Saban Bajramovic: The Maximum King of Yugoslav Romani Pop Music
Claude Cahn1
I first heard of Saban Bajramovic one late evening in, I think, the summer of 1999. A bunch of us were
sitting in the kitchen and the conversation turned to music. Romani activist Orhan Galjus, who is originally
from Kosovo and who was there that night, turned to me and said meaningfully, "You people should sue
Goran Bregovic on behalf of Saban Bajramovic. That would be something worthwhile."
I work for an organization called the European Roma Rights Center, based in Budapest, Hungary, which
among other things, specializes in suing people who do bad things to Roma. I had heard of Goran Bregovic.
In Budapest, it was hard not to. The most popular film-maker of the year among hip young Hungarians was
the Bosnian Serb-turned-Serb-turned-Parisian Emir Kusturica, and the scores of his most powerful films -films in large part driven by their music -- were written by Goran Bregovic.
Kusturica is the most famous -- although probably not the best -- of a generation of film directors in what
is, at present, Central and Eastern Europe's most dynamic and creative country for film, Yugoslavia. He
made several films popular in the former Yugoslavia -- notably Do You Remember Dolly Bell? and While
Father Was Away on Business. The latter won the Palme d'or at Cannes in 1985. He achieved Europe-wide
fame, however, with a film called House for Hanging, generally marketed in English and French (the film
is especially popular in France) under the title Time of the Gypsies (Le temps des gitans).
Time of the Gypsies initiated in full Kusturica's romance with Roma, a romance he has snubbed since only
at is own peril (his only recent film not to include Romani themes, Arizona Dream, was a box office flop).
Time of the Gypsies has epic ambitions. A young Rom leaves the mahalla -- Shuto Orizari, the mother of all
Romani ghettoes, just outside Skopje, Macedonia -- and goes northwest in search of his little sister, who
has gone for treatment of a disease to Slovenia. He soon finds that she has wound up enslaved by other
Gypsies as a beggar in Italy. After much tribulation among rich, picturesque and cruel Gypsy gangs in
various Italian cities and out of the way Italian hideouts, the hero dies. I saw the film with a Hungarian
Romani colleague of mine, who hated it: "packed with stereotypes," she said.
Definitely. Kusturica's medium is wild, funny, endearing, stupid, clever, scheming, violent, venal, lazy,
eccentric, innocent, depraved, passionate Gypsies and everything gadje (non-Roma) love to believe about
them. Kusturica's brilliance is to dive headfirst into stereotypes and exploit them to their fullest in the
service of propelling a story forward. He gets away with it by enjoying his characters to such an extent that
it is impossible for an audience to hold him accountable. A Kusturica character -- and by extension a
Kusturica film -- is generally too lovable to get upset about (This sometimes gets Kusturica into difficulties
-- it is often quite difficult to dislike his evil characters).
Kusturica's most ambitious film to date is Underground, a film about the break-up of Yugoslavia and
therefore only tangentially about Romani themes. Underground taps into Romani culture for one purpose -to distill pure violence. Bregovic supplies a brilliant sound track: a Romani brass band of the type available
in any major town in Serbia (in this case, the Boban Markovic Orchestra), juiced up with a deafening snare
drum submerged in reverb, charge all over nighttime Belgrade throughout the film, shouting a halfSerbian/half-Romani anthem called "Kalashnikov" ("Oh God, just give me one big Kalashnikov..."). The
music pounds home the message -- violence is carnival and the Balkans a party; the West is cramped,
repressed, boring.
Bregovic has come into his own as a soundtrack composer, but he began as something like the Brian Jones
of Yugoslav rock. His old band, Bijelo Dugme, was popular in the 1970s and 1980s. He was the
experimental member of the band, integrating (gasp) Albanian musical themes in the odd number, such as
in "Lipe cvatu", one of the only Bijelo Dugme songs still listenable today. His score for Time of the Gypsies
1
Claude Cahn is Research and Publications Director of the European Roma Rights Center (ERRC).
Information on the ERRC is available on: http://errc.org. The author is grateful to Dylan Gray, Olga
Manojlovic and Dragan Ristic for reading drafts of the article and providing comment.
is brilliant. It is composed folk music. A few embellishments and recording tricks render palatable and very
catchy for a popular audience music generally confined to the dusty side of the record shop. And for his
efforts, Bregovic has been paid the highest of compliments: Romani bands all over Europe now play
Bregovic compositions and arrangements such as "Ederlezi" as part of the standard repertoire, as if they
really were folk songs.
