Balkan Jazz

So it’s 22:39 on a Monday night and Balanço is currently in full swing on B92, one of Belgrade’s most musically rich and diverse radio stations. I looked forward to the stream, which is as usual a very hip mix of jazz inspired elements with a Latin twist – quite and enjoyable and refreshing for yet another lame beginning of the weekend. I thought about what to write these days, looked for inspiration, but my muse was nowhere to be found. She must have been on grève… after all – this is France. Listening to this jazzy flavored mix, I thought about the title of my blog, which in many ways came out unconsciously. I am therefore almost sure that many of you might wonder what the title “Balkan Jazz” means and whether such a thing indeed exists.

At a first glance, the combination of words that makes up this idiom seems a mere contradiction of itself rather than anything else. To the outsiders, the Balkans are often a stereotype of nothing more than violence, vulgarity, idleness, and bad table manners for that matter. Jazz, a Southern musical art form which originated in the early 20^th century (to that same group of outsiders) is also in many ways watered down and seems to be nothing more and nothing less than brass cacophony. How is it, and above all, why is it that I chose to deliberately bring these inconceivably incompatible elements together? Well, to be perfectly honest, it just felt right. I have a feeling that in essence, the phrase “Balkan Jazz” whether or not it alludes to music (and many times it does), demystifies the Balkan mentality in a nutshell.

Looking at it from an anthropologic point of view, both histories of jazz and the Balkans share a common point in history – the fact that for many years both been have undeniable objects of oppression. The blacks in the Southern United States used this musical genre to express all their grief, sorrow, but as well happiness by struggling to live in a world that was by no means friendly at the time. The Balkans, having faced nearly five hundred years of Ottoman domination have also found methods through which they kept their culture and heritage alive through folklore, spoken word, and of course – music.

Perhaps not everyone in the Balkans is a musical genius (indeed Mozart’s native Salzburg got off easy, geographically speaking), but there exists a trend that many moments in our daily lives are intimately connected with music – whether this involves weddings, funerals, family patron saint holidays, or fare welling someone off to the army (if this ludicrous tradition is at all possible to understand by anyone else but ourselves). Music has therefore traditionally always played a central role in both greeting and farewell. In that sense, it (and especially brass music played by the Roma – essentially the real Balkan jazz) has become a flooding gate of openness, genuineness, and sincerity often creating a thin and fine line between joy and sorrow, the line between reality and the absurd...