Posted in Source: Guardian
Article by:Garth Cartwright
Photograph: Andrej Isakovic/AFP/Getty Images
As my bus rolls through Belgrade’s grey suburbs I’m reminded of how Serbia’s pariah status has punished its public transport network: no air conditioning and shot suspension. Not that I’m surprised, as travelling in the Balkans always involves sacrificing west European comfort zones. In Britain people often express disbelief that I spend so much time in a region noted for its negative headlines, places decimated by war, poverty and brutal government. In reply I can only suggest that much beauty and magic is found here. And then there’s the music.
Music made me get on this sticky, cramped, five-hour-long bus journey. And music has kept me returning to these lands ever since I first arrived in Europe (from New Zealand) in 1991. Back then, with the Berlin Wall having recently crumbled, a huge reservoir of vernacular music had suddenly been made available. Yet Yugoslavia, always the most open and liberal of Balkan communist states, was collapsing into civil war. These days travel throughout former Yugoslavia is easy with borders open – except Serbia/Kosovo – locals welcoming and prices low. And the music … the traditional music forms of this region are richer than those of anywhere else in Europe.
My destination is the small, central Serbian town of Guca (pronounced Goo-cha). As the bus chugs over rolling hills, through thick forest, past sparkling lakes, I’m reminded of Switzerland. And then we arrive in Guca and any notion of Swiss tranquillity is dispelled.
Descending from the bus, Guca’s humid air is thick with the shriek of trumpets while its streets overflow with dancers. It’s mid-afternoon Friday and there will be no let-up until midnight Sunday: one heavy weekend looks set to be served up.
With a resident population of just 2,500, Guca might seem like an unlikely place to host an annual music event that has steadily become one of Europe’s most popular and wildest festivals. Locals describe Guca as “Serbia’s Woodstock”. A more accurate comparison would be with Notting Hill Carnival – Guca is a free festival that attracts over 300,000 people, both Serbs and a growing international crowd who come to hear brass bands battle it out.
Brass bands, wild? You think I’m kidding, right? No chance. Guca runs from 5-9 August and consists of nothing but Balkan brass, a sound forged by the clash of Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires then turbo-charged by the region’s Romany Gypsies. Forget Brassed Off, don’t even mention the Brighouse and Rastrick Band, this is a far more manic, exhilarating experience.
Guca Festival has no curfew, few rules and a real sense of bacchanalia as hundreds of musicians blast exotic eastern funk while everyone dances until they drop. I used to attend illegal raves in the 90s, parties held in open fields or deserted factories, but they were no match for Guca. The energy, the joy, the sheer gonzo exuberance that overtakes this hamlet across the weekend, is incomparable. Dancers leap on tables, jump off statues, bounce off walls, belly dancing to hard zigzagging rhythms, achieving ecstasy via neatly dressed brass orchestras and copious supplies of beer and meat.
Brass bands have long been employed for weddings, funerals and festivities across the southern Balkans. Over the last decade their sound has crept beyond the region as a western audience picked up on musicians can seemingly play tough, organic trance all night long, even inspiring DJs to remix the tracks into Balkan Beats. From Scotland’s Orkestra Del Sol through New Mexico’s indie rockers Beirut to Nigel Kennedy, many are looking towards the Balkans for inspiration. And Guca is the throbbing heart of this raw, unruly sound.
Not that it was always like this. Not that it was ever expected to be like this. Officially called “Dragacevski Sabor Trubaca”, Guca’s festival was created in the late 1960s to keep the brass orchestra tradition alive. Marshall Tito’s Yugoslavia was big on all things folkloric and some sharp-eared apparatchik, noting how the steady flow of population from rural-to-urban locations was depleting the brass band tradition, came up with the idea of an annual festival/competition that would recognise a Best Orchestra and a Golden Trumpet.
Initially low-key – Serbia’s festivals also celebrate flutes, accordions and tambura (a sort of stringed lute) – Guca’s popularity exploded following the huge success of Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica’s 1990s films featuring Balkan brass bands: Time Of The Gypsies, Underground and Arizona Dream.
Entering Guca’s main street feels like stepping onto Kusturica’s film set. Brass bands blast out of tents, bars and alleys, marching in formation, forcing their way through crowds, pumping out the hard, fast dance rhythms that have kept this musical tradition in demand across the southern Balkans for more than a century.
Guca’s official festival is split into three parts: Friday’s opening concert, Saturday’s official celebrations and Sunday’s finals for the Golden Trumpet (heats having been held earlier in the year across Serbia). Friday’s concert features previous winners, each orchestra getting to play three tunes while folk dancers, kitted out in bright knitting patterns, join hands and spin in circles.
