Goran BregoviC

(BA)

Born in 1950 in Sarajevo, in the heart of the Balkans, Goran Bregović grew up amidst the chaos of the former Yugoslavia and the vibrancy of its multicultural streets. The son of a Catholic Croat and an Orthodox Serb, he learnt to play the guitar from his Gypsy grandfather. He developed his musical taste amidst the hustle and bustle of weddings and cafés where Serbs, Croats, Sephardic Jews and Gypsy people mingled. After all, as Bregović puts it, ‘music is the only homeland that has never fallen apart’.

He started out with rock. In the 1970s, he was the face of Bijelo Dugme, Yugoslavia’s most popular band, which filled stadiums. But beneath the amplifier, Bregović was listening to something else: the brass bands at wedding celebrations in the neighbourhoods of Sarajevo, the female choirs arriving from Bulgarian villages as if from another century, the Gypsy violin that asks no permission to enter any room. When director Emir Kusturica invited him to compose the soundtrack for Time of the Gypsiesin 1988, Bregović did not hesitate — and in doing so he found the language he had been seeking without realising it. Arizona Dream, Underground, Queen Margot: cinema became the laboratory where he realised that his music needed epic space, ceremony, songs for weddings and funerals, because that’s where life happens.

With the outbreak of the Balkan War, Goran Bregović formed the Wedding and Funeral Band (Orchestra for Weddings and Funerals) in 1991. The name captures the essence of the Balkans: the same music serves both to celebrate life and to mourn the dead. During the siege of Sarajevo (1992–95), he played at actual weddings and funerals, saving Bosnian Gypsy musicians from death.

Bregović’s sound is, therefore, a wedding feast at the end of the world. There are Balkan brass instruments that make the blood rush, Bulgarian female voices that seem to come from another century, percussion that leaves you no choice, harmonies that are simultaneously sacred and pagan. Orthodox traditions, klezmer, Bosnian sevdah and global punk.

He likes to say that he composes music for funerals and weddings — in other words, for those moments when life demands more than words. His Wedding and Funeral Band isn’t just an ensemble; ‘it’s a little Yugoslavia on stage’.