EVA SALINA & PETERSTAN
Vida Pavlovi was one of the greatest of all Ser-bian Roma singers, possessed of a voice to entwine you in visionary sadness. She passed away in 2005, after a life sadly replete with all the melancholia and discomfort of which she sang with such assurance, but also after selling hundreds of thousands of records. Listening to Vida’s own albums again, I’m struck by how tied her hands and ambitions were, within gaudy sleeve artwork, false bonhomie and inappropriate celebration. But her effervescent cries of entrapped and essential vitality created a startling realism at odds with her constricted milieu. Together with accordeon maestro Peter Stan, Eva Salina has placed Vida, in this tribute, into a quieter, more strenuously supple and breathable, safe space.In a career devoted to revisiting similarly empowered Balkan Roma vocalists, the duo have come to specialise in superbly played flights of imaginative recreation and imagination. I’m still taken with Eva Salina’s last album, a record devoted to the work of Šaban Bajramovi Sudbinais a more absolute, intrinsic, poetic understanding of a quieter icon’s place within Balkan song and society.
Salina has the fearless outsider’s ability to create an unshowy and selfless patina of intimate drama with Peter Stan’s unpredictable and characterful playing of multiple influences on his accordeon. She quietly impresses her dark, poised voice upon the landscape and legacy that inspired her, often imploring for space outside Stan’s claustrophobic, beautifully suffocating inventiveness.
E Laute Bašalen Taj Roven refers to the Roma Holocaust, in explicit acknowledgement of this music’s tough reflection of suffering: “The violins, full of sadness, are crying for us.” It’s an emotional but mirthless twisted dance in line and out of time. “Give me peace because you are devouring my heart,” Salina sings in E Dade ́ciˇCajori .But the whole album is both stoical and defiantly elemental, a record of visceral feeling.Darkness dances with rural stir, sacred and perishable.
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