Romani Routes

Romani Routes
AMERICAN MUSICSPHERES
Series Editor
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Bright Star of the West
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Sean Williams and Lillis Ó Laoire
Romani Routes
Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora
Carol Silverman
ROMANI ROUTES
Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora
ab
Carol Silverman
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Silverman, Carol.
Romani routes : cultural politics and Balkan music in diaspora / Carol Silverman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-19-530094-9 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-19-983278-1 (companion website)
1. Romanies—Music—History and criticism. 2. Folk music—Balkan Peninsula—History and
criticism. I. Title.
ML3600.S55 2011
781.62´91497—dc22 2011007128
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Table of Contents
Figures and Charts vii

Acknowledgments ix
Notes on Transliteration xiii
About the Companion Website xv
Part I Introduction
1. Balkan Roma: History, Politics, and Performance 3
2. Musical Styles and Genres 21
3. Dilemmas of Diaspora, Hybridity, and Identity 39
Part II Music in Diasporic Homes
4. Transnational Families 59
5. Transnational Celebrations 83
6. Transnational Dance 107
Part III Music, States, and Markets
7. Dilemmas of Heritage and the Bulgarian

Socialist State 127
8. Cultural Politics of Postsocialist Markets and
Festivals 149
9. Bulgarian Pop/Folk: Chalga 177
Part IV Musicians in Transit
10. Esma Redžepova: “Queen of Gypsy Music” 201
11. Yuri Yunakov: Saxophonist, Refugee, Citizen 221
12. Romani Music as World Music 241
13. Collaboration, Appropriation,

and Transnational Flows 269
Notes 295
References 335
Index 365
Figures and Charts
Figure 2.1. Variations of Čoček Rhythmic Patterns 29

Chart 9.1. Intersecting Circles: Chalga, Wedding Music,
Romani Music 179
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Acknowledgments
This book has benefited from several decades of assistance from many
individuals, families, communities, institutions, and granting agencies. I
would like to acknowledge funding from the International Research and
Exchanges Board, the Open Society Institute, the National Council for
Eurasian and East European Research, and the National Endowment for
the Humanities. At the University of Oregon, I was supported by a Summer
Research Grant and grants from the Oregon Humanities Center and the
Center for the Study of Women in Society. I would also like to thank the
Institut za Folklor “Marko Cepenkov” in Skopje, Macedonia, for serving as
my academic home in 1990.
Above all, I owe tremendous gratitude to the Romani community mem-
bers who generously hosted me in Macedonia, Bulgaria, Toronto, Mel-
bourne, and New York and who invited me to their homes and guided me
through cultural events. They include Yuri and Lidia Yunakov; Pera, Kjani,
Binas, Rafet, Erhan, Sevgul, and Shengul Redžeposki; Zada, Zekir, Ferhan,
Selviana, Rechko, Cindy, Redžep, Perijan, Šeman, Nuri, Zejnep, Idris,
Gjulfa, Zulfikjar, and Bajramša Ismail; Afrodita Salievska and her family;
Sonya and Jašar Jašaroski; Sadet, Seido, and Sanela Mamudoski; Mevlude,
Sazija and Ferat Arifovi; Seido, Nimet, and Isa Salifoski; Lahorka and Ali
Jašar; Tair, Selfija, Sabuhan, Severdžan, and Turkijana Azirovi; Mirka and
Firus Redžeposki; Nešo Ajvazi; Ismail Lumanovski; Erhan, Gjulče, Husa-
medin, Mikrema, Jusuf, Sevim, Turan, and Uska Umer; Esengul Edipova;
Muren and Ajten Ibraimovi; Sevim, Nurije, and Sal Mamudoski; Sebihana
and David Neziroski; Imer and Gjula Sulemanoski; Mizka, Ruse, and
Bajram Amzoski; Sebihana, Kaimet, and Šeno Ademoski; Ajša Sefuloska
and Ferdi Memedoski; Virgil and Dalip Asanovi; Gjulten and Šaban Dervi-
soski; Perijana and Nedžat Useinoski; Ramiz Islami; Romeo and Kurte
Kurtali; Kujtim and Muamed Ismaili; Ilmi and Bisa Teraski; Sevda and
Marem Bajramovski; Ali, Muzo, Kenedi, and Altan Zekiroski; Memet
Dželoski; Trajče Džemaloski; Šani Rifati; Abdula Durak and his extended
family; Esma Redžepova, Stevo Teodosievski, and Simeon Atanasovski;
Zahir Ramadanov; Sami Zekiroski; Mustafa Gjuneš; Trajko and Sabo
Petrovski; Muharem Serbezovski; Muzafer and Altan Mahmut; Gjulizar
Dželjadin; Bajsa Arifovska; Adžerka and Sukri Arifoski; Snezhana Gocheva
ix
and her extended family; Yashko Argirov; Yordan and Vera Kenderov; Ivo
Papazov and Maria Karafezieva; Neshko Neshev; Salif Ali; Dobri and
Matyo Dobrev; Hristo Kyuchukov; Mihail and Dimitŭr Georgiev; and
Anzhelo Malikov.
In Bulgaria and Macedonia, I was also graciously hosted by Petŭr Ral-
chev, Ivan Milev, Georgi Yanev, Ahmed Yunakov, Vergiili and Nadya Atana-
sov, Radost Ivanova, Aleksandar and Olga Džukeski, Vladimir and Olivera
Cvetkovski, and many other friends and colleagues. I would also like to
thank the many families who invited me to their family celebrations.
For help with translation, I owe thanks to Afrodita Salievska, Šani and
Dževrija Rifati, Dušan Ristić, Zada and Ferhan Ismail, Rachel MacFar-
lane, and especially Victor Friedman, who read the entire manuscript. I
would like to acknowledge editing assistance from Angela Montague,
from the staff of Oxford University Press, and from series editor Mark
Slobin.
I have greatly benefited over the years from fruitful intellectual ex-
changes with an inspiring group of colleagues, among them Jane Sugar-
man, Amy Shuman, Donna Buchanan, Gail Kligman, Steven Feld, Timothy
Rice, Svanibor Pettan, Martin Stokes, Judith Okely, Brana Mijatovič, Mar-
garet Beissinger, Elsie Dunin, Victor Friedman, Regina Bendix, Dorothy
Noyes, Mark Slobin, Sonia Seeman, Michael Beckerman, Petra Gelbart,
and Mirjana Lausević. Scholars from the Balkans, including Lozanka Pey-
cheva, Ventsislav Dimov, Elena Marushiakova, Vesselin Popov, Trajko
Petrovski, Claire Levy, Radost Ivanova, Vergiili Atanasov, Tsenka Iordan-
ova, and Speranta Radulescu, all generously shared their ideas with me.
Ventsislav Dimov and Lozanka Peycheva helped greatly with permissions
in Bulgaria.
I would especially like to express my appreciation to Seido Salifoski,
Šani Rifati, Afrodita Salievska, Kalin Kirilov, Mark Levy, Garth Cartwright,
and Nick Nasev for their helpful comments on specific chapters. Francis
Fung, Traci Lindsey, Henry Ernst, Helmut Neumann, Victor Friedman,
Rumen Shopov, Šani Rifati, and Villie Shumanov helped with musical ma-
terials. Kalin Kirilov was a valuable video editor. Ian Hancock generously
provided encouragement in difficult moments. My heartfelt thanks go to
Jane Sugarman for reading the entire manuscript and offering many in-
sightful suggestions. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers
from Oxford University Press for their detailed comments.
In the course of researching and writing, several community members
and colleagues passed away; they are sorely missed and will be deeply
remembered in my heart. Finally, I owe much gratitude to my family,
Mark and Nesa Levy, for their unwavering moral support.
The title of this book, Romani Routes, was inspired by the NGO (non-
governmental organization) Voice of Roma and its Romani Routes touring
program (www.voiceofroma.com/culture/romani-routes.shtml). I would
like to thank the officers of VOR for their permission to use the phrase.
Portions of Chapter 6 were reprinted from “Transnational Chochek:
Gender and the Politics of Balkan Romani Dance,” in Balkan Dance:
x Acknowledgments
Essays on Characteristics, Performance, and Teaching, ed A. Shay, 2008,
with permission from McFarland Publishers. Portions of Chapters 7 and 8
were revised from “Bulgarian Wedding Music Between Folk and Chalga:
Politics, Markets, and Current Directions,” in Musicology 7(2007): 69–97
with permission of the Serbian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Musi-
cology. Portions of Chapter 10 were revised from “The Gender of the Pro-
fession: Music, Dance and Reputation Among Balkan Muslim Romani
(Gypsy) Women,” in Gender and Music in the Mediterranean, ed. Tullia
Magrini, 2003,with permission from the University of Chicago Press. Por-
tions of Chapter 11 were reprinted from “Music and Transnational Iden-
tity: The Life of Romani Saxophonist Yuri Yunakov,” in Džaniben (Czech
Journal of Romani Studies), Winter 2009: 59–84, with permission of the
publisher. Portions of Chapter 12 were reprinted from “Trafficking in the
Exotic with Gypsy Music,” in Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman
Ecumeme, ed. D. Buchanan, 2007, with permission from Scarecrow Press,
a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.
This book is dedicated to the memory of my parents, Evelyn and Larry
Silverman, who eagerly followed my research and live in my heart.
Acknowledgments xi
Notes on Transliteration
This book deals with four Balkan languages—Romani, Bulgarian, Mace-

donian, and Serbian (Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian)—each with its own con-
ventions of transliteration. Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Serbian belong to
the family of South Slavic languages. Romani is an Indo-Aryan language
related to other languages spoken in northern India; its orthography dif-
fers from country to country. Bulgarian and Macedonian are written in
Cyrillic; Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian may be written in either the Cyrillic or
Latin alphabet. A few Turkish words are also used in this book.
I have provided translations of all foreign words; when these words are
not Romani I have indicated the language used, as in “Južni Ekspres
(Southern express [Macedonian]).” If no language is indicated, the
language is Romani, as in “Bijav Geljum te Bašalav (I went to a wedding to
play).” I note that many words in Macedonian, Bulgarian, and Romani are
derived from Turkish; for example, the Macedonian and Romani term
bovčalok (gifts for the groom sewn on a sheet) comes from the Turkish
bohça. However, there are too many words from Turkish for me to indicate
this connection in this book.
In effort to make it easier for the reader, I have modified existing trans-
literation practices according to this system:
Romani, Serbian, and Macedonian words are written with Bosnian/Croa-

tian/Serbian Latin orthography and pronounced as follows:
a = as in art
e = as in met
i = as in machine
o = as in port
u = as in lunar
‘ = short u (schwa) as in but
š= sh as in shop
ž = zh as s in pleasure
c = ts as in hats
č = ch as in change
ć = ch as t in nature
xiii
dž = dzh as j in jazz
j = y as in yes
Bulgarian words are written according to one widely accepted scholarly

system with h’s; for example:
The sound sh as in shop is written sh

dzh as j in jazz, etc.
ŭ = short u (schwa) as in but
In Romani, four aspirated consonants are written as čh, ph, kh, and th
Most Turkish words used follow standard Turkish orthography, for ex-
ample, Laço Tayfa, where ç is ch.
Because I am dealing with two transliteration systems and several cul-
tural systems, the same word or concept may appear two ways; for ex-
ample čoček (Romani, Serbian, and Macedonian) and kyucheck
(Bulgarian); surla or zurla (Macedonian) and zurna (Bulgarian).
For previously published materials and for names already transliterated
with Latin letters, I have retained the previous forms. There will thus inev-
itably be some inconsistencies in the text.
xiv Notes on Transliteration

About the Companion Website
www.oup.com/us/romaniroutes
The author and Oxford have created a password-protected website to ac-

company this book. The website contains video examples, audio exam-
ples, photographs, and text supplements (including song texts and
historical information). Users may access the website with the username
Music1 and password Book5983.
All examples were used with duplication permission or are fair use.
When not indicated, the source is the author.
The website materials are explained below.
CHAPTER 1
Photographs
1.1 Working-class home, Šutka, Skopje, Macedonia, 1994

1.2 Poor home, Šutka, 1994
1.3 Arthur Ave. street, 2009
1.4 Arthur Ave. market, 2009
1.5 Arthur Ave. burek and pizza store, 2009
CHAPTER 2
Photographs
2.1 Zurla and tapan, Šutka, 1990

2.2 Bear trainer, Bulgaria, 1980
2.3 Monkey trainer, Bulgaria, 1980
2.4 Ferus Mustafov plays at a celebration for the birth of Muamet Čun’s
granddaughter, Šutka, 1990
xv
Video Examples
2.1 Zurla and tapan, men’s heavy crossing dance, wedding, Šutka, 1990
2.2 Zurna player Samir Kurtov, wedding, Gotse Delchev, Bulgaria, 2004
2.3 Ferus Mustafov plays at a party for the birth of a girl, Šutka, 1990
2.4 Ferus Mustafov, Macedonian TV show, 2/4 čoček, Belly Dances,
Maestro (YU Video 5046, 1985)
2.5 Džipsi Aver, Stara Zagora Romfest, 2005
2.6 Amza Tairov performing at a wedding, 2003
Audio Examples
2.1 Shalvar Kyuchek, Nezhniya Tsumani (The Delicate Tidal Wave),

