Location: Rdeči Trg, Postojna, Slovenia
Concert date: August 27, 2007
Attendance: 0
Ticket price: /
The attraction has arrived! At least that’s how it looked from the number of people crammed onto Rdeči Trg, where the now-traditional annual Postojna festival Zmaj Ma Mlade takes place. And on a Tuesday night, no less! It really was a one-of-a-kind attraction. The kind that’s just right for the “Western world”, forever yearning for anything with a slightly more exotic aftertaste.
It felt like a quiet wind had wrapped itself into the night, which was buckling under the weight of expectation. It was a wind holding back the rain in the distance, the very rain the weather forecasters had so faithfully promised a day earlier, and it was a wind that accompanied a dozen nomadic souls and their shepherd, who goes by the name of Boban. Boban Marković. And those dozen nomadic souls make up his orchestra, or orkestar. Yes, they came from the temperamental south-east to the reserved and well-mannered west, but music, like the wind, knows no borders. In principle.
This is the same south-east that was once so close to us and has proven to still be close, if not even closer, yet at the same time it’s inexplicably distant, standing for a world and a culture that we can know at best from faded memories, woven completely into half-forgotten dreams, but still naively and irresistibly attractive. A culture that inevitably comes with culture shock. Put differently, the whole point is the culture shock, the departure from the norm, which we love to surrender to. And why wouldn’t we? It’s a culture that has little in common with ours except the name, and in the frequent fits of patriotic “joy” you’d call the whole thing anything but culture… But when there’s no reason to panic, this culture can come alive in its best light, with plenty to show and just as much to give.
Anyway, Boban Marković Orkestar delivered what was the main point all along. Music and a good time. And there was enough of both. Almost. It felt like that hour and three quarters flew by far too fast. If in Guča you can find a sign in Cyrillic saying “slobodno trubite”, in these parts the time limit is rarely allowed to be overstepped, but as the old Romans said, let things end at the peak… Speaking of peaks, a few times during the set it seemed that the Orkestar was (sadly) serving up a feast that fits healthy European standards completely (read – too much), meaning no fat, lightly fried, and in some kind of less harmful oil at that. Definitely not quite the recipe wanted by fans of this kind of music, or maybe even by everyone expecting a bit more than you’d hear on some Putumayo World Music compilation or the like.
The criticism is aimed mostly at a slightly too market-oriented concept of music, which in places borders on those big big band lineups Hollywood would gladly hire for movies about the “wild” Balkans. The music, and with it the energy, was pretty lukewarm in spots, and if I hadn’t seen the men and boys playing it (very solidly, mind you), I could have imagined it being played by guys and men from Kosovo, Pristina, Čačak, or just as well from Hamburg, Helsinki, Tokyo or Beverly Hills. But (luckily) it turned out that this isn’t the dominant side of the orchestra, just a slightly annoying minority part, which, after all, makes them a bit more appealing (and accessible) to the masses.
Still, Boban Marković Orkestar rises high above the crowd of all sorts of turbo entertainers, and it would be downright unfair to brand them turbo trumpeters just because they’re a little rounded off around the edges.
The Orkestar is made up of ten trumpeters, with Boban up front, though he keeps pushing himself further into the background and has been handing the brightest spot in the lineup over to his son Marko for a while now. As he announced, this is “Marko Marković Orkestar!”; besides the trumpets, there are also three percussionists, without whom no serious brass band can do. As for the average age of the musicians, most of them are closer to Marko’s age than Boban’s, but that’s how you keep the vitality up and pass the cultural charge on to the next generations.
The Orkestar mostly indulged in longer, quite dynamic instrumentals, but here and there Boban grabbed the mic and sang a number or two, especially in the last part of the set, when he delighted the fairly heated crowd with Goran Bregović’s almost folk songs “Mesečina” and “Djurdjev Dan”, during which, quite symbolically, those long-forecast drops finally fell from the sky. And to make this tribute to Bregović complete, there had to be “Kalašnjikov”, which through the film Underground lifted the whole trumpeter culture from the margins into the wide sky, though rather unfairly passing right by the true (but uncrowned!) king of Roma music, Šaban Bajramović.
Anyway, moonlight and trumpets are a killer combination, and even when the trumpets had gone completely silent and the raindrops covered the heated ground, they couldn’t wash away those (almost) ecstatic feelings. And behind those dark, rain-heavy clouds, a mischievous full moon was hiding, and the nomadic wind, colored with the sounds of the brass orchestra, rolled on into the night.
