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

Bright Balkan Morning combines the talents of three remarkable ethnomusicologists and an unusually gifted photographer. The result is a rare treasure of a book, one that should certainly be in the library of anyone interested in Greece’s Romani population and the music Romani play, but also of anyone curious about the music of another culture. It allows the reader to discover this music in the complexity and ambiguity of its context, not only because the text is accompanied by a CD or because the musicians speak at length about their music, but because Blau’s many photographs of musicians, dancers, and the bleak concrete architecture of the mahala are superbly integrated into the text.

The text of Bright Balkan Morning, by the husband-and-wife team, Angheliki Vellou Keil and Charles Keil, is the result of decades of fieldwork in and around the town of Iraklia (formerly Jumaya) in the district of Serres, in Greek Macedonia. Angeliki Vellou Keil’s name will be familiar to rebetika fans. It was she who, in a series of interviews, recorded Markos Vamvakaris’s life story, producing the first and most detailed autobiography of any rebetika musician to date. Born in Thessaloniki, Vellou Keil left Greece in 1955 at the age of eighteen and has lived since then in the United States. When she and her husband decided to focus on the musicians of the mahala of Jumaya, Vellou Keil was fulfilling a sense of obligation to her place of birth: “I wanted to make up for the original sin of my immigration,” she notes in the introduction, “Ethnographic fieldwork was out of the question” (10). The best ethnographic fieldwork is often the result of a sense of obligation, even guilt (a good example is Hakim Belabbes’s film Threads, about his native village in Morocco). If some scholars may find it a drawback, others will be grateful for the refusal of the Keils to exoticize or romanticize the “gypsies” of Greece and their music. The inhabitants of the mahala of Jumaya are treated, in this account, as one of many minorities who make up the polyglot and multi-ethnic Greek population. This approach allows the Keils to dispel the myth that there is a distinctive—and, presumably, more exotic—music that the Roma perform among themselves. After years of listening, talking and living with the Roma, the Keils concluded that they simply play Greek or Bulgarian or Turkish music. If they do so in a distinctive style, it does not appreciably alter the underlying character of the music.

The instruments most often associated with Roma musicians in Greece are the daouli (a two-headed bass drum played on both sides) and the zurna or shawm (an outdoor oboe with a double reed). The combination of these two instruments, or of instruments very similar to them, is found across Asia, Africa, and Europe. Charles Keil, who is also a fine a jazz musician, gives a lyrical description of the impact of these instruments on him when he first heard them on the way to his own wedding in Thessaloniki:

Zurnas wailing, daouli pounding—all of jazz history culminated for me at that moment. This was the sound that the John Coltrane Quartet had been laboring toward so faithfully night after night at the Fivespot in New York. . . The busy bass and piano parts of Jimmy Garrison and McCoy Tyner were here condensed into the penetrating drone of the second zurna player. The polyrhythmic churning of Elvin Jones at his drum set was essentialized flawlessly here by the little stick flicked against the tighter head of the daouli, while the right-hand thumping stick delivered clean accents uncluttered by ringing cymbal overtones. Distillation of bass and piano to a single tone. Essence of Elvin Jones focused in one bass drum. And soaring above the drone and...