Location: Bluesiana Rock Caffee / Velden am Woerthersee / Austria
Concert date: 01.11.2007
Attendance: 130
Ticket price: 25 euros
The second leg of the two-day RockLine raid on Bluesiana wrapped up in style with a set by the hot-blooded Serbian phenomenon Ana Popović. She’s a thirty-one-year-old pearl of the Balkan rock scene and, for good reason, a fixture on European and world stages for many years now. Ana Popović has never been just another statuesque, mare-caliber woman who fills the average music consumer’s free time by intensely shaking, viewed through the prism of mating processes, the more important parts of the human anatomy. Sure, young Ana’s figure thinned out the ladies in the crowd for good, and it’s true that Bluesiana hasn’t glittered with this much camera-flash activity in ages. Still, I dare say most of us were looking forward mainly to the spontaneity of yet another unforgettable musical evening, something Bluesiana long ago became a synonym for.
Besides being an exceptional musician, Ana Popović also proved herself a promising candidate for drill sergeant. For example: the legions of stallions who had occupied the best spots with blitzkrieg enthusiasm and precision turned out, under her baton, to be an extremely disciplined collective of the unsatisfied. Long before the show began, their little bodies formed an obedient and curiously shaped semicircle with a radius of about a meter and a half. As it turned out later, during an evening of marathon sweating and showing off the autocratic tendencies of each guy’s proud standing-only parts, that semicircle worked as an effective buffer zone (a centimeter closer could have been fatal for the singer’s eyesight). But enough of this gay gossip. Even if to many she’s a sort of modern-day Belinda Carlisle or, worse still, Shania Twain, since in the eyes of the mostly male crowd that flooded Bluesiana on Thursday night, no doubt in heavy anticipation of a visual feast on the nicely shaped body of the young Belgrade girl, Ana is definitely more than an object worthy of boastful, macho sexual treatment. She’s an extremely self-confident gal with an unusually aggressive, and at the right moments almost motherly, relationship with music. That speaks of a very well-developed sense of expression, which, let’s call it perfection, still lacks a pinch of real oomph, style, or if you prefer, true character. Ana’s musical language is accordingly at times a merely superficial take on soul, at times on jazz, even country, but above all on traditional blues frameworks. Popović effectively makes up for the lack of expressive depth with brilliant technique and, of course, her looks, though I have to stress again that the relevance of the latter remains entirely negligible.
The musical evening lovely Ana put together for us was in fact a predominantly blues-oriented program, split roughly in the middle into two sets, each a good hour and a half of intense guitar playing, lively bass juggling and more-or-less predictable organ wizardry. All three elements fused into one compact, tightly packed musical picture. Its strength rests almost entirely on original material, which Ana delivered royally and in grand style. U Complete Me, Love Me Again and How’d You Learn thoroughly stirred the imagination right from the start, not to mention the newly reborn hunting instincts of the heated, yodeling males. Next came Hungry, a nice showcase of Ana’s bold handling of old blues tricks, such as sharply dictated dynamic shifts, lightning-fast tempo jumps and similar ruses, nicely camouflaged in a seemingly original melodic rhetoric that, as expected, fooled most of the people there. The peak of the bombastic blues-rock experimenting in the first half was the biggest surprise of the night, an unusual, almost polka/blues take on T – Bone Walker’s The Hustle Is On.
Popović entered the second half of the evening, you could say, with a reserve lineup. With the cautious Doubt Everyone and My Favorite Night, the years of Ana’s jazz adventures studying in the Netherlands came through more strongly for the first time. The refinement and strongly emphasized communication within Ana’s band take on new dimensions with the dominant Night By Night and Between Our Worlds. A one-of-a-kind, emotionally eruptive high point then shook Bluesiana with the epic instrumental Navajo Boom, Ana’s tribute to the tragically departed blues hero Stevie Ray Vaughan, where we witnessed for the first time the guitarist’s incredible sensuality of musical expression! All the more welcome for it. Though, truth be told, her outward image has little to do with what we think of as the blues, Ana is today probably one of the few women, if not the only one, with enough guts to properly wrestle with the brash, blunt and utterly cheeky character of blues music. When the passions calm down again with Hold On and the lyrically fun My Man, or rather return to familiar waters, the greatness of what Ana does is still obvious. A real fierce woman!
text: Daniel Pavlica
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
1.U Complete Me 2.Love Me Again 3.How’d You Learn 4.Hungry 5.Is This Everything 6.Recall The Days 7.The Hustle 8.Change My Mind 9.Doubt Everyone 10.My Favorite Night 11.Bring You’r Fine Self 12.Love Fever 13.Night By Night 14.Long Way Home 15.Between Our Worlds 16.Navajo Moon 17.Hold On 18.My Man
Photo gallery