Fekata, Filip Simeonov (Crystal Records, 2005)
2.2 E Sitakoro Oro, Ora i Čočeci, Euro Čoček 2002, Titanik (Voice of
Roma)
2.3 Bijav Geljum me Bašalav, Orkestŭr Knezha: Ko Džamije Me Bešav,
Iliya Marinov (Lazarov Records, 1990s) with text supplement
2.4 Me Phirava, Orkestŭr Sever: O Dzhumaya, Dancho Panov (Folkton,
1990s)
2.5 Mirveta, music Ilir Karimani, Dae (Mother), Safet Ibrahimi (Chrom
002, 1990s) with text supplement
2.6 Džansever, Astargja o Horo, 1990s recording, with text supplement
2.7 Džansever, Astargja o Horo, Gypsy Queens (Frankfurt, Germany,
Network 32.843, 1999)
2.8 Džansever, Astargja o Horo with Kristali at wedding in Bujanovac,
Serbia, 2002 with text supplement
2.9 Čita performs Germanija, Germany (live) on Čita (Milena Records
MR 200513-2, 2005), with text supplement
CHAPTER 3
Photographs
3.1 Romani flag

3.2 Esma Redžepova singing Dželem Dželem to American Kalderash
Roma, private party sponsored by Macedonian Roma, New York
City, 1996
Video Examples
3.1 Muharem Serbezovski, performing Ramajana at a private Romani

New Year’s Eve party, with Bilhan Mačev (clarinet), Trajče
xvi About the Companion Website

Džemaloski (keyboard), Ilhan Rahmanovski (guitar), Kujtim Ismaili
(bass), and Severdžan Azirov (drums), Yonkers,
New York, 1997
3.2 Esma Redžepova performing Dželem Dželem at Šutkafest, accompa-
nied by Stevo Teodosievski, 1993
3.3 Esma Redžepova singing Dželem Dželem (Serbian text) to American
Kalderash Roma, private party sponsored by Macedonian Roma,
New York, 1996
3.4 Esma Redžepova performing Dželem Dželem at the Macedonian
church in Garfield, New Jersey, 2004
Audio Examples
3.1 Celo Dive Mangasa (All Day We Beg), Ciganske Pemse Pevaju,
Muharem Čizmoli (Beograd Disk EBD 0207, 1970s), with text
supplement
3.2 Ramajama, Muharem Serbezovski with Medo Čun (RTB EP 11 191,
1970s), with text supplement
3.3 Stranci (Strangers), Holivud, Zvonko Demirovič with Južni Vetar,
1990s, with text supplement
3.4 Kemano Bašal (The violin plays), Bašal Kemano/ Violino Sviri,
Džansever, music Ferus Mustafov/Ahmed Rasimov; text Neždet
Mustafa; arrangement Ahmed Rasimov (Sokoj MP 21102, 1992),
with text supplement
Text Supplements (not attached to other media)
3.1 Dželem Dželem

3.2 Cosmopolitanism
CHAPTER 4
Photographs
4.1 Album cover, Amanet, Rome (sic) Songs, 1995

4.2 Musa Mosque and Islamic Center in Belmont, 2009
4.3 Wedding sheet displayed in tray, Šutka, 1990
4.4 Groom with gifts dances with the bride’s mother, Šutka, 1990
Video examples
4.1 Bride’s mother pinning gifts on the groom, blaga rakija, Šutka, 1990
4.2 Macedonian Romani woman in Melbourne, Australia, sends greet-
ings in Romani to her relatives in New York, 1998
About the Companion Website xvii

Audio Examples
4.1 Gurbeti, sung by Ferhan Ismail, Rome [sic] Songs with Amanet: Ramiz
Islami (clarinet), Erhan Umer (keyboard), Ilhan Rahmanovski (guitar),
Seido Salifoski (dumbek), New York, 1990s, with text supplement
4.2 Gurbetluko sung by Ramadan Bislim (Ramko), Najšužo Kilibari
(Ramko Produkcija, 1990s), with text supplement
4.3 To Phurano Bunari, Abas Muzafer on Alen; Adžiker te Bajrovav, n.d.,
Text Supplement (not attached to other media)
4.1 Education and Gender
CHAPTER 5
Photographs
5.1 Women making stuffed grape leaves, Šutka wedding, 1994

5.2 Women making breads, circumcision party, Šutka, 1990
5.3 Men preparing meat for a wedding, Šutka, 1994
5.4 Women and girls in fancy šalvari, dance line, Šutka wedding, 1990
5.5 Gifts on trays, Šutka wedding, 1990
5.6 Gifts on trays, Šutka wedding, 1994
5.7 Bride led out of her house for henna ceremony wearing tel, silver
streamers, Šutka, 1990
5.8 Bride wearing tel, silver streamers, Šutka, 1990
5.9 Bride wearing tel, silver streamers, Šutka, 1990
5.10 Bride’s female relatives dance at henna ceremony, Šutka, 1990
5.11 Preparing the sieve with greenery, a red scarf, and popcorn, Šutka,
1994
5.12 Fancy outfits of girls, Šutka wedding, 1990
5.13 Leading the dance line with a decorated sieve, Šutka wedding, 1990
5.17 Groom’s female relatives with a tray of henna with candle for the
second henna ceremony, Šutka, 1990
5.18 Bride with henna on her hands and feet, second henna ceremony,
Šutka, 1990
5.19 Bride’s male relative leads her to groom’s family, holding her head
down, Šutka, 1994
5.20 Bride gazing downwards, Šutka, 1994
5.21 Grooms’ mother leads the dance line at double wedding,
New York, 1995
xviii About the Companion Website

5.22 Muharem Serbezovski, private Romani New Year’s Eve party,
Bilhan Mačev (clarinet), Trajče Džemaloski (keyboard), Ilhan
Rahmanovski (guitar), Kujtim Ismaili (bass), and Severdžan Azirov
(drums), Yonkers, New York, 1997
5.23 Ramiz Islami, circumcision party, New York, 1988
5.24 Album cover, Ramiz Islami and Grupi Sazet E Ohrit, New York,
1995
5.25 Ismail Lumanovski performing with Ilhan Rahmanovski and Šaban
Dervisoski, Maia Meyhane, New York, 2006
5.26 Seido Salifoski, circumcision, New York, 1988
Video Examples
5.1 Henna ceremony: groom’s female relatives arriving with trays of

gifts, Šutka, 1990
5.2 Bride’s father plays zurla at her henna ceremony, Šutka, 1990
5.3 Groom’s female relative announces gifts for the bride, henna
ceremony, Šutka, 1990
5.4 Bride led out for henna application, Šutka, 1990
5.5 Applying henna to the bride’s hair, Šutka, 1990
5.6 Dancing in the street, henna ceremony, Šutka, 1990
5.7 Bride led out from the bath to greet groom’s female relatives; she
kisses their hands, Šutka, 1990
5.8 Young girl dances as her female relatives instruct her, Šutka wed-
ding, 1990
5.9 Bride’s female relatives lead the dance line with a decorated sieve,
Šutka, 1990
5.10 Line dance at igranka, with solo čoček dancers in the center, Šutka,
1990
5.11 Father of a gifted young female dancer beckons her to dance solo
čoček at the front of the line, Šutka wedding, 1990
5.12 Afet Dude, dance in 9/8 with solo dancing in the center, Šutka
wedding, 1990
5.13 Elder woman leads slow line dance, Šutka wedding, 1990
5.14 Elder woman leads crossing line dance, Šutka wedding,1990
5.15 Feta’s band on stage; young boys play makeshift drums under the
stage, Šutka wedding, 1990
5.16 Night henna ceremony for bride’s hands and feet, Šutka, 1990
5.17 Banquet sponsored by the bride’s relatives, Šutka, 1990
5.18 Muamet Čun, clarinet, solo dancer, Šutka wedding,1990
5.19 Young solo dancer, Šutka wedding, 1990
5.20 Bride dances sadly with her family before she is transferred to the
groom’s family, Šutka, 1990
5.21 Bride is led by her brother from her family to the groom’s family,
Šutka, 1990
5.22 Bride’s relatives arrive for the džumaluk, village near Šutka, 1990
About the Companion Website xix

5.23 Bride dances with her relatives at the džumaluk, village near
Šutka, 1990
5.24 Bride kisses her aunt, mother, and father as they give her money at
the džumaluk, village near Šutka, 1990
5.25 Bride leading dance line, henna party, New York, 2004
5.26 Bride led out for henna ceremony, New York, 2004, with Oj Borije
text supplement
5.27 Henna ceremony, New York, 2004
5.28 Bridal couple emerging from the mosque, New York, 2004
5.29 Dancing in front of the mosque, New York wedding, 2004, with
Zapevala Sojka Ptica text supplement
5.30 Bride led out of her house, takes temana, New York wedding, 1995
5.31 Groom’s parents bargain for the bride with bride’s parents, New
York wedding, 1995
5.32 Bride takes temana, New York, 1995
5.33 Bride’s incorporation rituals, New York, 1995
5.34 Grooms’ mother leads the first dance line, New York wedding, 1995
5.35 Grooms’ mother leads; bride’s mother leads a crossing dance, New
York wedding, 1995
5.36 Ramiz Islami (clarinet), his son Romeo (clarinet), Erhan Umer
(synthesizer and vocals) and his father Husamedin (drum set and
vocals), Trajče Džemaloski (synthesizer), Kujtim Ismaili (guitar),
New York wedding, 1995
5.37 Ramiz Islami’s band playing a 9/8 dance, New York wedding, 1995
5.38 Husamedin Umer playing tapan for line dance in 7/8, New York
wedding, 1995
5.39 Bride’s parents lead the dance line, New York, 2004
5.40 Ramiz’s band at blaga rakija, New York, 1995
5.41 Groom and bride receive gifts at blaga rakija, New York, 1995
5.42 Men lead line čoček at blaga rakija, New York, 1995
5.43 Bride’s mother lead line dance Beranče in 12/8, blaga rakija, New
York, 1995
5.44 Men lead slow 7/8 line dance, blaga rakija, New York, 1995
5.45 Groom leads slow 2/4 line dance, blaga rakija, New York, 1995
5.46 Slow 2/4 line dance speeds up, blaga rakija, New York, 1995
5.47 Muharem Serbezovski, private Romani New Year’s Eve party, with
Bilhan Mačev (clarinet), Trajče Džemaloski (keyboard), Ilhan
Rahmanovski (guitar), Kujtim Ismaili (bass), and Severdžan Azirov
(drums), Yonkers, New York, 1997
5.48 Šadan Sakip sings Geljan Dade accompanied by Bilhan Mačev;
dancers do Jeni Jol, Romani party, New York, 1996
5.49 Šadan Sakip sings, accompanied by Bilhan Mačev, Romani party,
New York, 1996
5.50 Solo čoček, Romani party, New York, 1996
5.51 Erhan Umer (keyboard and vocals), Yuri Yunakov (saxophone), Sal
Mamudoski (clarinet), Rumen Sali Shopov (drums), California
Herdeljezi festival, 2008
xx About the Companion Website