But there is another twist: the "folk songs" which Bregovic plunders are, in many cases, not actually folk
songs, if one takes a folk song to be something of anonymous authorship, sung by the people since time
immemorial. Some of them are stolen from the world of contemporary Romani pop. Take, for example,
"Mesecina", the third song on the Underground soundtrack. The original melody is a ditty called "Djeli
Mara", full of piano flourishes, a puccini violin line and somewhat pedantic tempo changes. The electric
drum machine keeping the rhythm assures its irrelevance for the mass market. In the Bregovic rendition,
"Mesecina" is re-folkified by being performed by a brass band, but Bregovic has a keen ear for the slick
sound of the market, and so overlays "Mesecina" with multiple extra layers of horns. With the benefit of
recording techniques not generally available to small town brass bands, Bregovic's Mesecina sounds like a
herd of stampeding elephants. This lifts the piece out of folk obscurity and into European vogue.
The original -- "Djeli Mara" -- is a Saban Bajramovic number, and the distance between Bajramovic's
recording and the Bregovic dress-up is the yawning gap that separates Romani culture and its non-Romani
derivative. In the 1970s and especially after the death of Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito's in 1980, in the
framework Yugoslavia erected to grapple with the national grievances that were a recurrent feature of its
history, Romani popular culture flourished. The pre-Milosevic Yugoslav government struggled to assuage
Slovene, Albanian and Croatian complaints of oppression and Serb-domination in the federal system by
promoting non-Serbs and encouraging the growth of "national" and "ethnic" cultures. Romani culture -- no
threat to the state -- was especially promoted, and Romani radio and television programs appeared on the
state broadcasting network in Belgrade, Skopje and Pristina.
In this context, Romani popular music exploded, and the undisputed maximum king of the "Nove Romske
Pesme" -- the new Romani song -- is Saban Bajramovic. One could call Saban the Yugoslav Romani Frank
Sinatra -- he is something of a crooner -- but to do so would miss both his songwriting brilliance and his
ambition to express something essentially Romani. For sheer catchy pop numbers, he has no rival -- "E
Bršind Perela Caje", "Kale Bal", "O Dunavo Me Nakhlem" and "Lumbaj, Lumbaj" are among Yugoslavia's
contributions to culture. But beyond a rich ear for pop melody lies an ambition to provide the furniture of
the Romani world; songs like "Djordjev Dan" map out the central features of a Romani culture that had,
before Saban, rarely seen expression via mass media such as radio and television. And when Saban sings,
"Hey, another beating by the police..." to Roma in their native language, Romani audiences listening in the
early 1980s must have heard a piece of their experience that they never imagined could come through the
speaker of a radio. Maybe a better comparison is Woodie Guthrie.
The only problem is that many non-Roma -- especially non-Romani Yugoslavs -- cannot stomach listening
to him. In the first place, he sings ballads in a language they can't understand. More importantly, his whole
atmosphere is drenched in Gypsiness, and anti-Romani sentiment is presently at high tide in Central and
Eastern Europe. With his gold tooth and his Muslim name, he is the epitome of Romani strangeness all
over the former Yugoslavia -- a kind of too-familiar false Turkish exoticism. Hence the role for a cultural
translator. A talented composer like Bregovic can take Bajramovic's genius for pop melody and render it
suitable for non-Romani audiences. And make a lot of money in process.
Emir Kusturica's most recent effort is a full return to the Gypsy theme called Black Cat, White Cat, a
sustained slapstick meditation on the state of today's Yugoslavia, seen through the prism of the story of two
Romani brothers being propelled toward wedding(s). The film is one long dream of Gypsies, featuring the
black market, usurious lending, obsessive acquisitiveness, flamboyant and theatrical excesses of wealth and
debauch, and gratuitous violence, all made palatable by a cute love story. Through this frame, and in a
version of the Romani language so thick with Serbianisms that it barely retains its shape, Kusturica shows
us Serbia. His message: we Serbs have fallen so far that now we are no better than Gypsies.
