Bright Balkan Morning: Romani Lives and the Power of Music in Greek Macedonia

Paperback - February, 2003 - Wesleyan University Press
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By: Dick Blau, Charles Keil, Angeliki Vellou Keil and Steven Feld
ISBN: 0819564885

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Reviews by readers

Big Fat Roma Music Book

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."

Bright Balkan Morning = Late Chicago Night!

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.

Extraordinary

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.

--Alyssa A. Lappen