5.52 Erhan Umer (keyboard and vocals), Rumen Sali Shopov (tambura,
tapan and vocals), performing Red Bul, with Yuri Yunakov (saxo-
phone) and Seido Salifoski (dumbek), who then takes a solo with
Rumen, California Herdeljezi festival, 2008
5.53 Uska Umer sings with Amanet: Erhan Umer (keyboard and vocals),
Turan Umer (guitar), Sevim Umer (drums), and Ismail Lumanovski
(clarinet), Herdeljezi festival, California, 2007
5.54 Uska Umer sings Red Bul with Amanet: Erhan Umer (keyboard
and vocals), Turan Umer (guitar), Sevim Umer (drums), Muren
Ibraimov (dumbek), and Ismail Lumanovski (clarinet), Herdeljezi
festival, California, 2007
5.55 Džengis Rahmanovski (dumbek), Ilhan Rahmanovksi (guitar),
Seido Salifoski (dumbek), Šaban Dervisoski (accordion)
and Ismail Lumanovski (clarinet), Maia Meyhane, New York,
2006
5.56 Sal Mamudoski (clarinet), Yuri Yunakov (saxophone), and Alfred
Popaj (keyboard), Hungaria House, New York, 2007
5.57 Sal Mamudoski (clarinet), Yuri Yunakov (saxophone), and Alfred
Popaj (keyboard) performing Kjuperlika, Hungaria House, New
York, 2007
5.58 Menderes Azirov leading Čačak, Yuri Yunakov (saxophone),
wedding, New York, 1996
5.59 Nešo Ajvazi performs talava, accompanied by Seido Salifoski
(dumbek), Toni Jankuloski (keyboard), and Ismail Lumanovski
(clarinet), Balkan Music and Dance Workshop, Iroquois Springs,
New York, 2005
5.60 Nešo Ajvazi sings Red Bul, accompanied by Seido Salifoski
(dumbek), Toni Jankuloski (keyboard), and Ismail Lumanovski
(clarinet), Balkan Music and Dance Workshop, Iroquois Springs,
New York, 2005
5.61 Ismail Lumanovski (clarinet) performs Gaida, Seido Salifoski
(dumbek) and Toni Jankuloski (keyboard), Balkan Music and
Dance Workshop, Iroquois Springs, New York, 2005
5.62 Ismail Lumanovski (clarinet) performs an improvisatory čoček,
Seido Salifoski (dumbek) and Toni Jankuloski (keyboard),
Balkan Music and Dance Workshop, Iroquois Springs,
New York, 2005
5.63 Seido Salifoski (dumbek) performs an improvisatory solo,
Ismail Lumanovski (clarinet) and Toni Jankuloski (keyboard),
Balkan Music and Dance Workshop, Iroquois Springs, New
York, 2005
Audio Example
5.1 Muharem Serbezovski, Gilaven Romalen, Zaljubih Se, Ans. Crni

Dijamanti (Diskoton DTK 9430, 1987), with text supplement
About the Companion Website xxi

CHAPTER 6
Photographs
6.1 Solo dancer on top of a car, circumcision procession, Šutka, 1990

6.2 Solo dancer receives tips, Bulgaria, 1984
6.3 Frula ensemble, Tsigane, 1986
Video Examples
6.1 Solo čoček dancers (one getting tips), Orkestŭr Orfei, Sofia, 1994
6.2 Male and female solo čoček dancers in the middle of the line,
celebration for the birth of a girl, Šutka, 1990
6.3 Solo čoček dancer, recorded music, family gathering, Šutka, 1990
6.4 7/8 line dance, Yuri Yunakov (saxophone), Hasan Isakut (kanun),
Trajče Džemaloski (keyboard), Kujtim Ismaili (guitar), Severdžan
Azirov (drums), wedding, New York, 1996
6.5 Beranče (12/8) danced at celebration for the birth of a girl, Šutka, 1990
6.6 Crossing dance, celebration for the birth of a girl, Šutka, 1990
6.7 Opening, Šutkafest 1993: Esma, dumbek players, Bitolska Gaida and
solo čoček, Šutkafest 1993 (MRT Sokom 1994)
Audio example
6.1 Romani Čhaj Sijum, Džansever, Kemano Bašal/Violino Sviri, text

Džansever, music and arrangement Ferus Mustafov (Sokoj
21102,1992), with text supplement
6.1 History of Romani Dance
CHAPTER 7
Photographs
7.1 Zurna players, Pomak wedding, Avramovo, 1980

7.2 Tŭpan players, Pomak wedding, Avramovo, 1980
7.3 Dancing, zurna/tŭpan, field above Pirin Pee festival, 1985
7.4 Mancho Kamburov, Pirin Pee, 1985
7.5 Ivo Papazov playing saxophone and clarinet, 1980s
7.6 Ivo Papazov and Ali Garzhev (accordion), wedding procession, Iskra,
1980
xxii About the Companion Website

7.7 Musicians’ market, Sofia, 1984
7.8 Anzhelo Malikov playing cimbalom at a Hungarian restaurant, Sofia,
1984
7.9 View of Stambolovo festival, 1988, cover of journal Bŭlgarska
Muzika, 1989
Video Examples
7.1 Ivo Papazov removing pieces of his clarinet and playing saxophone
and clarinet simultaneously, Bulgarian National
Television, 1987
7.2 Nedyalka Keranova sings, Karadzha Duma Rusanke with Akademi-
kus, Zvezdite na Trakiya Folk 1994 (Payner 96001, 1995)
7.3 Ivo Papazov (clarinet) and Yuri Yunakov (saxophone) improvise a
pravo horo (2/4), Bulgarian National Television,
1987
7.4 Neshko Neshev (accordion) and Ivo Papazov (clarinet) improvise
a rŭchenitsa (7/16), Bulgarian National Television,
1987
7.5 Kyuchek in 2/4, Ivo Papazov (clarinet), Neshko Neshev (accordion),
Radi Kazakov (guitar), Vasil Denev (keyboard), Salif Ali (drums),
Matyo Dobrev (kaval), and Ahmed Yunakov (saxophone), wedding
banquet, Thrace, 1994
7.6 Filips kyuchek (9/8), Ivo Papazov (clarinet), Neshko Neshev (accor-
dion), Radi Kazakov (guitar), Vasil Denev (keyboard), Salif Ali
(drums), Matyo Dobrev (kaval), and Ahmed Yunakov (saxophone),
wedding banquet, Thrace, 1994
7.7 Improvisation by Ahmed Yunakov (saxophone), with Trakiya,
wedding banquet, Thrace, 1994
7.8 Improvisations by Ivo Papazov (clarinet), Neshko Neshev (accor-
dion), Yuri Yunakov (saxophone) in pravo horo (2/4), with Salif Ali
(drums) and Kalin Kirilov (guitar), Seattle, 2005
7.9 Filip Simeonov improvising rŭchenitsa, Orkestŭr Trŭstenik, Zvezdite
na Trakiya Folk 1994 (Payner 96001, 1995)
Audio Examples
7.1 Trakiya, Kŭrdzhaliisko Horo, wedding, Iskra, Bulgaria 1980

7.2 Trakiya, Kŭrdzhaliisko Horo, arranged by Dimitŭr Trifonov
(Balkanton BHA 11330), 1970s
7.1 Heritage, Nationalism, and Socialism

7.2 Stambolovo Festivals during Bulgarian Socialism
About the Companion Website xxiii

CHAPTER 8
Photographs
8.1 Publicity shot, Trakiya, Ivo Papazov (clarinet), Neshko Neshev

(accordion), Maria Karafezieva (vocals), Yuri Yunakov (saxophone),
Radi Kazakov (guitar), Salif Ali (drums), Ryko, 1990
8.2 Romani music concert, Sofia circus arena, 1990
Video Examples
8.1 Orkestŭr Kanari: Nie Bŭlgarite, Kanari 25 Godini, Horovodna

Broenitsa, Plovdiv amphitheater, opening (Payner, 2000)
8.2 Gloria sings Moma v Zandani with Orkestŭr Kanari: Nie Bŭlgarite,
Kanari 25 Godini (Payner, 2000)
CHAPTER 9
Video Examples
9.1 Toni Dacheva and Orkestŭr Kristal perform Chudesen Sŭn (Vsichko
e Lyubov, Payner, 1998), with text supplement
9.2 Toni Dacheva and Orkestŭr Kristal perform Svadba (Vsichko e
Lyubov, Payner, 1998), with text supplement
9.3 Amet, Belgiiski Vecheri/Dzhamovete (Payner DVD Collection 5,
2004), with text supplement
9.4 Emiliya, Zabravi! Hitove na Planeta Payner 3 (Payner, 2005), with
text supplement
9.5 Ballads MegaMix by DJ Jerry (Payner DVD Collection 5, 2004)
9.6 Antigeroi, Azis: The Best Video Clips (Sunny, 2004)
9.7 Nyama, Azis: The Best Video Clips (Sunny, 2004), with text
supplement
9.8 Azis and Sofi Marinova, Edin Zhivot Ne Stiga, Azis: The Best Video
Clips (Sunny, 2004), with text supplement
Audio Examples
9.1 Sladka Rabota, Toni Dacheva i Orkestŭr Kristal, Vsichko e Lyubov

(Payner, 1998), with text supplement
9.2 Bŭlgarina v Evropa, Magiya: Orkestŭr Kristal s Mariana Kalcheva
(Payner, 2001), with text supplement
9.3 Danyova Mama, Sofi Marinova: Studen Plamŭk (Ara 266, n.d.), with
text supplement
xxiv About the Companion Website

CHAPTER 10
Photographs
10.1 Esma Redžepova Ansambl Steve Teodosievskog RTB EP 12725,

early 1970s
10.2 Esma Redžepova, Jugoton EPY 3736, early 1970s
10.3 Esma Redžepova Ansambl Stevo Teodosievski, late 1970s
10.4 Esma Redžepova in Slovenian, Croatian, and Bosnian costumes,
late 1970s
10.5 Esma Redžepova in Romani, Indian, and Spanish costumes, late 1970s
10.6 Esma Redžepova in modern clothing, late 1970s
10.7 Esma Redžepova Ansambl Stevo Teodosievski publicity shot, late
1970s
Video Examples
10.1 Bašal Seljadin, Putevima Pesme Esma Ansambl Teodosievski (MP

31005) 1988, with text supplement
10.2 Hajri Mate (sic), Putevima Pesme Esma Ansambl Teodosievski (MP
31005) 1988, with text supplement
10.3 Čhaje Šukarije, Putevima Pesme Esma Ansambl Teodosievski (from
Zapej Makedonija 1968, MP 31004) 1979, with text supplement
10.4 Ciganski Čoček, Putevima Pesme Esma Ansambl Teodosievski
(from Zapej Makedonija 1968, MP 31004, 1979
10.5 Čhaje Šukarije, Esma Ansambl Teodosievski, 1965, Austrian Public
Broadcasting, rebroadcast on Macedonian National Television,
10.6 Romano Horo, Esma Ansambl Teodosievski, 1965, Austrian Public
Broadcasting, rebroadcast on Macedonian National Television,
10.7 Šadan Sakip, tarabuka, Ibro Demir “Kec”, vocals Lenorije Čhaj,
Putevima Pesma Esma Ansambl Teodosievski, MP 31004, 1979,
10.8 Čini (Magija), Toše Proeski and Esma Redžepova, 2002, with text
supplement
Audio Example
10.1 Bašal Seljadin, Anka Gieva and Dragica Mavrovska, Jugoton SY

1090, 1960s, with text supplement
10.1 Female Singers and Sexuality in Historical Perspective
About the Companion Website xxv

CHAPTER 11
Photographs
11.1 Yuri Yunakov (saxophone), Sunaj Saraçi (violin), Severdžan Azirov

(drums), Ilhan Rahmanovski (guitar), Kujtim Ismaili (guitar),
Trajče Džemaloski (keyboard), wedding, New York, 1997
11.2 Publicity photograph of Yuri Yunakov and Ivo Papazov, 2005,
courtesy Traditional Crossroads
Video Example
11.1 Yuri Yunakov (saxophone), Hasan Isakut (kanun), Trajče

Džemaloski (keyboard), Kujtim Ismaili (guitar), Severdžan Azirov
(drums), wedding, New York, 1996
CHAPTER 12
Photographs
12.1 Poster advertising the 1999 Gypsy Caravan from Bass Hall, Fort
Worth, Texas
12.2 Cover of CD Band of Gypsies: Taraf de Haidouks (Nonesuch 79641,
2001)
Video Example
12.1 Finale, Gypsy Caravan: A Celebration of Roma Music and Dance,

1999, filmed by Jasmine Delall
CHAPTER 13
Video Example
13.1 Godzila, Alyosha and Orkestŭr Kristali, Folk Kasino 3 (Payner,

2005), with text supplement
Audio Examples
13.1 Godzila, Jony Iliev and Fanfare Ciocarlia on Gili Garabdi Ancient
Secrets of Gypsy Brass (Asphalt Tango ATR 0605, 2005), with text
supplement
xxvi About the Companion Website

13.2 Godzila, Jony Iliev and Band, Ma Maren Ma (Asphalt Tango ATR
0102, 2002), with text supplement
13.3 Godzila, Alyosha, Džansever and Orkestŭr Kristali, wedding,
Bujanovac, Serbia, 2002, with text supplement
13.4 Lake Bul, Ajgara, wedding, Šutka, 2000, with text supplement
13.5 Red Bul, Džansever and Orkestŭr Kristali, wedding, Bujanovac,
Serbia, 2002
13.6 Red Bula, Mahala Rai Banda (CRAW 31 Crammed Discs 2004)
13.7 Red Bula, Balkan Beat Box vs. Mahala Rai Banda, Electric Gypsyl-
and 2 (CRAW 37 Crammed Discs 2008)
13.1 Herdeljezi song text
About the Companion Website xxvii

