Imamovic, Damir - Dvojka CD (Mega Blowout Sale)
SKU
23-GBCD 033
"Bosnian singer-songwriter Damir Imamovic is at the forefront of the "New Sevdah" movement. Sevdah is Bosnia's gorgeous and centuries old popular song form, often referred to as the Bosnian "blues." As witnessed by their dynamic performances at European festivals (including last years WOMEX), Damir and his pan-Balkan band Sevdah Takht have become the most important young proponents of sevdah on the international scene. Their approach is fuelled by a fearless commitment to push this passionate music into contemporary, unknown territory. While The Huffington Post recently anointed Damir "the king" of the genre, clearly him and his band are much more revolutionaries than kings. Musicians often struggle to articulate what it is they're playing, where it comes from and where they're going. Damir Imamovic's Sevdah Takht suffer from no such struggle. The new album, the follow-up to 2012's critically acclaimed debut, is a wonder of clear-eyed thinking, crystalline melody and deep reflection. Taking its name from sevda, the Turkish word for love, derived in turn from the Arabic sawda meaning 'black bile' (and hence melancholy), sevdah has been played in the Balkans in one form or another since at least the 15th century. Although the temptation to refer to it as 'Bosnian blues' is perhaps too infrequently resisted, its lyrical and musical preoccupations with love, longing and loss do provide us with a bridge to other European roots traditions, such as fado, whose central concept of saudade is itself related to sawda. Sarajevo born and raised, Imamovic has been steeped in the sounds of sevdah since childhood. Much has been said of his stellar family tradition - both his father and grandfather remain legends of the form. Since those early days, however, when he would ward off boredom during the siege of the city in the early 1990s by learning guitar chords in his basement shelter, Imamovic has completely changed the rules of the game. For this is not a man content to insert himself seamlessly into any line of succession - that would be too easy. He comes with questions and challenges above all: questions for those gatekeepers of the genre bent on reducing style, rhythm and repertoire to a narrow set of conventions; and challenges to the more recent 20th century orthodoxies that would make of sevdah a straightforward reflection of national character. Imamovic's art is nothing less than a quiet, steady insurgency within sevdah - deeply considered work that refuses the seductions of nationalism. It takes the music beyond its birthplace and shows it the world. The new album takes these musical and cultural orthodoxies and plays the hell out of them. The title, Dvojka, refers (perhaps slightly provocatively) to the 2/4 rhythm of modern sevdah's 'golden age' of the 1950s and 60s, when many of the conventions of the genre were codified, and when what you couldn't do had as much weight as what you could. There is enough affection for those conventions to make it a tribute, albeit a sceptical one, to those earlier Radio Sarajevo generations; but this wouldn't be a Sevdah Takht album if it did not strike out on its own from the very outset. 'Sarajevo', the opening track, puts the familiar sonic inflections of sevdah at the disposal of 'the other Sarajevo', the fading and forgotten generations of misfits and radicals that quietly underpinned the cultural and political life of the Bosnian capital. There is elegy throughout the album, of course, but slow-burning ecstasy too: from 'Opio se mladi Jusuf-beg' (another one for the Sarajevans among us) to the beautifully supple 'Lijepa Zejno', which shows precisely what the recent addition of a violin brings to Sevdah Takht. In between lie songs of hope and heartbreak in a stunning interplay between tradition and innovation, with the album being split more or less evenly between original Imamovi? compositions and songs by authors whose names have long been lost to history. In the hands of a lesser musician, this might be mere archaeology. But behind Imamovi?'s wonderfully maturing voice, and the fun he is clearly having with his new, custom-made tambur, lies a band of rare, understated accomplishment: percussionist Nenad Kovacic, whose West African influences are the perfect gift to sevdah; bassist Ivan Mihajlovic, playful and deadly serious all in the same bar; and new arrival Ivana DuriC, whose violin provides the anchor to the sevdah tradition that the title of the album teasingly promises. Damir Imamovic's Sevdah Takht matches Glitterbeat's cultural and musical enthusiasms perfectly. Theirs are global stories forged from a deep love for the regional tradition from which they come - a love strong enough to withstand the demands that this restless young artist places on it. As far as culture is always politics, and struggle in one is always struggle in both, this is a deeply political project; but it is also Imamovi?'s strongest personal statement to date. He was always going to make this album and we're glad he's made it with us."
- LabelGlitterbeat
- UPC4030433603321