Southern Serbian Brass Adventures

Today we cyber travel even further south in Serbia. Anybody who likes Balkan Brass Music and Balkan drinks (alcoholic ones apply here) will know this town: Guča, famous for its annual Brass Festival. The event started off as a Balkan Brass competition for insiders, but became over time an international event for many to enjoy - with all the good and bad things which Balkan parties with a lot of alcohol involved bring with them. Lets drop right into the middle of it:

BTW, currently it is Cyber August in Serbia, as this is when the real festival is usually taking place. 

We shall stay a little longer there, as, whilst you are, you need to meet father and son Boban and Marco Marković, probably the two most famous Romany trumpeters and band leaders in the Balkans. They won the competition at least 10 times in a row:

 A funny story related to Boban Markovic, who you met previously on our adventure. I was visiting my late friend Gordana, who was a concert organiser and behind many Balkan Band shows in London. She didn’t like that Boban’s sound was heading in a jazzy direction. So, after several glasses of Šlivovica in her sitting room in Kensal Rise, she rang Boban and caught him fishing in his local river… She told him off for playing his traditional music too jazzy, and he should rather listen to the London Gypsy Orchestra, the group I led at the time, who would play this music much better than him. This is not quite true, but form your own opinion:

We are going South, to areas of sunny Serbian music

Lets travel a little further south, towards central Serbia, more precisely to Čačak. And I think it is high time for your to get some hands-on experience. I shall teach you the music to Čačak, a Serbian dance. Here nobody is quite sure if the town was named after the dance or visa versa:

From there, we can travel 50km eastwards, to Kragujevac, In a funny way, Kragujevac seems to be the birthing place of talented accordionists, as during my own (real life) travels through Serbia, every accordionist that I came across would, when asked, told me that they originated from Kragujevac.

I was fortunate enough to play with Zika, alias Živorad Nikolić, in the time before social media and easy videoing.

Ha! On my voyage into the depth of my hard drives, I found a video from my time playing with Zika: Here we are performing a number of famous Serbian pieces, including Ederlezi, Tama Daleko and Ajde Jano and in the village hall of Wood Norton on the 21st March 2008:

I think we can fit in one more destination for today: Niš. I went there in 2008 to celebrate my late friend Gordana’s birthday. Having always had a great but perhaps hidden interest in the gothic, I particularly enjoyed seeing the Skull tower and the chandelier made of bullets:

When I travelled there in 2008, I had hoped to meet a great Serbian Fiddle player called Alexandar Šišić. Sadly, Alexandar died just a few weeks before I arrived, but I would love to celebrate him by sharing some of his great music for us all to enjoy:

Another happy discovery from digging through my old archives. In this video I'm performing a Kolo by Alexandar Šišić. The music is also accompanied by a slide show of me and my fiddle through the years. This recording is unedited as it is from the years before everyone could edit things on their own computer, so you either paid for an expensive studio, or you hoped to play well in the first place :-)