Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Vruja
Label: Celinka
Release: 2013
Runtime: 57:54
Rating: 3.6/5
Tradition shapes culture and character, the backbone of a people, the torch-bearers of custom and the guardians of the treasure chest of being different from everyone else around them, outside them. In this story and context, Istrians are eternal rebels even today, but change has started to creep in, and people are losing that gram of difference, which is also why the memory of the bridge of inseparability, of an ethnic indivisibility between Croats, Slovenes and Italians, is fading in many places. Istrians say of themselves that they’re something else, something that doesn’t fit into any box – that they’re Istrians. Vruja mastermind Marino Kranjac recently picked up an ethnographic study by Giuseppe Radole and, besides the relationship between Italians and Croats, pulled Slovenes into this dance of trading traditional tunes and culture back and forth. Over centuries of living side by side, all three entities mixed their genes, folk songs, melodies and the very musical practices of performing, and people lived connected, depending on one another. There was more contact than there is today, as studies now show: the fairgrounds and Istrian towns were meeting points of three cultures that traded goods, married each other and, on Istrian soil, died too. As Istrians.
On their fourth record, Brez pašaporta, Vruja, a band of traditional musicians who nurture and carry on the tradition of musical groups from Slovenian Istria, continue their mission of spreading knowledge and popularizing the musical heritage of Istria. Even after twelve years together, Vruja stay true to the authentic sound of their native soil, all of it mixed and sticky-glued together, and through the handful of fertile terra rossa they add to the mosaic of Istrian peculiarity, to the Istrian soul, that something special, musical, with which they can educate the uninitiated. Here I have to borrow their own words. In presenting the fiddlers’ heritage of northern Istria, the band’s members stay faithful to the instruments typical of the area, such as the vijulin (violin), bajs (the Istrian bass with two gut strings), klarin (clarinet) and remonika (accordion). They spice up that lineup with a dasko (a washboard). With that setup they play the best-known dances of northern Istria: the polka, waltz, šaltin, šete paši, cotič, manfrina, mazurka, štajra, vilota and dopaši. The band presents the musical tradition of southern Istria with the instruments typical of that area, like the vela i mala sopela or roženica (wooden wind instruments with a double reed), the meh or mih (Istrian bagpipes) and the šurle (a double pipe with a single reed). With those instruments they “sopeju” out some of the most characteristic melodies, like the mantinjada and balun. Vruja sometimes combine all these folk instruments with ones like guitar, mandola, flutes and bagpipes, building a musical picture of their own design and inspiration. A special stamp on the band comes from their vocal performances of songs from southern Istria, that is, two-part singing na tanko i debelo, villota (two-part singing from the coastal towns), and songs from Slovenian Istria. Through these songs you can hear the Chakavian, Istro-Venetian and Šavrin dialects.
The record took shape at the Bertoki home of Marino and Alenka Kranjac, and Vruja dressed up their offering with rich liner notes in Italian, Croatian and English, and invited well-versed guests and connoisseurs of authentic tunes to join in. Alongside them are Dario Marušić, their longtime musical friend and companion, and three young players from southern Istria, Branimir Šajina, Noel Šuran and Zoran Karlić. Thirteen journeys into the past kick off with the track with the most played-out variants in Istrian, Le Bevanda Sonnifera. The first part of this two-part song is marked by the sound of Istrian bagpipes, as played by the Galižani near Pula, and the song goes on with the characteristic “thick” Istrian tune of manly polyphony from Rovinjsko selo. The verses are sung in Istro-Venetian and Chakavian dialects, the playing of the Koper hinterland weaves into the melody, and the big finale, a song about seduction, trickery and sparkle, wraps up on the shores of Strunjan. The story is about a beautiful brunette who goes to fetch water, meets a knight on the way, and he offers her a nice pile of money for a night of fleshly pleasure. Backed by her mother, the girl dazes the knight and gets him drunk, the two women rob him, and the flesh-loving nobleman is left with neither his money nor his fleshly delight. Vruja carry on their tale of a musical journey in a more danceable, playful vein with Dve lete in pú, and its rhythm and two-part melody give away that the influence of the balun dance, a staple in nearly every village of Slovenian Istria, seeped into Slovenian Istria. A song from Dragonja, it tells of unrequited love, and Vruja carry on the seduction and the lesson with a portrait of the virtuous Istrian lass Milka in the song Sem slovenska deklica. The song was already popular in northern Istria between the first and second world wars. The first part of the tune sounds the way it’s sung in Dekani near Koper, accompanied by the characteristic sound of a Trieste-style diatonic accordion, while the second part strikes up in a more ominous, more minor-key tone, with the tamburitzas from Ćićarija; its mark is left, after Alenka’s ringing voice, by the sound of the two-string tamburitza and the voice of Dario Marušić.
