All Must Have Prizes

Eight or nine years back, no summer weekend on HTV would be complete without a live prime-time broadcast from one of the many pop and folk music festivals hosted by practically every municipality with a picturesque town square and a co-operative mayor.

Marko Polo Fest Korčula, Slavonski Brod's Revija nove domoljubne pjesme (Review of New Patriotic Songs), Pjesme Podravine i Podunavlja (Songs of Podravina and Podunavlje): the only things more numerous than festivals seemed to be articles and columns asking whether every small town in Croatian needed a festival of its own.

The proliferation of festivals has calmed down somewhat since then, but looks to be creeping back again this year: Trogir acquired its own event dedicated to the late composer Zdenko Runjić, Etnofest Neum returned after a rained-off 2005, and this weekend the Festival kajkavske popevke reinvents itself with a competitive element for the first time.

Krapina's contribution to the regional festivals map has gone through several incarnations since its premiere in 1966: a serious attempt to nurture light music in kajkavian dialect, a suspiciously nationalist gathering (according to 1970s socialist cultural administrators), an annual memorial to the Yugoslav regime's repression of Croatian culture (according to their 1990s equivalents), and an excuse for showbusiness singers to sing in (for many) an exotic dialect and dress up in national costume.

The first few editions of Krapina didn't even admit performers who came from outside the kajkavian-speaking area. Like most regional festivals, things are a little more pan-Croatian these days: alongside the local regulars, the 2006 line-up features not only the Međimurje ethno-musician Lidija Bajuk, but Zagreb pop songwriter Rajko Dujmić and the Herzegovinan singer Ivan Mikulić.

Aside from his ventures into central European schlager, Mikulić has also experimented for some time with deriving pop music from the folk singing - ganga and rera - of his native Herzegovina. His first attempt at it was 1997, when he wrote several songs for the short-lived Mostar group Mobitel, but we've heard a lot more about Herzegovinan folk-pop since then, first via Mate Bulić's music, and then all through this spring via a little song about a štikla.

Mikulić's own application of the technique, Igraj, igraj, nemoj stat', won the Melodije Mostara festival this year with, apparently, the most elaborate choreography seen on a Croatian festival stage. (Would that include the dance spectaculars traditionally ordered up by HTV for their Sunday evening entertainment shows?). Igraj, igraj continues to pick up airplay here and there, which is more than could be said for Štikla.*

Rumours seem to have started already that Mikulić has, to put it kindly, a better chance than most of walking away with the festival's inaugural prize. They'll be proved right or wrong in six or seven hours' time. The Gazette, for its part, is more concerned that any combination of popevke and Herzegovinan melos can only have one imaginable result, as proved this summer by Slovenian semi-turbofolk singer Rebeka Dremelj and her Štikla-impersonating Ribica.

* And you can just about sing 'Hajde da se volimo' over the chorus, if you really, really want to.

Let's Take It From The Top

The Zagreb summer-break spirit seems to have infected the Gazette, which is slowly rediscovering its work ethic just as Catherine starts to wind down hers and think about spending a few days looking around castles in the Zagorje.

In approximately chronological order, these would probably have been full-length posts, if I'd had my act together.

Severina performed her summer season with her leg in plaster after an accident roller-skating in the dark, and revealed quite in passing to Jutarnji list that the team for her new album, due out at the end of the year, consists of Moja štikla's arranger Goran Bregović alongside Marina Tucaković, one of Serbia's most prolific pop/folk lyricists. Even more in passing, she described her 2000 hit Ajde, ajde, zlato moje as 'on the borders of turbofolk', although somehow that's less of a surprise than the Tucaković link-up.

Severina's pre-Bregović version of Štikla, the less comically folkloric Moj sokole, has had the sort of airplay one would expect from a summer hit by one of the most famous women in Croatia. Štikla, on the other hand, has not. Hari Mata Hari's Lejla, on the... third?... hand, has had more airplay than both songs put together. Which of the three would a visiting Martian think had been Croatia's Eurovision entry?