Romani Routes
PART I
I NTROD UC T I O N
1
ab
Balkan Roma
History, Politics, and Performance
I n the last fifteen years, as the fusion music terms Gypsy1 Punk and Balkan
Beats have proliferated and Gypsy motifs in clothing have become fash-
ionable, Gypsy music has become a staple at world music festivals and dance
clubs in the United States and Western Europe.2 Moreover, Gypsy style
seems to be simultaneously familiar and exotic. Many consumers profess to
know who and what Gypsies are, and what Gypsy music is. Some audience
members repeat stereotypical generalizations drawing on a plethora of
written, visual, and oral formulations from the last few centuries: Gypsies
are innately talented, artistic, embodying their wildness in their music; they
are consummate musical technicians; they magically sense the desires of
their patrons; but in the end, they can’t be trusted. Indeed, the fictional
Gypsy musician is a ubiquitous exotic fantasy figure in Western literature,
art, and oral tradition (Trumpener 1992; Van de Port 1998).
How does music mediate between these poles of fascination and rejec-
tion? Since the fall of socialism in 1989, thousands of Roma have emi-
grated westward because of deteriorating living conditions in Eastern
Europe; as a result, fear of “Gypsy hordes” and entrenched stereotypes of
thievery and trickery are being revived. In this heightened atmosphere of
xenophobia, Roma are paradoxically revered as musicians and reviled as
people. Underlying this phenomenon are the dichotomous emotions of
fear and admiration.
Two contrasting phenomena encapsulate the dichotomy of how most
North Americans and Europeans think about Roma: the warning about
Gypsy beggars in European cities, and the craze for Gypsy music in Amer-
ican and West European clubs. When Madonna performed a fusion of
East European Romani (Gypsy) music on her summer 2009 tour, she epit-
omized how celebrity patrons appropriate the music of marginal groups.
But when she was booed by 60,000 Romanian fans after she bemoaned
the plight of Gypsies, she further exposed the dichotomy that Roma, loved
for their music, are hated as people.
3
Romani Routes deliberately positions the recent popularity of Gypsy
music alongside the recent refugee flow of Eastern European Roma west-
ward, contrasting the discrimination faced by the majority of Roma with
the new commercial ventures of a small group of successful Romani mu-
sicians. I further contrast both the poverty-stricken majority and a few
rich musicians with the Balkan Romani community in New York City,
dating from the 1960s, where working-class refugees and immigrants toil
for a better life for their children while cultivating music as a vital com-
municative link. The placement of this book in Oxford’s American Music-
spheres series reflects its ethnographic grounding in the United States
while underlining the connections that American Balkan Roma have with
both Eastern Europe and world music markets.
The book combines a transnational approach with an ethnography of
community life in relation to music. My community-based fieldwork fo-
cuses on two diasporic Macedonian Romani communities: Belmont, lo-
cated in the Bronx, New York; and Šuto Orizari (known as Šutka), located
outside of Skopje, with comparative materials from several Bulgarian
Romani communities. In Šutka and Belmont (and in most Balkan Romani
communities), music and dance are emblematic of Romani identity and
embedded in numerous and elaborate ritual displays. Weddings are the
main focus of families, and marriage is a transnational public event, often
negotiated over long distances. Music is the vehicle for enacting social
relationships and enhancing status. It is also a commodity to sell to non-
Roma and other Roma.
Situating music in relation to individuals, communities, states, policy,
and world music markets, I confound the simplistic assumption that music
starts out “pure” or “authentic” in bounded communities and becomes
hybrid only when it moves to non-Romani markets. I show how innovation,
hybridity, and market forces all operate within communities, and between
communities in the diaspora, and how Romani musicians move among
these sites. I also examine how hybridity is recast in transnational sites and
commercial venues by managers and producers. Furthermore, I confound
the assumption that music starts out as noncommercial in Romani con-
texts and becomes commercial for the world music market. Balkan Romani
musicians have been professionals for hundreds of years, marketing their
product and tailoring their performances to Romani as well as non-Romani
patrons. The interplay among economic necessity, marginalization, iden-
tity formation, and symbolic display via music is the subject of this book.
A performance framework highlights the dramatic and processual quality
of music, of discourse about music, and of identity making. Following Bau-
man (1975), Hymes (1975), Abrahams (1977) and Goffman (1974) I define
performance as a marked mode of communication with specific generic
features signaled by various “frames.” Performers assume responsibility to
display communicative competence and to be judged by audiences (Bau-
man 1975:293).3 Kapchan underscores that performance “not only fabri-
cates meanings in highly condensed symbols . . . but comments on those
meanings, interpreting them for the larger community and often critiquing
4 Introduction
and subverting them as well” (1996b:480).4 This book, then, discusses the
multiple meanings of Romani music that are interpreted processually
through performance by various actors, including musicians, their varied
audiences, their communities, their marketers, and state and local officials.
Whereas most folklorists have used a performance framework to study
bounded events, some scholars have fruitfully expanded the concept to
embrace identity construction and gender management. Kirshenblatt-
Gimblett’s phrase “the political economy of showing” (1998) is useful in
reminding us that performances of identity are always embedded in hier-
archies of power and class. For Roma, displaying or hiding one’s Romani
identity is both historically informed and negotiated on the spot. Particu-
larly revealing of identity management are debates about musical authen-
ticity that take place among Romani musicians, non-Romani audiences,
managers and marketers, and scholars. Like Povinelli (2002), I investigate
the challenges Roma face in inhabiting various “spaces of recognition,”
such as community member, authentic musician, world music star, Euro-
pean minority, American minority, and activist.
Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity (1990, 1993) can help to
frame representational issues among Roma. Butler claims that people
dramatically perform conventions of maleness and femaleness according
to implicit heteronormativity. Gender parody, such as drag, may be trans-
gressive, but it also cites and may even reinscribe gender norms.5 Simi-
larly, when Roma play the part of Gypsy musicians, that is, deliver the
stereotype that is expected, are they reinscribing ethnic and racial norms
or subverting them?6 To begin to answer this question, we must ask what
choices Roma have and how they maneuver within them. Can and do they
perform outside the stereotype? If so, what are the results? Judith Okely’s
work is relevant here; in an aptly titled article, “Trading Stereotypes,” she
underlines that in dealing with non-Roma, identities are “exoticized, con-
cealed, degraded, or neutralized” (1996:52). We must also consider the
transformative power of performance to create new subjectivities. As Dia-
mond writes, “In performance . . . signifying (meaning-ful) acts may en-
able new subject positions and new perspectives to emerge, even as the
performative present contests the conventions and assumptions of op-
pressive cultural habits” (1996:6).7 For Roma, musical performance has
been one of the positively coded arenas in a long history of exclusion, and
thus it charts a potential site of transformation.
Romani Routes investigates the cultural politics and the political economy
of Balkan Romani music making embedded in changing historical inequal-
ities. Moving from American and Balkan communities to policy and states,
I examine how the socialist governments in Bulgaria and Macedonia posi-
tioned Romani culture in relation to categories of folklore, and how the
postsocialist state repositioned it in relation to political and economic
agendas.8 Since 1989, privatization has opened up new capitalist markets
that promote Gypsy music, but these commercial ventures are usually
managed by non-Roma; Romania is a notable exception. Romani music
has been appropriated by non-Roma into fusion genres such as Gypsy Punk
Balkan Roma 5
and into remixes by international DJs. Although a small number of Romani
musicians have been catapulted into fame, the vast majority of professional
Romani musicians struggle to maintain their trade amid economic crisis
and political instability.
In addition to entrepreneurs and fans, nation/states have also become
interested in displays of Romani culture in relation to political agendas. In
2007 Bulgaria and Romania became members of the European Union,
and Macedonia is in the initial stage of negotiations. Accession criteria
sometimes link human rights and economic development to the visibility
of Romani culture, for example, in music festivals. In Europe as well as in
the United States, Balkan Romani musicians respond to state policies at
the same time they are dependent on commercial forces and a volatile
market. How Romani musicians negotiate the relationship between poli-
tics and music in the context of neoliberal privatization is one aspect of
this book.
Despite the celebration of Romani culture, anti-Romani xenophobic sen-
timents are growing all over Europe. According to the European Roma
Rights Centre, Roma remain to date the most persecuted people of Europe
(www.errc.org); in fact, The Economist titled an article on European Roma
(2008) “Bottom of the Heap.” Their fundamental human rights are threat-
ened in many locations, and racist violence has increased since 1989,
reaching an alarming rate in 2009–10. Racism is no longer merely the pur-
view of extremists; rather, anti-immigrant and anti-Romani sentiment is
becoming more mainstream in Europe. For example, in 2008, the Italian
government fingerprinted Gypsies living in camps in an effort to crack
down on crime; in 2009 numerous violent incidents such as fire bombings
occurred in Hungary and the Czech Republic, and armed militias began
patrolling “against Gypsies”; and in 2010 the French government evicted
and deported Roma back to Romania and Bulgaria. All over Europe, na-
tionalist parties are on the rise (often under the guise of populism) and the
population is growing more polarized.9 In the United States, racism against
Roma is less pronounced but nevertheless exists in many realms; for ex-
ample, “Gypsy Crime” units are found in police departments, and discrim-
ination in housing and employment persists (Hancock 1987; Becerra 2006).
In addition to focusing on states and politics, Romani Routes also high-
lights several Romani individuals, communities, and genres of music from
Macedonia and Bulgaria to ethnographically document their diasporic
routes. Examining musicians in their Balkan communities and following
them to their North American neighborhoods and on their tours, I explore
how, through performance, they grapple with representational issues and
enact multiple positions in transnational contexts. A wider political and
economic context frames how musicians negotiate viable performances
for various audiences, including their own communities, other ethnic
communities of the Balkans, and non-Romani world music audiences in
the United States. I highlight the Balkans, specifically Macedonia and Bul-
garia, because they are home to populous European Romani communities
and because many of the most famous Romani musicians have come from
6 Introduction
this region.10 Furthermore, in the United States Macedonian and Bulgar-
ian Romani musicians have found a responsive market.
The issue of representation looms large in my analysis because margin-
alized groups have little control over how they are depicted in discourse
and image. Indeed, the stereotypic or fantasy Gypsy is a ubiquitous figure
in the Western imagination (Trumpener 1992; Hancock 1997).11 In addi-
tion, its current circulation is tied to economic, cultural, and political
agendas. If, as Stuart Hall claims, nothing exists outside of representation
(1996a, 1996b), we must ask, How do Roma themselves feel about stereo-
types, both positive and negative? Activists in the recent human rights
movement denounce them, but some Romani performers strategically
employ aspects of self-stereotypification to monopolize various musical
niches. Labels such as exotic, passionate, genetically talented, and soulful,
for example, are not only found in marketers’ advertisements but also
sometimes defended by Romani performers. The global political economy
of performance reveals that self-representations are multiple and contin-
gent, generated with an eye for maximum patronage (Herzfeld 1997;
Okely 1996; Lemon 2000; Szeman 2009).
At the same time that Romani performers sometimes strategically use
stereotypes, they also actively resist certain representations of themselves.
Referencing Ortner (1995, 1999), I reexamine the rubric “resistance,”
claiming it is always paired with accommodation and collaboration and
embedded in specific historical circumstances. My ethnographic data on
staged and backstage performances reveal that musicians’ choices are
delicately negotiated within limited options. For example, performers
may have no control over their marketing and images, but they may con-
trol their repertoire.
Like Stokes (1994, 2000, and 2007), I ask how music operates as a rep-
resentational medium and how Romani musics and Romani musicians
are represented. Eschewing the dichotomies pure vs. hybrid and essential
vs. constructed, I look at the interplay of grounded stories of attachment
with eclectic cultural openness. I explore Romani musicians as global
actors as well as local actors. I investigate Roma as family and community
members, as well as citizens of nations, transnational migrants, interna-
tional performers, and activists. Despite the constraints of exploitative
markets and oppressive ideologies, Romani musicians manage to assert
their agency by refashioning their artistry in novel ways. Yet this is not a
tale of celebration; rather, it is one of contingencies, of small victories
within a framework of marginalization.
Historical and Political Overview of