What follows is just a crumb of lovely tunes of much greater length. Il Genovese / Storu si je lepi vrt brings to your ears a lovely duet of male and female vocals, as sung in Croatian Istria, and the Istro-Venetian sweetness of the tune from Materada and Piran, after a more playful and melodic intro, is shifted into a Pregara meter; the more dissonant ending is there because the previous two versions of the song don’t have such a finale yet. Vruja stay consistent and keep the quality up with a leap deep into the heart of Šumber. The sturdy Istrian polyphony of La Jera Tre Sorele tells of a girl’s unusual decision to become a sailor. With a switch between the Chakavian and Istro-Venetian dialects, the typical “thick” and “thin” singing trade places, while the Strunjan tune of Pesca Dell’ Anello is more melodious, played by Vruja the way it’s also known in northern Italy. Slovenian Istria is the link here between the whiteness of the Istrian coast, the stone of Istrian resistance, and Italian influences. And with that last one, heels start to heat up and people dance more freely. Then a bit of joy and swaying beats of the three-quarter Valcer, which mixes the influences of two folk tunes, Še kikl’co prodala bom and Vsak kmet ima svoje veselje, in the Istrian folk way, a tune with the spirit of the village of Kolari near Grožnjan, and with the stamp that the late musician Otavio Štokovac – Rapatočki left on Vruja. Dancing to the dictation of double fiddles and bajs, we move on to the turf of the Šavrins. »Ala šu, zakantajmo jo po dalmatinsko!« is the dividing line of the Čentur tune, while One dve naranče shifts into a love story and an exchange of gifts between a young woman and her suitor in Ćićarija. The nasal two-part harmonies are the send-off for one of the best-known and best-blended tunes in Istria, Oj, mati, mamca / Varda La Luna, which Slovenes, Croats and Italians all claim as their own. Love is the shared language of all three, and the sound of polyphonic choral singing, with its guttural tone, conjures up visions of emptied Istrian villages where, a century or more ago, a young girl pined for her boy while her mother forbade the love.
