Elections And All That Jazz

It's a predictable old place sometimes, Croatia.

When Vesna Pisarović headed to jazz academy in The Hague (making her the only Croatian who's happy to be there?), it didn't take too far a leap of the imagination to expect that her next album would be something in the way of all that, well, jazz.

Neither is it much of a surprise that HDZ's electoral list for Slavonia includes the pop-tamburica singer Miroslav Škoro, the former director of Croatia Records, responsible for one of the best-selling albums of 2005, and sniffily described by Jutarnji list as 'the author of a few tamburica hits'.

If elected, Škoro would follow in the footsteps of Kićo Slabinac, his counterpart in the older generation of tamburica players, who held a Sabor seat for HDZ in the mid-1990s. The Croatian Musicians' Union, for one, would surely look to him to improve the legal protection of domestic musicians by increasing their quota on TV and radio.

And a Happy Halloween to all. It's probably just a coincidence that election candidates have to register today...

UPDATE: Seems HDZ have quite a bit of confidence in Škoro: he's in sixth place on the party list for his constituency, above interior minister Ivica Kirin and defence minister Berislav Rončević.

Severina: Tamburica and Mandolin

The Gazette goes away for the weekend, and Severina decides to tell Večernji list what's on her long-awaited post-Štikla album, about to be recorded in Belgrade with Goran Bregović and the Serbian folk/pop lyricist Marina Tucaković.

Neretva River and SeveFanClub are already on the story - in fact, if the link to the original interview with VL isn't working, SFC carries the full text as well.

After dismissing various rumours that she's married/pregnant/moving to Belgrade (which have mainly come from the direction of tabloid 24 sata - the newspaper which did the most to start the Štikla scandal in the first place back in February), Severina gets around to explaining how the still untitled album is shaping up musically: Bregović is currently 'writing the melodies and notes for those brass, tin, tamburica and mandolin orchestras from Županja, Daruvar, Solin and Kaštel' (two inland-Croatian and two coastal towns). Moreover, whether disappointingly or not:

'The new album won't be anything like Štikla at all. Although, alongside two of Bregović's songs from his version of Carmen, there'll be the tamburica and authentic [izvornih] sounds of Croatian amateur orchestras from Županja, Daruvar, Solin and Kaštel, I wouldn't call that ethno.'

(Which makes a change from the Štikla period itself, when she'd much rather have had the song called ethno than something else.)

In fact, it looks less like a different approach, more like a difference in content. Štikla involved various folk song/dance forms from Dalmatia and the Dinaric Dalmatian hinterland (Lika, Zagora, Herzegovina); the album as a whole might have more in common with the time-honoured, uncontroversial Croatian formula of tamburica and mandolin (wasn't that a Zlatko Pejaković song?), 'Pannonian' and 'Adriatic' symbols which ethnomusicologist Svanibor Pettan argues tend to (be made to?) 'appear [...] more refined, more modern, and more Western' in comparison to Dinaric heritage.

Rather than following in the, errr, footsteps of Štikla, one or two songs might actually be more in the style of one of Štikla's only serious rivals during Dora, Ivana Banfić's tamburica-pop Kad se sklope kazaljke - and indeed, we're promised one of the tracks will be arranged by Stanko Šarić from the most famous tamburica-revival band Zlatni dukati/Najbolji hrvatski tamburaši.

So far, so 1990s, perhaps. But what's that, tucked away at the end of the interview, about covering a song Bregović first wrote for the Turkish pop diva Sezen Aksu?