The fifteenth anniversary of Operation Oluja and the end of the Homeland War was marked by an official ceremony in Knin, and an all-day celebration in Čavoglave culminating in a concert by the village's most famous branitelj, Marko Perković Thompson. Thompson's own album, due late last year, may be delayed again now that he and his wife are expecting their third child - to be called Jelena if a girl (after the queen?), and Ilija for a boy (after the saint?).

The onset of Bosnian elections nautrally meant a race for the Croat parties to sign up famous musical names from the domovina. As of Večernji list's article in late August, Hrvatska koalicija (the Croatian Coalition) was counting on three acts who had all, in their time, been the biggest name in Croatian showbusiness ethnopolitics: Thompson, Miroslav Škoro and Prljavo kazalište. HDZ-BiH scooped up most of the other Herzegovinan pop singers of the moment, among them Mate Bulić, Ivan Mikulić, and girlband Feminnem.

Back in May, the Gazette's eye was caught by the line-up for Croatian singer Zorica Andrijašević's forthcoming album, namely, the Serbian folk songwriting team of Zoran Lesendrić-Kiki and Marina Tucaković (again). Andrijašević has now gone one better, according to this week's Arena magazine, and signed for the Serbian folk label Grand Productions - only the second Croatian singer to do so, says Arena, with the first being Siniša Vuco.

As East Ethnia reported at the time, three of Croatia's best-regarded alternative acts - TBF, Let 3, and Damir Urban - withdrew from Zadar's planned new rock festival Ups! when it turned out that the show would be sponsored by the Foundation for the Truth about the Homeland War, the lobby group founded in January with the aim of promoting... well, what else would it promote. The Foundation, apparently, got involved with Ups! 'to show that the historical truth about the Homeland War is not only supported by people who go to Thompson and Mate Bulić concerts', but may instead have helped to suggest the opposite.

The Gazette's more intrigued by who in the first place could have thought it was a good idea to invite the Letovci - whose current album deals with 'the collective memory, collective romances and irritations of the peoples who live in the states of former Yugoslavia', mainly by rearranging old newly-composed folk songs, adding swear words and wearing false moustaches - to a festival sponsored by an Ante Gotovina defence fund. (At least Gotovina never wore a moustache.)

Allowing me a brief trip into Glory of Carniola territory, the Slovenian singer Saša Lendero - who specialises in translating her Eurovision pre-selection entries into Croatian and re-entering them in Budva Festival or HRF - presented her summer hit Ne grem na kolena, currently available at her official site. It seems it isn't just turbo folk - Slovenian turbo polka - which has made it across from the Serbian and Bosnian markets: the trend for covering Greek pop songs has headed west as well. On the way, it's dropped Despina Vandi's Simera off in Croatia as Lana Jurčević's Odlaziš - but this does seem to be a year when Croatian music realised it had a little to catch up on.

Moj Sokole Again

You wait.. not very long... for a Severina scandal, and then two come along at once. With essentially the same song, no less.

Jutarnji list is reporting that Severina has decided to withdraw Moj sokole from Splitski festival after all - the result, according to JL, of negative publicity caused by Jasmin Stavros's earlier withrawal (on the grounds that Sokole, alias the demo version of Štikla, would have an unfair advantage over the rest of the line-up), and by recent allegations that Sokole had been copied from Toma Bebić's 1980s song Oja noja. (Back in March, Oja-noja was in fact being given as another alternative title for the demo.)

The festival director, Tomislav Mrduljaš, told a press conference yesterday that Severina was all the more upset to withdraw because of her own connections with Split, but still felt under too much pressure to be able to continue in the festival.

Večernji list, meanwhile, has the news that Danijela Martinović is bringing out an album with Latino vesions of some of her old hits under the title Cante i baile con Danijela (Sing and dance with Danijela). (Shakira surely has a lot to answer for.)

The Gazette's favourite story of the day, though: Henry Jenkins's discussion on his new-ish blog of the upcoming Bollywood take on Superman...