I join the crowds as they press forward in expectation of the evening’s headliner: Boban & Marko Markovic Orkestar. Boban Markovic is Guca’s Mohammed Ali, having won the Golden Trumpet more often than any other bandleader. Marko is his teenage son who left school to join his father on the road aged 13. Boban Markovic has won Guca so often he no longer competes. Instead, the king returns to play for his people and when he takes the stage the crowd roars. Boban presses trumpet to lips, hits a long high note, an improbably yearning sound, his orchestra begins to blast and Guca erupts. (For anyone who wants a taste of Guca without leaving the UK Boban and Marko will be touring here early-July – see myspace.com/bobanimarko.)
While the official events attract Serbia’s most celebrated brass bands, it is away from the stages and on the streets where the festival really gets its mojo working. Awnings are rolled out and instant restaurants created where countless musicians compete for tips. Large parties of Serbs are seated at tables where they feast surrounded by competing orchestras, the best of which are rewarded with money pasted onto foreheads and trumpets. When the cash flow dries up the bands march onto the street, still playing, fresh dancers bouncing around them.
Admittedly, the cacophony created by thousands of brass and percussion instruments all throbbing away can exhaust even a diehard Balkan brass nut, and the relentless force field of sound battered my senses. Fortunately, a Serb friend had organised my accommodation (there are few hotels in Guca, camping or home stays are popular alternatives) on the outskirts of town and every few hours I would retreat, wash and rest up. But not for long: the brass’s siren call, like the Pied Piper of legend, kept luring me back again and again into the Balkan trance party.
Vegetarians may not find the festival quite so entrancing: never before have I witnessed so many animals slowly roasting on spits. Lambs, pigs, even a 430kg oxen hissed, popped and were sprayed with beer to douse the flames. Guca’s party people feast on red meat and white bread. Ordering a bowl of boiled cabbage I found it swimming in pork fat and bone fragments.
Serbia’s bad old days are also evident with a select few idiots waving paramilitary flags and wearing T-shirts advertising war criminals as heroes. That said, the vibe here is very positive, much less threatening than Notting Hill Carnival. Over the weekend I witnessed not a single aggressive action, everyone wanting to share a smile.
Guca captures the big, bold Balkan spirit perfectly. No matter your nationality, ethnicity, sex or age, Guca will embrace you. Folkloric in origin but absolutely contemporary in spirit, Guca offers a real sense of collective celebration and reminds you that music was once something tribal, wild, unshackled by industry.
Where Glastonbury involves a corporate pop-rock event that lacks surprises and spontaneity, Guca encourages dancing on the street to organic trance music. Care to guess which festival I choose to ride the bus to this summer?
• Guca (guca.rs) takes place from 5-9 August. British Airways (0844 493 0 787, ba.com) flies Heathrow-Belgrade from £263 rtn inc tax. Lufthansa (0871 945 9747, lufthansa.com) flies to Belgrade, via Munich, Frankfurt or Zurich, from Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and Glasgow from around £300 rtn. UK world music magazine Songlines (songlines.co.uk/musictravel) offers an all-inclusive Guca tour for £495pp, plus flights from London for £240 rtn. Buses from Belgrade to Guca take five hours for around £10 rtn (best to purchase in advance at the bus station at least a day before travel). Magelan (magelancorp.rs) offers airport-to-Guca transport for €30-35pp (some other sites charge up to €100). Most accommodation is home stays and should be organised beforehand – try Magelan (see above) and backpackserbia.com. Free camping is possible: negotiate with a local to have access to shower/toilets.
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On a bitterly cold December evening, just a few weeks ago, if you were wearing a certain kind of laminate around your neck, you could have slipped through a dark stage door at the nefarious corner of Taylor and Market in San Francisco, and found yourself backstage at the Warfield Theatre, where three of the Reyes Brothers – Andre, Nicolas and Canut, and two of their cousins, Tonino and Paco Baliardo – would have greeted you with warm hugs and invited you to sit down and sup with them at their large round dinner table. This was a very special dinner of sorts because they were being joined on this tour on stage for the first time by members of a third generation of this family of musicians–Michael Baliardo, Tonino’s son, and George Reyes, Nicolas’ son.
They were a handsome and elegant group of men: fathers, sons, uncles and cousins chatting animatedly, primarily in French, with, quite possibly, a little Calo being tossed about here and there in conversation. Calo, or Spanish Romani, is a dialect that originated in Spain and is spoken by the Gitanos, blending native Romani vocabulary with Spanish grammar. The round table was covered with a white tablecloth and they were eating a delicious dinner of tilapia and lemon herbed chicken, salads and profiteroles, drinking sweet iced tea, laughing and joking and offering their guests wine and food. Casually, the diners excused themselves from the table and moments later began to go upstairs to perform to a packed theatre where the excited crowd of over 2000 fans erupted in cheers.