Balkan Roma
Linguistic evidence reveals that Roma are originally from India and that
they migrated out of the area sometime around 1100–1300 AD.12 According
to linguists, the Romani language is descended from Sanskrit and exists in
Balkan Roma 7
several dialects (Matras 2002, 2005; Hancock 2002).13 The specifics of the
Romani diaspora from India are debated by scholars; a widely accepted
view claims that Roma “descend from migrant castes of commercial
nomads or peripatetics . . . and that the name ‘rom’ is cognate with . . . the
Indian caste name ‘dom’” (Matras 2004:201). Linguist and activist Ian
Hancock, on the other hand, claims that Roma were Rajput warriors en-
listed to fight the incoming Muslim invasions from the West (Hancock
2002:9–14).
Roma were established in large numbers throughout Eastern Europe by
the fourteenth century and Western Europe by the fifteenth century, some
settling and others following a nomadic way of life.14 Roma have been in-
dispensable suppliers of diverse services to non-Roma, notably music, en-
tertainment, fortune telling, metal working, horse dealing, wood working,
sieve making, basket weaving, comb making, and seasonal agricultural
work. Many of these trades required nomadism or seasonal travel, and
sometimes occupations were combined out of economic necessity. Initial
curiosity about Roma by European peoples and rulers quickly gave way to
hatred and discrimination, a legacy that has continued to today. In the
southern Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, Roma were
slaves from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. As bonded serfs
owned by noblemen, monasteries, and the state, they were sold, bartered,
and flogged; even their marriages were strictly regulated. Romani slaves
were an important labor and artisan source, providing skills in gold
washing, bear training, wood carving, blacksmithing, and music. Slavery
was abolished in 1864, and as a result many Roma migrated out of south-
ern Romania.
Despite their small numbers, Roma inspired fear and mistrust and were
expelled from virtually every Western European territory. Bounties were
paid for their capture, dead or alive, and repressive measures included
confiscation of property and children, forced labor, prison sentences,
whipping, branding, and other forms of physical mutilation. Assimilation
was attempted in the eighteenth century in the Austro-Hungarian Empire
during the reign of Maria Theresa and her son by forcibly removing chil-
dren from their parents and outlawing nomadism; traditional occupa-
tions; and Romani language, music, and dress. Assimilationist legislation
was also enacted in Spain after 1499 (Hancock 1987 and 2002; Fraser
1992; Kenrick and Puxon 1972; Petrova 2003).
In the Balkans, the policy of the Ottoman Empire toward Roma was, in
general, more lenient than in Western Europe, at least from the sixteenth
to the eighteenth centuries (Marushiakova and Popov 2001). Since the
administration of the Ottoman Empire was conducted though the millet
system (based on religious groupings) and Ottoman urban society was
multicultural, Roma were not legally marginalized in terms of ethnicity.
Many Balkan Roma converted to Islam in the sixteenth to eighteenth cen-
turies to pay lower taxes, and to move up the Ottoman ranks. The Muslim
religion and Turkish culture and language were the marks of civilization,
and conversion often meant merely a change in name.15
8 Introduction
Muslim Balkan Roma display many similarities to other Muslims of the
region in terms of culture, ritual, and music. This shared history mitigates
against the tendency in both scholarly and lay writings to see Roma as
exceptional or unique. True, Roma have their particular historical trajec-
tory of marginalization; but a healthy dose of comparison to other Balkan
peoples, especially Balkan Muslims, shows many commonalities in family
life, gender roles, ritual, custom, and music. In fact, Balkan Roma often
share more cultural patterns with their Balkan neighbors than with other
Romani groups, such as American Kalderash. Throughout this book, I
aim de-exoticize Roma by suggesting comparisons that are historically
and ethnographically emplaced.
In the Balkans today, approximately half of the Roma are Muslim and
half are Eastern Orthodox, with a small percentage of Catholics and a new
rising percentage of Pentecostals.16 In practice, the religion of Muslim Bal-
kan Roma is quite syncretic, incorporating elements of paganism and
Eastern Orthodoxy. Approximately half of Balkan Roma have lost the
Romani language; in the southern Balkans many of those who have done
so speak Turkish as their first language. Multilingualism is the norm
among Balkan Roma, with the older generation sometimes speaking four
or five languages.17
Petrova suggests that negative stereotypes of Roma blossomed in
fifteenth-century Western Europe and spread eastward (2003:128).
Roma were viewed as intruders probably because of their dark skin,
non-European physical features, foreign customs, and association with
both magic and invading Turks. She asserts the rising tide of the Protes-
tant work ethic condemned vagrancy, idleness, and lenience as well as
alms for wanderers and beggars (125). Perhaps most important was the
late arrival of Roma into Europe, plus their lack of roots in terms of land
and property: “Ultimately the main difference that set the Roma apart
was that they were the only ethnically distinct nomadic communities in
a civilization that had been non-nomadic for centuries” (126).
The positive yet dangerous coding of Romani otherness hinges on their
romanticization, on the part of non-Roma, as free souls (outside the rules
and boundaries of European society); their association with the arts, espe-
cially music and the occult; and their proximity to nature and sexuality.
Using Said’s concept, we can claim that Roma are “orientalized” and exot-
icized (1978).18 Trumpener emphasizes the association of Roma with an
ahistoric, timeless nostalgia: “Nomadic and illiterate, they wander down
an endless road, without a social contract or country to bind them, car-
rying their home with them, crossing borders at will” (1992:853). Simulta-
neously they are reviled as unreformable and untrustworthy, liars, and
rejected from civilization. This contrast expresses the “ideology of Gypsy
alterity—feared as deviance, idealized as autonomy” (854). Roma, then,
serve as Europe’s quintessential others.
The most tragic period of Romani history was perhaps World War II.
With the Nazi rise to power, Roma faced an extermination campaign that
has only recently been documented. According to various authors, from
Balkan Roma 9
500,000 to 1.5 million Roma were murdered, representing between one-
fourth and one-fifth of their total population (Lewy 2002; Hancock 2002;
Kenrick and Puxon 1972). After the war, Roma received neither compen-
sation nor recognition as victims, and only recently have several claims to
property and assets been filed.
The post–World War II communist regimes in Eastern Europe officially
downplayed ethnicity but nevertheless defined Roma as a social problem.
Targeted for integration into the planned economy, Roma were sometimes
forced to give up their traditional occupations, and assigned to the lowest-
skilled and lowest-paid industrial and agricultural state jobs (e.g., street
cleaners). Nomadic Roma were forcibly settled; settled Roma were some-
times forcibly moved; and sometimes aspects of their culture, such as
music, were outlawed. Specific policies varied by country; for example,
forced sterilization was common in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s. Cheap
housing was nominally provided, but segregated neighborhoods were
commonplace. On the positive side, during socialism Romani school at-
tendance grew (despite inferior and segregated schools), violence was
rare, and Roma held steady employment and received the benefits of the
paternalistic state (Verdery 1996; Silverman 1988).
The situation of Bulgarian Roma during socialism, such as forced
changing of Muslim names to Slavic names and prohibitions against
Romani and Turkish musical genres, is discussed in Chapter 7. In contrast
to Bulgaria, Tito’s brand of Yugoslav socialism emphasized (at least theo-
retically) bratstvo i jedinstvo (brotherhood and unity; Bosnian-Croatian-
Serbian), a policy that promoted acceptance of different ethnicities.
However, there was an official hierarchy: narodi (nations), nardonosti (na-
tionalities), and etničeski grupi (ethnic groups, where Roma fell).19 Cul-
ture, especially music, was an area where the groups could acceptably
display their distinctiveness (Maners 2006). Hundreds of soccer clubs,
amateur music groups, well-funded professional ensembles, and a well-
coordinated network of festivals all served as a public manifestation for
Yugoslav multiculturalism. Romani music thus was somewhat visible in
official contexts, but this did not diminish engrained discrimination in
employment, housing, health care, and education.
As in Bulgaria, Roma in Yugoslavia for the most part were ignored in
scholarly folklore research because the discipline focused on rural peas-
ants who were assumed to constitute the “pure” national culture. Roma
were seen as “others” and excluded from the rubric “folk” (see Chapter 7
for a discussion of heritage); instead, they appeared as exotic, erotic, wild
figures in films, literature, and children’s stories (Pettan 2001). When
Roma were scrutinized by ethnographers, they were found to be disor-
derly primitives, existing on the borders of civilization and lacking a uni-
fied culture (Van de Port 1998:137–159). In fact, the Serbian anthropologist
Bajraktarović predicted they would disappear: they “do not have any pros-
pects for remaining a separate . . . element of our society” (1970:747). In
Macedonia, there is one Romani folklorist, Trajko Petrovski;20 however, all
over the Balkans young Romani scholars are currently emerging.
10 Introduction
In the postsocialist period, harassment and violence toward the Roma
of Eastern Europe have increased, along with marginalization and pov-
erty. They are the largest minority in Europe and have the lowest standard
of living in every country, with unemployment reaching 80 percent in
some regions. Census statistics are unreliable because states are reluctant
to report true numbers, but activists may by contrast overestimate
numbers; in addition, some Roma report themselves as other ethnic
groups to avoid the stigma of being Gypsy. Scholars agree there are about
ten to twelve million European Roma, with the largest numbers of Roma
in Spain, Bulgaria, and Romania (Petrova 2003; Ringold, Orenstein, and
Wilkins 2004; Barany 2002).
Today East European Roma face inferior and segregated housing and
education, including tracking of children into special schools for the dis-
abled. Poor health conditions, specifically higher infant mortality and
morbidity, shorter life expectancy, and higher frequency of chronic dis-
eases, all plague Roma. Discrimination is widespread in employment and
the legal system, and even educated people routinely express disdain for
Gypsies. Hate speech and racial profiling are common in the media. Per-
haps most troubling are the hundreds of incidents of physical violence
against Roma perpetrated by ordinary citizens and also by the police.21
In response to historic discrimination and recent abuses, a Romani
human rights movement has mobilized in the last twenty years via a net-
work of activists and NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) such as the
European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC), the European Roma Information
Office (ERIO), the International Romani Union, the Roma National Con-
gress, the European Roma and Travellers Forum, and European bodies
such as the European Union, the Council of Europe, and the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe (Klimova-Alexander 2005; Acton
and Klimova 2001; Cahn 2001a; Petrova 2003; Barany 2002; Guy 2001;
Vermeersch 2006). This movement has drawn much public attention and
funding to the plight of Roma, but material conditions have hardly
improved in some areas. The “Decade of Roma Inclusion,” inaugurated in
2005 by the Open Society Institute and the World Bank and currently
endorsed by twelve European governments, aims to ensure that Roma
have equal access to education, housing, employment, and health care.22
Macedonian Roma, numbering 130,000–200,000,23 are currently repre-
sented by four Romani political parties and more than thirty active
NGOs.24 Although the prime minister claimed in 2003 that “I am proud of
being representative of the country in which the Roma have perhaps the
highest level of rights compared to all the other European countries”
(Plaut and Memedova 2005:15), many disagree. For example, the Euro-
pean Romani Rights Centre titled its 1998 human rights report on Mace-
donian Roma “A Pleasant Fiction.” On the one hand, Roma are now a
“nationality,” the 1991 constitution mentions full equality, the Romani
language is spoken by 80 percent of Macedonian Roma, and there are
several Romani-language radio programs and two television stations. On
the other hand, there is widespread police brutality and discrimination in
Balkan Roma 11
hiring, education, service in public establishments, and the legal system;
moreover, surveys show 59–80 percent of non-Roma have negative feel-
ings toward Roma (Kanev 1996: 24; Plaut and Memedova 2005:16).
The municipality of Šuto Orizari (Šutka), outside Skopje, is home to
more than 40,000 Romani inhabitants; as the largest population concen-
tration of Macedonian Roma, it has become a cultural center for music,
dance, and politics (Silverman 1995b). Šutka Roma occupy every class
sector, from poverty-stricken to rich, but most inhabitants are poor (see
photographs 1.1 and 1.2, and see Chapter 4). Šutka was settled in 1963
when the government offered Roma housing after a devastating earth-
quake; it has grown steadily with migrants from other parts of Yugoslavia,
and more recently with several thousand Kosovo Romani refugees from
the 1990s Yugoslav wars.
Bulgarian Roma, numbering approximately 800,000 or 10 percent of
the total population, do not have their own political parties because
ethnic-based parties are legally prohibited.25 Thus lobbying is done via
NGOs; in Sofia alone there were more than 150 Romani NGOs in 2004
(Mihaylova 2005:48). Marushiakova and Popov observe that the NGO
“Gypsy industry” often perpetuates itself rather than seeking solutions
to problems (2005). Moreover, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, a strong
NGO sector is often an excuse for the state to do less. In Bulgaria, for
example, funding and infrastructure for desegregation of schools comes
primarily from NGOs.
In 1999 the Bulgarian government signed the Framework Program for
Equal Integration of the Roma in Bulgarian Society, but very little has
been done since then (Rechel 2008). In fact the framework expired in
2009, and the National Council for Cooperation on Ethnic and Demo-
graphic Issues (NCCEDI) has not prepared a new document. Attention to
the human rights of Roma by the multiple coalition governments that
have ruled Bulgaria since 1989 was clearly motivated by the prospect of
joining the European Union in 2007; for accession, progress needed to be
demonstrated.26 Since accession, motivation has decreased. In spite of an
“Anti-Discrimination Act,” there are numerous cases of discrimination in
local labor bureaus, social welfare offices, and health and education insti-
tutions (Mihaylova 2005:65), and some are being contested in the courts.
The 2008 U.S. State Department report on human rights in Bulgaria
claimed that unemployment was 65 percent among Roma, reaching 80
percent in some regions.27 According to the World Bank, 13 percent of
Roma completed secondary education, in comparison to 90 percent of
ethnic Bulgarians.28 In November 2009, the EU human rights commis-
sioner noted that the situation of the Roma community is of particular
concern; after viewing a settlement in Sofia, he stated, “No one should live
in these conditions in today’s Europe.”29
In 2005, Ataka (Attack), an extreme nationalist party that openly pros-
elytizes against Roma, won more than 8 percent representation in Par-
liament; in 2006 it won 26 percent of the presidential vote. Ataka’s leaders
have characterized Roma as criminals and as a threat to Bulgarians
12 Introduction
because of their high birth rate; one of their slogans is “No to Gypsifica-
tion, No to Turkification” (Kanev 2005; Cohen 2005).30 Although Ataka
has recently lost popularity, some of its ideas have been adopted by more
mainstream parties (Ciobanu 2008; Ghodsee 2008). It has also gained
allies among Western European xenophobic parties in the European
Parliament.
As a result of these inequalities of postsocialism, Romani refugees and
emigrants can now be found in every Western European nation and in the
United States and Canada. A profound refugee crisis has occurred in
Kosovo, from which the vast majority of the Roma have fled as a result of
the Serbian-Albanian conflict.31 Because of inferior living conditions,
many Balkan Roma would like to emigrate to the west, but immigration
has become extremely difficult. Western European nations are deporting
Roma, nationalist parties are on the rise, and xenophobia is growing. With
their racial taint, their low class stigma, and their baggage of historic ste-
reotypes, East European Roma are among the least desirable immigrants;
Muslim Roma are even more suspect.32
To recap the complexity of Romani migration: I emphasize that Europe
rather than India has been home to Roma since the fifteenth century and
that multiple rediasporizations within and from Europe have occurred.
For example, Roma migrated out of southern Romania after slavery was
abolished, Eastern European Roma migrated to Western Europe after the
fall of Communism, and Roma have migrated from Europe to North
America since colonial times.
Migration to the United States
The first trickle of Romani travel to the United States occurred with the
colonists, followed by waves from England in the 1850s. The largest
numbers came during the second wave of immigration, from 1880 to
World War I, along with eastern and southern Europeans (Lockwood and
Salo 1994). The current Kalderash Romani population in the United
States, numbering close to one million, can be traced to this last period of
immigration. The United States hosts Roma from every group and sub-
group, but they do not coalesce as a viable community. The New York
Macedonian Romani community that is the subject of this book dates
from the 1960s; these Roma interact with neither Kalderash nor other
Romani groups, although occasionally intermarriage with other Balkan
Roma takes place.
The center of Macedonian Romani life in the United States is located in
the New York City borough of the Bronx, in the Belmont neighborhood.
Belmont is a historic Italian neighborhood known as the “Little Italy of
the Bronx.” Italian groceries, restaurants, and bakeries, most of them
family-owned, still line the main shopping street, Arthur Avenue, but in
the past forty years Hispanics, Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, Montene-
grin Muslims, south Serbian Muslims (from Sandžak), and Balkan Roma
Balkan Roma 13
have moved into the area while the Italian population has declined.33
Now Balkan (mostly Albanian) restaurants, groceries, photography stu-
dios, and pizza/burek (a doughy pie with feta cheese, spinach, or meat)
parlors are interspersed with older Italian businesses (see photographs
1.3, 1,4, and 1.5).
Macedonian Roma began moving to New York City in the late 1960s,34
specifically from the city of Prilep, but also from Bitola and Skopje. At
the time, the Yugoslav government supported sending “guest workers”
to Western Europe (especially Germany),35 the United States, and Aus-
tralia because of hard currency remittances. Emigrants saw working
abroad as a way to make good money, move up the social scale, and help
out relatives at home. After the guest worker policy ended, sponsorship
of relatives and the need for spouses continued. The wars in Yugoslavia
1991–1995 brought economic crisis to the entire region, causing another
wave of emigration. Although Macedonia was peaceful during the war
and declared independence in 1991, its economy was in ruins during the
entire decade. Push factors (out of Yugoslavia) in the 1960s were mostly
economic, but now they include lack of hope, absence of a political
future, and fear of police brutality and other forms of discrimination.
Pull factors (to the United States) include the need for spouses, better
employment possibilities, and the upwardly mobile models that migrant
relatives have set.
“Chain” immigration, that is, one family sponsoring another, is the
common pattern. This was the case until the mid-1990s, when American
laws became more restrictive. Now spouses are the most numerous
migrants. Women very rarely migrate without a relative (e.g. husband,
father, son, brother) sponsoring them. Once in the United States, Roma
face a new set of challenges. The majority are working-class, but some
families have reached the middle class. First-generation Roma had poor
English skills, and they lacked the legal connections needed to apply for
documents. Many arrived with tourist visas, tried to regularize their
status, and were sometimes exploited by lawyers. Many Roma simply
overstayed their visas and became irregular migrants.
Some Macedonian Roma have applied for refugee status since 1991,
but they have usually been unsuccessful in part because the persecution
against Roma is underdocumented and unrelated to conflicts between
nation-states. Refugee status has historically been easier for claimants
fleeing wars; thus during the Yugoslav wars Bosnian Roma could more
easily became refugees. In addition to Bosnian Roma, Bulgarian Roma
are more often granted refugee status than Macedonian Roma because
there are more numerous reports of human rights abuses against them.
Recently it has become harder to receive asylum. Immigration judges
have claimed that some applicants are merely posing as Roma; ironically,
Roma now have to prove in court that they are Roma, while most of their
lives they have had to pass as non-Roma to avoid discrimination.
Virtually no country wants Gypsy refugees, and many Roma remain un-
documented or mired in legal battles for years. According to Xenos, “For the
14 Introduction
Gypsies, assimilation into the world of nations appears to be impossible—
they are perpetual refugees” (1996:240). The situation in Western Europe is
more highly charged than in America because the numbers of Roma are
larger and xenophobic parties advocate anti-immigrant policies (Castle-
Kanerova 2001: Bilefsky and Fisher 2006). Although asylum in Western
Europe was more liberally granted in the early 1990s, a decade later the
trend reversed and Roma are being deported while social welfare is being
dismantled. In the Macedonian Romani community in the United States,
few distinguish between refugees and migrants: “displacement is a process
that is not limited to those who meet the legal criteria for refugee status”
(Lubkemann 2002:1). It is clear that a vibrant community life (see Chapters
4 and 5) helps diasporic Macedonian Roma feel at home in New York.
Issues of Representation in Fieldwork

