of the hardships suffered by the Rom
in Greek Macedonia. While the book mentions the great and disastrous
Turkish invasion of Greece in 1922, it does not note the great massacre
of an estimated 150,000 Christian Greeks and Armenians in Smyrna on the
Aegean coast that year. This undoubtedly included some Rom, as the town
was then (as now) central on the Turkish coast.
But without knowing it, the authors have demonstrated some of the
ill effects of Muslim rule, for they do discuss, via oral histories,
the great liberation experienced by Greek Roma in 1924, when Turks were
repatriated to Turkey and 1 million Greeks from Turkey to Greece. The
latter may have lost some territory, but she gained liberation from
Muslim oppression.
As Greeks from Turkey poured into Greece, the town fathers in
Jumaya, for example, and presumably everywhere else the Roma then lived
in Greece, began to allow the Roma to go to school with Greeks.
Beforehand, the Turks had imposed separation on non-Muslim peoples. But
with Turks gone, Greeks exiled the old cast system too, thereby
relinquishing the system that had helped imprison Greek Roma in lives
without equal education. Now, suddenly, the Rom could attend the same
school as everyone else.
There are many wonderful features of this book, including the
photographs and the music CD at its end. But make no mistake, the oral
histories are the best feature, making this one of the best books on
the Rom I have read to date.
Last
night I planned to read this book for just a few minutes before going
to sleep. Hours later, instead of sleeping I was transformed into the
world of the Balkan Roma musicians and their incredible culture! I
simply couldn't put this amazing book down. I love the stories and
interviews with the old musicians, the informative history of the Roma
people and their culture, the full-of-life photos, and the CD with
soundscapes. All these pieces combine to give the reader a great view
of a people and their heritage, and one that has been largely
overlooked in the past. I found the work ethic of the musicians
described in this book to be very inspirational. To be able to play all
kinds of requests for days on end is really something to admire.
Musicians of any genre could learn a whole lot from reading about the
musicians in this book. Years ago, these authors turned me on to the
subculture of polka in the USA (and made a polkaholic out of me) with
their super "Polka Happiness" book. They have clearly done it again -
informed the world about an incredibly rich culture that was largely
hidden from view.
This book responds to my interest in the
social context of folk music and dance. The focus was on the lives of
the people who make the music, in this case the Roma of Jumaya
(Iriklia) in Greek Macedonia. The writers give you quite a rounded
view, describing how the music is performed, at what kinds of events,
how people relate to the music and each other, how the musicians see
themselves and their occupation and how making a living as a Roma
musician fits into Greek society. There is also a strong sense of
history and how things have changed over time in many ways - the
history of Roma in Greece and other Balkan countries, the specific
history of Roma in Jumaya, and the stories of individual musicians and
their families. The consistently positive way that the writers approach
their subject is also refreshing - they describe how Roma have used
music to survive and, in some cases, prosper, and how in doing so they
have contributed to the multi-layered fabric of Greek-Macedonian ethnic
identities.
What is especially interesting to me is the authors' view
of how multi-ethnic society works in Greek Macedonia as compared to
Bulgaria or Former Yugoslavia, and how the strategy of Roma musicians
is different in these different countries. In Greek Macedonia the
musicians play the music of all ethnic groups in order to maximize
their flexibility and income. During multi-ethnic celebrations the
musicians follow a strict policy of playing everyone's requests in the
order requested, so that no one feels that they have priority. There is
a fascinating description of an ethnically mixed wedding where the
families have to adjust their various wedding traditions to accommodate
each other, making it up as they go along to some extent.
The
authors compare and contrast this with the approach taken by Roma
musicians in other areas of the Balkans. In Kosovo in the 1980s the
Roma musicians are said to have purposely selected music from
traditions from other than Serbian and Albanian in order to avoid
conflicts. In Bulgaria the wedding band tradition is described as
leading to a new pan-Balkan "fusion" style which borrows from many
cultures but still feels Bulgarian. Ultimately the motivation behind
each strategy is the need of musicians to make a living.
The book
is interesting reading from a North American perspective as well. Keil
contrasts the multi-ethnic consciousness of Greeks, where the same
person may have several types of ethnic and national identities
simultaneously, with the concept of "multiculturalism" which he
describes as slices of a pizza in which there are lots of ethnicities
but everyone is either one thing or another. This raise the question of
what is really going on in such immigrant nations as Canada and the
United States.
The accompanying CD is a potpourri of sounds,
including music of various types, and there is a section of the book
describing the contents of the CD. Some of the track titles are Market
Day in Jumaya, Afternoon at a Mahala Café, At Home in the Mahala, New
Year's Party in Serres, Taverna Party at Nikisiani. The combination of
the text, the many high quality black and white photos and the
soundscape are successful in putting you into the experience, as much
as this is possible. There was also a nice balance between Angeliki
Keil's straight-forward and very readable reporting of the lives of the
musicians and Charles Keil's more theoretical musings about ethnicity,
the music and the role of the musicians. My only complaint about the
book is its weight - it's printed on very heavy, glossy stock, no doubt
adding to the quality of photographic reproductions, but it is so big
and heavy that you pretty well have to read it sitting up. An alternate
title could be, "Your Big Fat Roma Music Book."
In
the rich and wonderful BRIGHT BALKAN MORNING: Romani Lives and the
Power of Music in Greek Macedonia (Wesleyan University Press. Includes
a CD), Charles and Angeliki Vellou Keil write of how, since the
earliest days of Byzantium, commentators have remarked, sometimes
positively and sometimes negatively, on the power of the Romani people
to "steal your heart." With its stunning photographs by Dick Blau and
its evocative CD produced by Steven Feld, this book is just one more
instance of stolen hearts. The Romani, who are sometimes called
gypsies, have stolen the authors' hearts and are well on their way to
stealing my heart as well.
I urge you to buy this book. I say so as
someone who almost never reads anything published by an academic press.
I am definitely not an anthropologist or a social scientist of any
kind. What I know about the raw and the cooked doesn't get very far
beyond my kitchen, but I couldn't put BRIGHT BALKAN MORNING down. This
book ought to be that rare thing: an academic book with popular appeal.
The
easiest way into the riches of BRIGHT BALKAN MORNING are Blau's
black-and-white photographs of the Romani playing their instruments for
weddings, wrestling matches, and the little parades that apparently
form wherever they go. When the dances started up, I have a feeling
that Blau joined in, for these pictures just pulled me along. I could
smell the perfume in the grandmother's handkerchief as she held it out
to Blau and, through him, to me, as we all danced together. I could see
the textures of the road when I took my place in the wedding parade; I
could almost hear the sound of the zurna (a kind of outdoor oboe) being
played in my ear.
Of course Steven Feld's CD brings the actual
sounds to life. The CD begins oh so slyly by introducing Romani music
emerging from the ambient sounds of twentieth-century Macedonia. The
Romani are, if nothing else, great survivors of history's cultural
wars, and you can hear so many diverse musical strains-from the Muslim
to the techno pop. Eerily enough, the rhythm of the dauli (a two-headed
bass drum) being played sounds exactly like the bass-drum pounding at a
high-school football pep rally.
I wasn't as happy with the book's
writing style, but then the authors seem to be wrestling with shaping
this heartfelt information of theirs into all the requirements of
academic publishing, and that struggle oddly mirrors the lives of the
Romani. This sometimes awkward prose becomes just one more instance of
the dance the Romani inspire everywhere they go as they blend in and
out of the moment's culture.
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