True to form, Kusturica's story flies along on the wings of a great soundtrack, including a redressed version
of a classic Yugoslav Romani pop standard, "Landala" ("Duj Sandele" in Black Cat White Cat). The
complex romance between Kusturica, Bregovic and Bajramovic comes full circle with Black Cat White
Cat. Bregovic is out, the soundtrack designed by a trio of somewhat less talented composers, Dr. Nelle
Karajlic, Vojislav Aralica and Dejan Sparavalo. Saban Bajramovic is in: he sings the lead tune,
"Bubamara". The effect? The Black Cat White Cat soundtrack is nowhere near as original or powerful as
either of Bregovic's great Kusturica scores -- Time of the Gypsies and Underground. And Saban is just a
not-very-prominent component of the Kusturica tapestry -- a well-woven vision of Romani life seen from
the outside, in two colorful dimensions.
In late December 2000, I visited Niš, Yugoslavia, the hometown of Saban Bajramovic, as well as of a
friend of mine. Four of us -- Dragan, Martin, Refika and myself -- spent a snowy morning kicking around
town and finally wound up in a CD shop, where Martin bought a copy of Saban Bajramovic's greatest hits,
issued by a Slovene record label. You can buy cassettes and CDs like it anywhere in record shops and at
bazaars all over the former Yugoslavia, as well as at the big bazaars in the Yugoslavian diaspora, such as
the massive Autokino flea market in Vienna. A few hours after buying the CD and much excited
discussion, we had worked up the nerve to go and visit Saban.
His wife did not want to let us in. Saban was ill, and apparently quite a few Saban fans visit the Bajramovic
household hoping to meet the maximum king. After some brief pleading on the doorstep and a promise not
to stay long, however, she relented, and let us into the kitchen. Saban appeared in a shabby blue and green
bathrobe and plastic slippers, looking distinctly less sharp than his pressed-suit-and-gold-tooth stage
persona. Indeed, he looked ill, his cheeks cut with deep lines and a pair of large square wire-framed reading
glasses sloping at an oblique angle across his eyebrows. Mrs Bajramovic poured us all coffees and orange
soda. A couple of children (grandchildren?) in their mid-single digits played past a door in the other room.
What does one talk about with the maximum king? We sat grinning idiotically while Saban recounted some
anecdotes. After he writes a new song, he plays it for his kids. If they like the song, then the song is good.
Saban's recent cassettes, such as "Karavani" or the cassette called simply "Saban Bajramovic" being sold
around the Yugoslav archipelago in Vienna, aren't really up to much. All of us were thinking that the kidtest-system wasn't working out as well as it had in the past.
Who owned his music, we wanted to know. Saban was evasive. Martin produced the CD he had purchased
earlier that day. Had he ever seen it? Was he receiving any royalties for it? Had he been paid for it? Saban
thought he probably had signed some papers, maybe he had them somewhere. Could we see them? He
wasn't really sure where they were; he would have to look for them. Had he received any money for
"Mesecina"? Maybe, he wasn't sure. He would have to check. He thought he might have signed some
papers. Refika explained that possibly we could help him try to secure money he might be owed if he could
show us the papers. Saban looked unsure. Perhaps he thought we were another group of record company
people, wanting him to sign something. Mrs Bajramovic reappeared, concerned, and after another round of
orange soda, we were ushered back out the door.
He no doubt signed away all rights, we concluded, in exchange for a handful of cash that probably seemed
large, but is a tiny fragment of what the Underground soundtrack earns in France, where "World Music" is
a cash cow. The culture industry is so unpredictable, who knows what will happen in the future. Perhaps
Saban will fade into obscurity as his records continue to decline in quality. Maybe young hotshots will take
over -- the Romani bands from Macedonia and Kosovo like Zvonko Demirovic and Cita, the wave called
"Turbo Romani Gilja" ("Turbo Romani Songs"), full of heavy Turkishisms and "oriental" motifs and much
more danceable. Saban already inhabits a kind of half-light, his cassettes bootlegged in poor quality and
sold around flea markets with xeroxed covers. His reputation around Niš is as an eccentric, more concerned
with feeding his pet pigeons than with cultivating his fame.
Or perhaps the world of legend marketing will seize him. There will be documentary videos; biographies;
collectors item multi-CD sets, including handsome full-color booklets; tribute records by young admirers;
television appearances; French festival gigs and German, Dutch and Japanese tours. Ry Cooder will make a
record with him. In later life, he will grow rich, fat and revered. His record company will send him a
bathrobe appropriate for his station, and pay for his kids to have dental care in Switzerland. I hope so,
anyway.