Žegar Živi

Cloud Valley CV3008

Full Price (45 min)

* * * *

Serbian village people

Once you've got past the infuriatingly confusing typography on the cover ‑ actually the title in Cyrillic and Latin script ‑ there's some extraordinary music here. Apart from Topic Records, there's nobody releasing good ethnographic recordings in the UK, so this rare voyage into Serbian village music in Dalmatia (Croatia) is a rarity. It was the voice of singer Svetlana Spajić that first convinced producer Andrew Cronshaw to make this disc, but this CD is very much the music of a community, not a soloist. The singers and musicians are Serbian residents of Žegar, near Obrovac in Croatia, who had fled during the Serbo‑Croatian war, but who have now returned to their shattered village where these songs and instrumental pieces were recorded.

            Svetlana Spajić is lead singer on several songs, while the village singers feature the full and throaty voices of Jandrija Baljak, Dragomir Vukanac, Vojislav Radmilović and female singer Miljka Radmilović in the local solo call‑and‑group‑response style called groktalica, which uses a strongly trilled voice. The featured instrument is the loud diple (single‑reed double pipes) played by Obrad Milić in different locations around the village. Other tracks include typical village sounds such as drinking toasts, the village goats (and goat herders), and the church bells, although these might have made a better opening than conclusion. This disc lets you eavesdrop on a little­-known village culture and ends (before the church bells) with the polyphonic song 'Zhegar Field Feeds My Lamb', a gloriously rich song about the abundance of the village in the reverberant acoustic of the school.

Simon Broughton