and Writing
Although this book distills many years of fieldwork, it is still only a “par-
tial truth” in many senses (Clifford and Marcus 1986). My interpretation
is not only one among many but also situated in specific places at certain
times. My access to resources, my non-Romani “outsider” status, my
gender, and my training have certainly affected my perceptions. Much of
the postmodern discussion of ethnography rests on acknowledgment of
multiple views; my account, then, has become the occasion for my
Romani collaborators to discuss their interpretations of my interpreta-
tions. Heeding Lassiter’s call for collaborative ethnography (2005) and
specifically employing Elaine Lawless’s concept of “reciprocal ethnogra-
phy” (1992), I asked a number of Romani activists, musicians, numerous
members of the New York Macedonian Romani community, and several
non-Romani managers of Romani bands to comment on portions of the
book; their reactions and our discussions have been incorporated.
Romani scholar and University of Texas Professor Ian Hancock reminds
us that until recently all representations of Roma were constructed by
non-Roma, and Roma exercised no control over these descriptions and
images, whether scientific, artistic, or literary (1997:39–40). This is fi-
nally changing, and the ethnographer is either obsolete or must deli-
cately negotiate her place.
Studying a minority during the socialist and postsocialist periods high-
lights many issues of ethics, the role of the fieldworker, the power differ-
ential between fieldworker and informants, and the give-and-take in
relationships.36 As I accepted hospitality and knowledge from Roma, I
continually asked myself, What is my relationship to these people? What
am I doing for those who so generously taught me? How can I best dis-
cuss my own positionality in this research? As the Romani human rights
movement emerged in the 1990s, I struggled to combine activism and
scholarship and was alternately accused of neglecting one for the other.
Whereas one Romani activist said I should concentrate on documenting
Balkan Roma 15
human rights abuses and forget about analyzing music, some of my col-
leagues in academia said I was spending too much time on activism
(which some regarded as “service,” not “scholarship”). Some Roma said I
should forgo a music focus because that would promote the stereotypical
connection of Roma with music; some said I should focus on middle-class
educated Roma to counteract the ubiquitous image of poor, begging
Gypsies.
I have frequently interrogated myself as to the role of a non-Romani
scholar. What right do I have to speak about a group that is trying to define
its own voice?37 While one activist questioned my right and ability to speak
about Roma, other activists defended my commitment to Roma. I believe
I have a role among non-Roma in education and advocacy, but Roma have
their own organizing to do among themselves; thus I learned to withdraw
when a context required my exclusion. Among Roma, non-Roma such as
myself can facilitate, mediate, and provide resources for various cultural,
economic, and political projects while eschewing paternalistic and colo-
nizing stances (Smith 1999). Along these lines, I have been active with the
nongovernmental organization Voice of Roma (www.voiceofroma.com).
As Kamala Visweswaran writes, “If we have learned anything about
anthropology’s encounter with colonialism, the question is not really
whether anthropologists can represent people better, but whether we can
be accountable to people’s struggles for self-representation and self-deter-
minism” (1988:39). Because Roma are currently engaged in precisely the
struggle for self-determinism, my research turned to the use of music as
symbolic currency in self-presentation.
My Romani research started in the United States in 1975 when I became
a volunteer teacher in a Romani alternative school in Philadelphia. My
dissertation research (1975–1979) with the largest Romani groups in the
United States, Kalderash and Machwaya, dealt with ethnic identity, gen-
der, and pollution and taboo systems (Silverman 1981, 1982, 1988; also
see Sutherland 1975; Gropper 1975). Having migrated to the United States
from various parts of Eastern Europe about a hundred years ago, many
Kalderash know very little about other Romani groups in Europe and the
United States. Among the few tangible things I was able to give to Ameri-
can Kalderash Roma were historical information and cassette tapes of
East European Romani music. After immersing myself in American Kal-
derash culture and gaining some fluency in their Vlach dialects of the
Romani language, I was anxious to pursue Romani fieldwork in Bulgaria,
a country I had visited regularly since 1972.38
I first worked with Roma in Bulgaria in the 1980s, in the context of
research on wedding music, a fusion genre that was prohibited by the
government (see Chapter 7). I met the stars of the wedding music, in-
cluding Ivo Papazov, Yuri Yunakov, Neshko Neshev, Matyo Dobrev, and
Salif Ali, and many others; as a fan, I tagged along their performance trail.
Working with Roma in socialist Bulgaria was challenging because by 1984
they did not officially exist.39 Despite government policy, I managed to
circumvent prohibitions and spend considerable time in several Romani
16 Introduction
settlements. I documented ritual events such as weddings, baptisms, sol-
dier send-off celebrations, and house warmings; I recorded, photographed,
and videotaped where possible, given the constraints of socialism. Fam-
ilies viewed videotapes with me and offered valuable interpretations.
Often their interpretations centered around the “Romani way of doing
things,” in light of their being both Bulgarian and Romani. Discussions
frequently turned to the role of the state in their lives.
The idea of my working with Roma Macedonia was suggested by Aiše,40
a Muslim Macedonian Romani woman whom I met in New York in 1988
when she was visiting her brother Osman (see Chapters 4 and 5). They
lived in Belmont, located close to the neighborhood where I was born and
my parents lived. From the beginning of my research, then, I approached
Macedonian Roma from at least two locations. Aiše’s family arranged my
living arrangements in Šuto Orizari, the largest neighborhood of Roma in
Skopje, Macedonia, where I resided for six months in 1990 and one month
in 1994. I have continued to work with Roma in Macedonia and New York
until the present, with long stays in New York and short trips to Macedo-
nia as well as to Macedonian Romani communities in Australia and
Toronto.
My Bulgarian and Macedonian Romani connections merged in the
Bronx in 1994 when the Bulgarian wedding music star Yuri Yunakov em-
igrated to the United States and took up residence in the Macedonian
Romani community. Yuri formed a new band, asked me to join, and reluc-
tantly I accepted. I had sung Balkan music for more than twenty years and
Romani music for about five years, but mostly with Americans. In addi-
tion to bestowing on me a great honor and challenge, performing with the
Yuri Yunakov Ensemble gave me both backstage and front-stage perspec-
tives. In 1999 I toured for two months with “The Gypsy Caravan: A Festi-
val of Roma Music and Dance” as a performer and as the “education
coordinator,” delivering lectures and leading panel discussions for the
general public. Dozens of concerts with the Yunakov Ensemble, including
tours in 2003 and 2005 with Ivo Papazov, Neshko Neshev, and Salif Ali,
have yielded invaluable information and professional experience. Re-
cording with these artists on several CDs, writing liner notes for their
albums, and arranging tours for them has given me a chance to help their
music reach wider audiences and also to study the roles of audiences,
marketers, managers, and producers.
Finally, my most recent ethnographic tool is YouTube, through which I
have explored the transnational flow of music and dance. Romani mate-
rials that are posted on YouTube (by both Roma and non-Roma) include
not only commercial videos and television programs from the Balkans but
also excerpts of family and community celebrations from the Balkans and
the Western European and American diasporas. I have followed the com-
mentaries posted on YouTube and interviewed several prolific posters via
the internet. Romani Routes, then, takes account of my non-Romani iden-
tity, my transnational fieldwork, and my multiple roles of ethnographer,
performer, and educational activist.
Balkan Roma 17
Chapter Overview
Romani Routes is divided into four parts to reflect the transnational un-
derpinning of the materials and the dynamic movement of people and
music between the Balkans and America. I aim to underline the dialogue
between homes and migration, between states and capitalist markets,
and between communities and individuals. Please see the website for in-
formation on video examples, audio examples, and photographs as well
as supplementary textual material including song texts and historical in-
formation (a guide is found in the front of the book).
Part I, “Introduction,” discusses the basic analytical questions and the
theoretical framework, plus general background information on Romani
musical genres and styles.
Chapter 1, “Balkan Roma: History, Politics, and Performance,” pre-
sents the issues raised in the book and a historical overview of Roma and
their diasporic migration to the Balkans, as well as their rediasporization
to North America. I trace the legacy of discrimination and discuss the
status of Roma during socialism and postsocialism, highlighting Mace-
donia and Bulgaria. I chronicle the challenges of being a non-Romani
researcher and introduce the issue of representation: how have Roma
been depicted, and by whom?
Chapter 2, “Musical Styles and Genres,” explores music as a historic
Romani profession and offers insight into patron-client relationships and
stylistic change. I look at Balkan Romani music in terms of rhythm,
melody, genre, style, text, improvisation, and variation, highlighting the
emergence of new and revived styles. Balkan Roma have been extremely
influential in many of the fusions of the last forty years, and the cross-
pollination of regional styles fosters innovation. I also profile several
important Romani artists.
Chapter 3, “Dilemmas of Diaspora, Hybridity, and Identity,” theoreti-
cally explores the interdisciplinary scholarship on diaspora, transnation-
alism, hybridity, and cosmopolitanism and asks how Roma interrogate
these concepts. How have music and essentialism been used in multicul-
tural discourse and in identity politics? As a motley group of disparate
peoples lacking unity in territory, language, and religion, how have Roma
united around their history of exclusion to build a pan-Romani ethnic
movement? I explore activists’ attempts to construct nationalist symbols
of Romani culture, such as the Indian homeland, the flag, the literary
language, and the anthem.
Part II, “Music in Diasporic Homes,” ethnographically profiles Roma in
their multiple homes in the Balkans and the United States and explores
how and why they travel among diasporic homes. I illustrate the signifi-
cance of music and dance by analyzing the complex relationship between
social relations and family and community rituals. I explore how the New
York Macedonian community cements its ties to Macedonia and other
diasporic locations through marriage, language, and ritual, all enacted
performatively via cultural markers such as music and dance.
18 Introduction
Chapter 4, “Transnational Families,” traces the history of the Macedo-
nian Romani community in New York via kin networks, occupational tra-
jectories, migration of brides and grooms, and the movement of musicians
and media products. I look at the multiple ways Roma in the diaspora
constitute their identities and their gendered roles, and how changes are
occurring, especially for educated youths.
Chapter 5, “Transnational Celebrations,” focuses on family celebrations
that are the symbolic focus and the glue binding the Romani community
together. I analyze how celebrations display and interpret values through
music and dance and also reveal conflict. I compare weddings in Macedo-
nia with weddings in New York, analyzing their structure, rituals, music,
dance, costume, and economic and social implications. I profile several
key New York musicians and describe their repertoires and training.
Chapter 6, “Transnational Dance,” compares and discusses Romani
dance in numerous contexts, emphasizing its stylistic, social, and power
dimensions in relation to the marginality of Roma in wider society and the
ambivalent position of women. I historically trace the dance genre čoček
from Ottoman times until the present. I explore how women negotiate
dance performances within Romani diasporic communities and how pro-
fessional dance becomes symbolic capital to negotiate in the commercial
marketplace. I compare Gypsy dance performances in several ensembles
to show the range of representational styles and the use of stereotypes.
Part III, “Music, States, and Markets,” examines the legacy of socialism
in Balkan Romani music and traces economic, social, artistic, and polit-
ical changes through the postsocialist period. Examining the exclusionary
practices of states and the constraining forces of the market, I investigate
how Roma have resisted, collaborated, and adapted.
Chapter 7, “Dilemmas of Heritage and the Bulgarian Socialist State,”
examines how and why Roma were excluded from the rubrics of “nation”
and “folk.” I explore the trajectory of the fusion genre Bulgarian “wedding
music,” which was prohibited by the socialist government and became a
countercultural phenomenon. I document how wedding musicians nego-
tiated and resisted the state, and how the state responded.
Chapter 8, “Cultural Politics of Postsocialist Markets and Festivals,”
deals with music in the postsocialist period in relation to new contexts,
markets, and political configurations and a rising tide of xenophobia. As
Roma are squeezed between states and markets, how do they respond? I
examine Bulgarian wedding music, Romani music festivals, popular
music contests, and a Macedonian UNESCO application in relation to na-
tionalism, multiculturalism, and public negotiation of Romani identity.
Chapter 9, “ Bulgarian Pop/Folk: Chalga,” investigates the rise of chalga
in the 1990s as a pan-Balkan fusion of Romani, folk, and popular musics. I
trace the depictions of the orient, formulaic packaging, and the recent signs
of audience fatigue. I also examine the challenges that Romani performers
face, using case studies of Sofi Marinova and the transgendered diva Azis.
The controversy surrounding chalga illuminates the debate regarding defi-
nitions of what it means to be Balkan, European, and “modern.”
Balkan Roma 19
Part IV, “Musicians in Transit,” widens the focus of the book to interna-
tional audiences and revisits integration of American and Balkan view-
points. I illustrate how two Romani stars, one male and one female,
navigated transnational border crossings and strategized to expand their
careers. Looking at tours and commercial enterprises managed by non-
Roma, I discuss representational dilemmas from the point of view of man-
agers, producers, audiences, and Romani musicians. I interrogate the
political economy of collaborations and appropriations by examining
recent DJ remixes and the issue of who represents whom, who benefits,
and why.
Chapter 10, “Esma Redžepova: Queen of Gypsy Music,” explores the life
history of the Macedonian superstar in the context of Yugoslav multicul-
turalism and as a bridge between Roma and non-Roma. She resisted gen-
der norms, and her husband skillfully crafted her image as a respectful
singer. I examine her recent collaborations and explore her humanitarian
efforts.
Chapter 11, “Yuri Yunakov: Saxophonist, Refugee, Citizen,” illustrates,
through life history, how musical performance is a strategy in personal
identity politics. Emigrating to New York in 1994, Yunakov plays regularly
for Roma, Macedonians, Turks, Armenians, Albanians, Bulgarians, and
Americans. I show how through music he mediates the tension between
such supposed binaries as official-unofficial, traditional-modern, authen-
tic-hybrid, inclusion-exclusion, and local-global.
Chapter 12, “Romani Music as World Music,” discusses what happens
when community performers achieve international fame and when the
local becomes the global. I chart the relationship among festival producers
and managers of Romani music acts (who provide a saleable item), audi-
ence members (who claim to support a liberal multicultural agenda), the
press (eager to exoticize), and Romani musicians (trying to eke out a
living). Debate about authenticity and the emergence of new fusions such
as Gypsy Punk reveal the strategies of marketers and performers.
Chapter 13, “Collaboration, Appropriation, and Transnational Flows,”
ties together threads from previous chapters to discuss collaboration, ap-
propriation, and the transnational movement of music in relation to polit-
ical and economic matrices. I interrogate who is producing and marketing
Romani music and how power relationships are implicated in these ex-
changes. I examine issues of ownership and compensation through case
studies of DJ remixes, Balkan Beats dance clubs, and the movie Borat.
20 Introduction
2
ab
Musical Styles and Genres
What Is Romani Music?
Music is one of the oldest Romani occupations, a fact corroborated by