Pojela je nevestica / La Cena Della Sposa carries on with a tune cherished by Italians and Croats, a swap of two tunes – from Baderna and Prana – and the sparkling story is about a gluttonous bride and everything the girl ate in the ten days after the wedding, while the groom edged ever closer to the beggar’s staff. The hungry girl was fattening up, and the Croatian version, with its almost tearful, cynical delivery, drones through the whole menu of a girl with an inhuman appetite, while the more playful Italian melody has a good, more melodic time of it, dancing along to fiddles, accordion, guitar and a sweet-sounding combo of mellow male and lovely female vocals. Jaz ti bon kipila / Mamma mia, vorei, vorei is a song that tackles the same theme, both in the written Koštabona variant in the Šavrin dialect and on the Istro-Venetian coast of the Vižinada hinterland. The song is a dialogue between a mother and daughter, where the mother, over a supposed illness, wants to cheer the girl up with gifts so she’d get back on her feet, while the daughter, with her feigned illness, quite obviously dodges work or marriage … With Un Giorno Andando, the album most obviously shows the influence of blending the Chakavian, Venetian and Istrian dialects and spirits into something shared and inseparable. The song is sung na tanko i debelo in guttural style, and Vruja glide from one dialect into another naturally, with no visible seams, no borders. Mamca be tela / Spoza Per Forza is about the bitter fact of ordered love and marriages in the past, since young people often weren’t allowed to marry their beloveds of the heart. Štelo was financial standing, material gain, and a marriage built on material foundations was robbed of love and warmth. In the first part, the mother forces her daughter into marriage the way it was heard in Nova Vas, and in the second part we shift to Materada, where this time it’s the father, not the mother, forcing the child into a forced marriage. The musical surprise of the song comes in its outstanding finale, which turns into gypsy jazz, a fiery dictation of fiddles and singing guitar and accordion, and the exceptional, fiery finale, in almost Django Reinhardt fashion, conjures up the sound of the 1920s; Vruja step out of the village’s pure traditionalism into the more urban setting of Trieste or some slightly bigger town where influences from all over the world mixed. The cosmopolitan send-off of the big playful finale, one of the record’s real surprises, wraps up in keeping with the spirit of the album. Ona mi je rekla / Stara sura is a two-part trip back to the heart of Istria, and with its balun tune, traditional dance music, Vruja invite you to dance regardless of language, culture, heritage or belief – the language of music is just one, and it unites.
Smuggling influences from one side of the border to the other, and even more across the borders in people’s heads, makes for a gorgeous send-off for a record that may not appeal to those who can’t stand a connection to the past and can’t step beyond the borders in their own heads. I’m still very glad that borders, imposed on people by force, against the will of the locals living there, can at least for a moment be crossed – without a passport. As Vruja put it: »Even if they put up a Berlin Wall for us, they couldn’t stop us from meeting, creating together and collaborating.« The album Brez pašaporta is proof that Istria was, at least once, a single melting pot, a single cultural space, one supranational, supracultural and supralinguistic region, an entity, and that carving it up with sharp borders wounded the Istrian soul and cut into everyday Istrian life. That’s another reason Vruja call for unity, for a return to the roots, which are stronger and tougher than the big political and economic pan-European projects of unitarism. Through music and tunes, Istria has long since, timelessly and apolitically, demanded its plebiscitary wish for union and for secession from the inflammatory tendencies of centers that don’t understand the spirit of Istrians very well, if at all. Maybe we should listen to the call, which this time is interpreted in quite a few different ways, provided we can muster enough patience, ear and will. Vruja offer at least thirteen good arguments for it, and the album, despite its almost purist, stubborn traditionalism, deserves an honorable spot on a page with otherwise more rock-oriented content too – for its quality, its message, and its rich selection of treasures from a past that was shared and binding for so many, and now it would be time to outgrow these partitions and fencings-off in a quality way and do away with them open-mindedly, without calls for political agitation or propaganda.
Lineup
Marino Kranjac- vocals, violin, bagpipes, mandola, sopele, guitar
Alenka Kranjac- vocals, washboard, drum
Peter Kaligarič– accordion
Gabrijel Križman- vocals, guitar, mandola
Gorast Radojevič- bass
Rok Kleva Ivančič- violin
guest musicians:
Dario Marušić– vocals, vela sopela, two-string tamburitza
Branimir Šajina, Noel Šuran and Zoran Karlić – vocals, mala sopela
Production
Miro Kranjac
Track list
1. La Bevanda Sonnifera
2. Dve lete in pú
3. Sem slovenska deklica
4. Il Genovese / Storu si je lepi vrt
5. La Jera Tre Sorele / Pesca Dell’anello
6. Valcer
7. One dve naranče / One dvi naranče
8. Oj, mati, mamca / Varda La Luna
9. Pojela je nevestica / La Cenna Della Sposa
10. Jes ti buon kipíla /Mamma Mia, Vorrei, Vorrei
11. Un Giorno Andando
12. Mamca be tela / Sposa Per Forza
13. Ona mi je rekla / Stara súra
