Balkan Beats
28. 4. 2026 | Categories: Articles,Book reviews
Balkan brass bands, hitmaker Goran Bregović, nostalgia for Yugoslavia, the Roma music of Eastern Europe, the Serbian mega-festival Guča, Bosnian Sevdalinka ballads, and nationalist-tinged Turbofolk - all of these are partial streams of a complex trend that has lasted for over 30 years. The starting point is considered to be the film Underground by director Emir Kusturica with soundtrack by Goran Bregović, inspired by the Yugoslav war. This list alone suggests that this is more than a musical phenomenon, and that a whole team of well-founded authors will be needed to map it. And that is exactly what the book that was presented at the Womex trade fair last year is about.
[Ken Hunt, London] Let's say goodbye to 2025 with an anniversary. At the very beginning of 2010 I pitched the idea for a regular column to Sean McGhee, the editor of RnR (after its original name Rock'n'Reel. My idea was to write about a socially engaged or political song or piece of music.
[by Ken Hunt, London] The English playwright and film and television scriptwriter, Keith Dewhurst (1931-2025) died on 11 January 2025. He was responsible for a number of important plays performed in the National Theatre.
[Ken Hunt, London] 2023 into 2024 felt like bursting smiling into sunshine after being under one of the darkest clouds imaginable. In July 2024 I went back to the Rudolstadt Festival. The 2023 Festival had been really important. Santosh and I arrived there a month after being discharged from hospital and six weeks after major […]
[by Ken Hunt, London] For many years I was a newspaper obituarist writing for The Guardian, The Independent, The Scotsman, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Times. In addition, I wrote obituaries for many folk magazines. A sample would be Folker in Germany, the EFDSS Journal in the UK, Penguin Eggs in Canada and Sing Out! in the USA.
Since Oxford University Press took over what from 2004 became the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, I have written music-related biographical essays, mainly folk-related, for that massive reference work.
[by Ken Hunt, London] Traditional folk tunes have long leached into classical composition. In Central Europe in the times before many nations gained independence, music stoked senses of cultural identity and aspirations of nationhood. The polyvalent artist Iva Bittová came out of the Communist-era, Czechoslovak alternative theatre scene. She is a violin-vocal virtuosa, a Bachelor of Music, and an acclaimed film actor. She is of mixed Moravian, Slovak, Hungarian and Roma stock. The Mucha Quartet came together at the Conservatory in Bratislava, the capital of the Slovak Republic, in 2003.
This bespoke Rudolstadt Festival performance took place in the Stadtkirche, the town's baroque church and the programme of mixed Moravian and Slovak folksongs for voice and string quartet.
[Petr Dorùžka, Krems, Austria] Music enterpreneur Ankur Malhotra explains: The reason is favoritism and classism. There are millions spent by billionaires on weddings rather than be used to support the musicians via grant systems.
Malhotra represents some of the best Indian folk and roots musicians who perform on major festivals worldwide. Barmer Boys play spiritual Hindi and Muslim songs from the Rajasthani desert. 77-year-old Lakha Khan is the last living sarangi violin master. His music ranges from ragas to Sufi chants and epic chants. Decades ago, the virtuoso violinist Yehudi Menuhin was one of the first Western supporters of Indian music. He declared that the dark and hypnotic tone of the sarangi is "the very soul of Indian feeling and thought".
[Petr Dorůžka, Praha] After 42 years and 14 albums, Lo'Jo still sound like a group of visionaries from another world. Their roots go back to the punk rock era, but you can't hear it in their music. Also, Lo'Jo is untouched by French musical stereotypes. If you hear a chanson track, it's shifted into a distorted Tom Waits perspective. Musically, Lo'Jo was inspired by trumpeter Don Cherry, psychedelia, experimental music by groups like Magma, African genres, but these influences are more ideological than stylistic. The group's sound cannot be described using routine clichés, everything here works differently.
[Petr Dorůžka, Praha] Finland is musically one of the most diverse regions of Europe. The country of five and a half million offers tricky rhythms from Karelia, Sami joik, high energy dance tunes of pelimanni fiddlers, Finnish tango, runo songs from the Kalevala epic and of course music of Finland's two national instruments, accordion and kantele. In Finland, tradition is practiced as a living process and not as a museum exhibit, due to many dozens of creative musicians and educators. The crucial move in updating Finnish folk music to modern times was made in 1983, when Heikki Laitinen (* 1943) started the Folk Music Department at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki.