historical documentation dating from the fifteenth century.1 This tradi-
tional link may be one reason music has a deep symbolic connection for
Roma and the terms music and Roma are almost synonymous for non-
Roma. We should not forget, however, that music has been a viable occu-
pation for professional Roma for more than 600 years, and that in the
current period of postsocialist transnational mobility it remains viable.
Although Gypsy and music are commonly paired terms, the nature of
Romani music is only now receiving the scholarly attention it deserves.2
Historically, writers have assumed more than they have proved; exaggera-
tions run the gamut from the position that Roma are “sponges,” that is to
say, they merely borrow and have no music of their own (Starkie 1933;
Bhattacharya 1965), to the position that they are the staunchest preservers
of tradition. For example, the CD Rromano Suno 2 (Gypsy Dream, B92,
Serbia, 2006) asserts that “they found themselves in a strange place where
their repertoire is described both as the deepest repository of tradition
and a generator of irresponsible innovation.”
As early as 1910, Serbian music scholar Tihomir Djordjević dispar-
aged Gypsies because they failed to preserve their own music and, when
adopting Serbian music, they “gypsified” it.3 He wrote that when Gypsies
perform Serbian folk music, “they decharacterize and gypsify it. They
change primitive folk music as they choose, and they interfere with the
most essential aspects of this music; they change the details as they see fit,
or if these details are already attractive, they overemphasize them or add
decorations which sound gentle and beautiful at first, but have no place in
that music. That is the Gypsy Quality of folk music” (1984 [1910]:38). In
1977 Gojković wrote that Gypsies “corrupt not only national music of var-
ious countries but also new music, for instance, jazz” (1977:48). Thus the
21
typical older Balkan scholarly attitude toward Romani musical innovation
was one of contempt.
In Hungary, Roma have either been hailed as the most authentic pre-
servers of peasant music (Vekerdi 1976) or assailed as corrupters and dis-
torters of peasant music (Bartók 1931).4 There are many levels of this
controversy, which continues to the present day (Frigyesi 1994; J. Brown
2000; Hooker 2007) and spills over from Hungary into the Balkans. The
core of the conflict lies in varied interpretations of the concept of crea-
tivity and in the vain search for origins and “authenticity.” Roma are nei-
ther a “primitive folk which has no authentic music of its own, either vocal
or instrumental” (Spur 1947:114) nor merely sponges. What Frigyesi
points out for Hungary is also true for the Balkans: Gypsy music not only
was stylistically at the “crossroads of folk, popular and high art” but also
was “the common ground between the ‘rich’ and the ‘poor’” (Frigyesi
1994:267; Peycheva 1999a). Because of their professional niche, Roma
creatively molded the popular repertoire and interacted dynamically with
local musics. Examples of how this happens in the Balkans are discussed
throughout this book.
This debate shows that the historical nexus of Romani music is quite
complex. For centuries, Romani groups in Eastern Europe have been pro-
fessional musicians, playing for non-Romani peasants and city dwellers of
many classes for remuneration in cafes and taverns and at events such as
weddings, baptisms, circumcisions, fairs, and village dances. This profes-
sional niche, primarily male and instrumental,5 requires Roma to know
expertly the co-territorial repertoire and interact with it creatively. A no-
madic way of life, often forced on Roma from harassment and prejudice,
gave them opportunity to enlarge their repertoires and become multimu-
sical as well as multilingual.
In additional to nomadic Roma, large groups of sedentary Roma in
major European cities became professionals who performed urban folk,
classical, and popular music. In Hungary, Spain, and Russia, certain forms
of Romani music became national music, veritable emblems of the coun-
try (Frigyesi 1994; Leblon 1994; Lemon 2000). The music played by pro-
fessional Romani musicians in in-group contexts may or may not differ,
depending on the historical situation, from the music played for other
ethnic groups. Finally, there are many groups of Roma who are not profes-
sional musicians but have their own music. Furthermore, all these groups
have migrated within Europe to varying degrees, and also to the Americas
and Australia.
It should be clear by now that there is neither one worldwide nor one
pan-European Romani music. Roma constitute a rich mosaic of groups
that distinguish among themselves musically. This is not to deny that
there is an emerging ethnic awareness of unity and a scholarly basis for
comparison. A Bulgarian Romani song may have more in common with
an ethnic Bulgarian song than with a Polish Romani song, reflecting cen-
turies of co-territorial traffic in music. Are there stylistic elements common
to all European Romani musics? In answering negatively, I explore in
22 Introduction
Chapter 12 why this question is so urgent for many music producers. Cer-
tainly the professional niche continues to exist (in a wide area) and can
generate comparable data on repertoire and performance. Over and over
again in Eastern Europe, we hear of virtuosic performances of Roma that
move people to tears, of seemingly endless variations in melody, of the
capturing of emotion in music. Proverbs attest that “a wedding without a
Gypsy isn’t worth anything” (Bulgarian) and “give a Hungarian a glass of
water and a Gypsy fiddler and he will become completely drunk” (Hungar-
ian). Although the prominence of Roma in Balkan folk music cannot be
denied, facile searches for a unifying style must be met with suspicion.
In the quest for the universal and unique in Romani music, some
scholars have turned to the Indian homeland and claimed to find mu-
sical links with present-day groups (Bhattacharya 1965; Fonseca 1995;
Hancock 2002:71; Acković 1989). This work has been highly speculative
and remains unproven.6 Rather than seeking the unique or the pure, I
seek to explore Romani music as it exists in Balkan diaspora Romani
communities and for non-Romani local and international patrons. I start
by examining the music Balkan Roma play and sing in New York, Mace-
donia, and Bulgaria, making note of what is shared with co-territorial
peoples and what travels in which direction. Balkan Romani music,
then, rather than being a unified whole, can be considered a constellation
varying regionally and historically.
Balkan Historical Threads
As mentioned in Chapter 1, the Balkans are home to several million Roma