In the third decade of the 20th Century during the Spanish Civil War, a group of Catalonian gypsies afraid for their wives and children fled Spain for France. In a recent interview, Nicolas Reyes explained the decision: “The Gypsy people were not allowed to take part in the fight, other than being shot at, so the best way to stay alive was to run away from Spain.” Most of these gypsy families settled in the Camargue region, where they live now, between Marseille, Arles and Montpellier. The Reyes family joined a Gypsy encampment at Arles in 1936, and they sang as they worked odd jobs, did horse trading, harvested grapes and gathered scrap metal. In the evenings they brought out their guitars and the traditional songs and sang at Sunday village gatherings while the women danced in the safe and intimate caravan circles. They improvised with guitar players, Palmas (clapped rhythms which are derived from their Spanish heritage), and singers around the campfires of their adopted home. “They still do that, even now,” Said Josquin Des Pres, who grew up in San Tropez and has known the Reyes and Baliardos for decades.
Des Pres, an award-winning record producer and songwriter here in Southern California, said that it was in the Fifties, during a traditional Gypsy pilgrimage–”Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer” in the Camargue–that their unique flamenco singing and guitar strumming gained mainstream notice. Ricardo Baliardo, or “Manitas de Plata” (Little Hands of Silver) was being feted by artists from the area including Pablo Picasso, Cocteau and Salvador Dali; his nephew, Jose Reyes, quickly became renowned as the best flamenco singer in France and was accompanied by his uncle, Manitas de Plata, who is still considered one of the best guitarists in history. Picasso is said to have exclaimed of Baliardo’s playing in Arles in 1964, “that man is of greater worth than I am!” He proceeded then to draw on the guitar.
The style of their music, “Flamenco Puro” was so popular that their fame spread worldwide and they had fans like Charlie Chaplin and Brigitte Bardot to name a few. Jose Reyes and Ricardo Baliardo performed to a sold-out crowd at Carnegie Hall in December of 1965. Manitas’ brother Hippolyte Baliardo, a well known Rumba guitar player, invited his sons to become the members of Los Baliardos Players. In the Sixties and early Seventies, after he left Manitas, Des Pres said, “Jose Reyes, with Plata and Baliardo, who was an uncle, formed a group called ‘Los Reyes’, which means “The Kings,” which included four of his five sons, (Andre was too young at the time), and Chico Bouchikhi, who was married to one of Jose’s daughters”.
In 1979, the patriarch Jose Reyes died, and the Reyes Brothers formed a union with their cousins, the Baliardos. This group was a more modern fusion of the music they had played in their family for generations. There are eight members of the Gipsy Kings but you’ll see six on the stage because they rotate on tour. Some like to travel more than the others. Nicolas Reyes, the main singer, Canut and Andre performed on stage at the Warfield that night, and at the new Conga Room in Los Angeles, on New Year’s Eve; the two other Reyes brothers Patchai and Paul remained home with their families. They still live in the Camargue region when they are not on tour and are devoted to their wives and children. The Baliardo Brothers–Paco, Tonino and Diego–are guitar wizards. All of them have played together since they were young and prefer to compose and play their own music. Their music is derived from a form of flamenco, a sort of rumba: “Rumba Flamenca, which is easier to dance to,” said Patty Weiss, who has played violin with the Gipsy Kings on some of their North America tours, including here in LA at the Greek Theater.
Their songs are mostly about love and travelling and having a good time and are sung in a mixture of French, Spanish and their own gypsy dialect, Calo.
“They learn to play a guitar as soon as they are born,” said Des Pres of the Reyes and Baliardo families. “There is a Gypsy legend which says that when an old Gypsy singer or guitarist is ready to die, he will sing or play for a pregnant woman. Then that baby will get his talent. Many times when the Gypsy Kings are on tours, at the end of the show, they will put one of their younger children on stage. They all know the strum.”
The crowd at the Warfield demanded two encores and the concert ended with standing ovations from the audience.
“I was pleasantly surprised at how well they did. Drums and bass guitar are not traditional gypsy instruments. Their sons did really really well tonight, “Des Pres told their manager, Michel Crupel, that night after the concert when everyone was getting ready to go to the Four Seasons. “For gypsies, as an ever oppressed and pursued community, our children have a particular importance.” Nicolas Reyes has said in many interviews, “Children are Kings!”
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