The Singer of Tales

The sevdah of the western Balkans, especially associated with Bosnia and Herzegovina occupies a space between folk and art music, flexible and mutable, yet artistically and technically challenging for its performers. It is a palimpsest of imperial power: five hundred years of Ottoman rule overwriting but not obscuring village melodies with courtly maqams and the drone and chime of the saz, then Austria-Hungary bringing tonal harmony along with the railway. The wars of the 1990s brought ethnic fragmentation, set against a reclamation and revival of sevdah as symbolising a shared culture. There is another side to the music. Much of its lyrical imagery is framed around clandestine love, shuttered in seclusion, and sevdah has come to stand as a music of resistance for a new, marginalised, generation.

Of this generation of singers Damir Imamović has the most scholarly approach, tracing the music to brothels and opium dens as much as the perfumed rose garden of popular imagination, but he is also a masterful performer with a powerful yet sensitive baritone voice. Joined on this album by colleagues on contrabass, Turkish kemenche and violin, this powerful reimagination of classics alongside originals is one of the finest works Bosnia has produced this century.