Bright Balkan Morning: Romani Lives and the Power of Music in Greek Macedonia [Paperback] Review

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.

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