Drina - Ozren goro, povi brdu grane

Drina was a vocal duo of Svetlana Spajić and Minja Nikolić at the begining of the 2000s, doing traditional Serbian vocal music from all the parts of Balkans where you'd typically find Serbs (Podrinje, Macedonia, Kosovo, Eastern Serbia, Kninska Krajina, Bosanska Krajina etc.). Today they are involved with another project (Pjevačka Družina Svetlane Spajić) but their album from 2001, called Živa Voda is still well worth seeking out. The song here is from Eastern Bosnia and is sung in "kantalica" style , with the first voice doing the main theme and the second singing the second interval (which makes it sound pretty unearthly). Despite its somewhat alien sound, it is a wedding song, sung at weddings.

Here is what Svetlana Spajić said about the project back in the day:

Drina is one of few urban groups in Yugoslavia which perform traditional Serbian songs using authentic vocal technique. It is duet and its members are Svetlana Spajic and Minja Nikolic. These two young singers also performs the songs from other Balkan areas, primarily from Bulgaria and Macedonia using vocal styles typical for these areas, but mostly their repertoire consists of traditional songs from all areas where the Serbs live or used to live (until the war events in this decade, expulsions and migrations). For their work they use exclusively field-recordings of village singing or go directly to the villages, searching for new songs and traditional manners of singing.

Drina started its work in Belgrade in 1999. but both singers have their singing experience. Svetlana Spajic started learning and singing traditional songs in 1993. and she was one of the founders of the young urban group "Moba" (Harvest Helpers). Together with traditional player, Darko Macura, she is a member of the First Traditional Balkan Ensemble which gathered in 1995. some fifteen best Balkan traditional performers from Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Turkey, Albania and Serbia. She sings also Bulgarian, Macedonian and Greek songs (including those from Asia Minor) and she is the only Yugoslav singer who performs Tuvan diphonic way of singing called "khoomei". Minja Nikolic is young and estimated jazz-singer and leads the female jazz vocal group The Four. Although their music taste is rather different in contemporary music, Svetlana and Minja understand each other very easily as far as their grandmothers' songs are concerned. They give concerts in the country and abroad.

The aim of Drina is to communicate mostly with young, urban audience who is emerged in contemporary culture and freed from academic and soc-realistic patterns typical for former Yugoslavia. "In our country, it is a challenge to perform such songs in urban surroundings. It is the greatest opportunity for artistic revaluation of these songs and a big chance to preserve them in future, since the living traditional culture in villages is slowly fading away. And that is exactly the tradition: live, organic re-creation from what was kept and learnt and what is delivered to the others, not some sterile, academic preservation. So, you may find us wherever life and energy beats, and it sometimes means that we have to sing in smoke-stained, dark music clubs. But they are full of young, open people and that is the audience we want.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• traditional music
• folk music
• world music
• narodna muzika
• etno muzika
• kantalica
• drina
• svetlana spajic
• minja nikolic

[IvanaFromSerbia]

Jedna mi od omiljenih! :)

[iggy977]

Ovo je ekstra.