divided into many groups; in their migrations to North America, Balkan
Roma have retained music as a focus of their community life, but that
music has changed over time. Historically, Roma have been professionally
involved in many musical forms, both folk and popular; have had a virtual
monopoly of some forms; and have been virtually absent from other forms
(such as Istrian, Dalmatian, and Slovenian music and some shepherd’s
flute and bagpipe genres). The probable explanation of their absence in
these musics is that there simply wasn’t a steady income to be earned
from them. For example, Macedonian Roma have never played rural in-
struments such as gaida (bagpipe) and kaval (end-blown flute). In Bul-
garia, however, Roma played these instruments because there was a
market for them.
For centuries all over the southern Balkans, Roma have had a virtual
monopoly of professional ensembles consisting of one or two zurli (zurla
and surla in Macedonian, zurna in Bulgarian and Turkish, pipiza in Greek),
double-reed conical-bore instruments, plus one or two tapani (tŭpan in
Bulgarian, tapan in Macedonian, davuli and daouli in Greek), double-
headed cylindrical drums (see photograph 2.1 and video examples 2.1 and
2.2). A few ethnic Slavic zurna players have been reported in the literature
(Peycheva 1993:50). Citing evidence from a fourteenth-century fresco in
Musical Styles and Genres 23

Ohrid, some ethnomusicologists believe that the zurla and tapan were
brought to the Balkans by the Roma before the arrival of the Ottoman
Turks, but there is debate on this topic (Ilnitchi 2007).7
It cannot be doubted that for hundreds of years zurla and tapan ensem-
bles have played professionally for many ethnic groups in southern Ser-
bia, Kosovo, Macedonia, the Macedonian province of Greece, the Pirin
region of Bulgaria (southwest), and some parts of Balkan Thrace. At large
public events such as fairs, zurla and tapan ensembles were (and are)
hired by dancers or picnicking families. They were also associated with
wrestling matches, found among many Muslims of the southern Balkans.
Among Muslim Macedonian Roma, zurla and tapan music is essential for
ritual moments such as application of henna to the bride’s hair, hands, and
feet (see Chapter 5, and video examples 5.1, 5.2, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, and 5.16); the
act of male circumcision; and the slaughter of the lamb on Erdelezi
(Gjurgjovden, St. George’s Day; see Chapter 5 and Dunin 1998). Today
zurla and tapan ensembles coexist with amplified modern bands because
of the ritual function of the zurla and tapan, their role in playing tradi-
tional dance music, and their symbolic association with Romani identity
(Blau, Keil, Keil, and Feld 2002; Silverman 1996a; Peycheva and Dimov
2002). In New York, there are no zurla and tapan ensembles—but there
are a few Romani zurla players in the Bridgeport, Connecticut, region and
many tapan players as well.
In the 1980s, the zurna was prohibited in Bulgaria because of its
Romani and Muslim associations. In Chapter 7 I discuss socialist state
policy and how Roma resisted it. Since 1989, Pirin zurna and tŭpan music
has emerged as a vital force; players now serve patrons of all ethnicities
and play for a variety of events; they have also been rehired (albeit part-
time and for low wages) by some local ensembles. Famous Pirin zurna
players such as Samir Kurtov, who was born in 1971 in Kavrakirovo, Pet-
rich region, are highly paid and well respected, and they now perform at
weddings outside their region; Kurtov now performs often in Greece, Ser-
bia, Macedonia, and Turkey (Hunt 2009; Peycheva 2009). Video example
2.2 shows Kurtov playing at a wedding in Gotse Delchev, Bulgaria, in
2004; a slow melody changes into a 2/4 dance. In postsocialist Bulgaria
and Macedonia, the instruments have also been used at political events
for their role in outdoor announcement at parades and rallies (Peycheva
and Dimov 2002:183).
Zurla and tapan playing, like all instrumental performance, is exclu-
sively male, transmitted along kin lines. In some communities, zurla
players are from a single family of Roma. Training takes place from elder
to younger, and repertoire and technique are learned by listening and
watching. This principle can be generalized to transmission of all Balkan
Romani music: oral immersion without written notation. (For example,
video example 5.15 shows how young boys sit under the stage at a wed-
ding and follow along with makeshift drums.) For zurla training, typically
the learner drones while the master plays melody. Once mastery is
reached, the parts may alternate. Occasionally, the two zurlas will play in
24 Introduction
unison, in octaves, or more recently in parallel thirds. In addition to play-
ing the dance or song melody, the lead zurla player does free rhythmic
improvisations, known as mane, and also metric improvisations. Size of
repertoire and technical virtuosity distinguish good zurla players. Orna-
mentation consists of rapid and even finger trills, mordents, and grace
notes (Peycheva and Dimov 2002; Rice 1982). Master tapan players impro-
vise rhythmically and texturally, creatively using the differing sounds of
the two drumheads.
Roma have also been active in the realm of brass bands, in both rural
and urban environments. Adopting brass instruments from central Europe
about a hundred years ago, Roma became especially prominent in brass
bands in southern Serbia, Macedonia, and Bulgaria. Serbian peasants
also play in brass bands, but Roma tend to be professionals, and they per-
form a more Turkish-influenced repertoire. Serbian festivals, such as
those at Guča, have given wider visibility to this tradition and introduced
a sense of hierarchy through awarding prizes. The brass band has become
a Serbian national symbol, and bands such as Boban Marković are pop-
ular on the world music circuit.8
Professional male Romani bear leaders have been found throughout the
Balkans since the sixteenth century, often traveling with their families and
teaching their bears to perform to tambourine and voice accompaniment
(photograph 2.2). In the nineteenth century their centers were Romania,
Serbia, Bosnia, and North Bulgaria. They still entertain peasants at fairs
and in courtyards; according to a Bulgarian proverb, “a festival without a
bear trainer is a waste of time.” Bears can also heal various illnesses (this
being related to the power of the bear in folk belief) and perform tricks
such as dancing on the hind legs and passing the tambourine around to
collect money. Since the nineteenth century, Romani monkey leaders have
also been common (photograph 2.3). Bear and monkey trainers in Bul-
garia play a vertically held, three-stringed, pear-shaped, bowed lute called
gŭdulka (kemene in Macedonia). They identify as Kopanari (part of the
Rudari group) and speak Romanian. Many make their own instruments,
since they are usually woodworkers as well as animal trainers. In addition
to playing dance music to which the animal performs, they also play and
sing improvised historical ballads or humorous songs, sometimes pro-
viding social commentary (Silverman 1986:55). The Bulgarian socialist
government strictly regulated and even prohibited animal trainers, but
since 1989 the restrictions have been eased, and they can now be found in
parks and playgrounds of major cities.
From Ottoman times there has been a trafficking of musical styles fa-
cilitated, in part by Balkan Roma (Peycheva 1999a; see discussion of the
historical roots of wedding bands later in this chapter). For example, in
the nineteenth century the Romani fiddlers of Negotin transmitted
Romanian music to the Vlachs of east Serbia (Vukanović 1962:48). Today,
not only do Romani musicians travel, but also there is trafficking in
media products. In examining the interplay among “Oriental” (Turkish-
influenced) style, marketing, and Romani identity, Rasmussen notes that

Serbian Roma played a vital role in facilitating interaction among several
distinct musical genres: village folk music, urban folk music, popular
music, and novokomponovana narodna muzika (newly composed folk
music; 1991, 2002, 2007). Similarly, in Macedonia and Bulgaria Roma
played eclectic repertoires in urban ensembles that developed into con-
temporary wedding bands.
Kovalcsik, using Hungarian materials, claims Romani music can be dis-
tinguished from co-territorial folk music by improvisation and a readiness
to adopt new influences, especially commercial popular genres (1987).
Using material from Kosovo, Pettan also cites improvisation and the value
of change as specifically Romani features (1992); Kertesz-Wilkinson uses
Hungarian materials to analyze how changes in performance are incorpo-
rated selectively, according to a Romani aesthetic system (1992); and Ras-
mussen analyzes Romani openness to popular music (1991). Dimov
similarly comments that the presence of Gypsies is “the clearest example
of the polyethnic characteristic of Balkan music, and its negotiation,
translation and integration” (1995:14). Peycheva also discusses the “poly-
lingualism” of Gypsy musicians in text and style (1995). On the other
hand, I note as well that recently other ethnic groups in the Balkans are
adopting new and varied styles.
It is worth remembering that professional Balkan Romani musicians
regularly serve patrons from many ethnic groups, and thus their reper-
toires tend to be large and varied.9 Although the economic patron-client
relationship is often the framework within which Roma perform, the
artistic imperative is the creative engine behind exchange of services. For
centuries, Roma have been one of the main forces of innovation in Balkan
music (Pettan 1992; Peycheva 1999a). Their role as innovators can be par-
tially traced to the motivation of generating new material to sell to patrons,
but it can’t be solely reduced to economic imperative. Musicians also value
innovation for its artistry; they carefully listen to and evaluate each other,
detecting what precisely is new and worthwhile in technique, melody, har-
mony, improvisation, genre, text, and form. But innovation isn’t enough to
win admiration, novelty must be accompanied by superior technique and
soulful passion.10
Innovation is accomplished in myriad ways: sometimes by looking to
other local genres (e.g., using local instruments or folk or pop styles
such as African-American rap or electronic music styles), sometimes by
looking across regional borders (e.g., using Albanian, Serbian, or other
Balkan styles), and sometimes by looking toward distant Romani
musics (e.g., Spanish or Indian styles). The guitar style of the Gipsy
Kings (primarily rumba and flamenco) was appropriated in the early
1990s after the group made their first Eastern European tour. Rap in the
Romani language was employed in Macedonia and Bulgaria first in the
early 1990s and is now a growing style; the vocalist Ševćet (who lives in
Germany) created the genre “Roma Reggaeton Hip Hop,” which master-
fully fuses hip hop and Romani elements into his “Gio Style” shows (see
www.myspace.com/sevcet).
26 Introduction
Another way of innovating is to revive and reinterpret older repertoires.
In Bulgaria, for example, Ibro Lolov and Anzhelo Malikov rerecorded
songs that Yashar Malikov (Anzhelo Malikov’s father) collected or com-
posed in the 1950s. The elder Malikov was a prolific arranger credited with
dozens of songs (Peycheva 1999a). The 2005 CD Romane Merikle/Roma
Beads is dedicated to Yashar Malikov, Hasan Chinchiri, and several other
deceased Romani composers; it features remakes of Chinchiri’s songs as
well as other repertoire from the 1950s.11 Although these examples could
be termed “covers” or remakes, I would counter that this is more than
mere borrowing. In some cases (for example, wedding music; see Chapter
7), Roma have created new genres from existing elements.
Malvinni represents Gypsy music with an equation:
I+V=E
where I is improvisation, V is virtuosity, and E is emotion (2004:10). I

agree that these three elements are significant in the Balkans, but I think
Malvinni’s equation is too narrow and too mathematical a formulation.
Furthermore, I can envision another possible equation: V = I + E. More-
over, Malvinni’s equation does not hold for all Romani musics, and it is
also applicable to some non-Romani musics; improvisation is not very
important in American Kalderash music but definitely is in (non-Romani)
jazz. In the Balkans, it is nevertheless true that improvisation holds an
almost sacred place for Romani instrumentalists; it is the core of Bulgar-
ian wedding music, to give just one illustration. For singers, emotion and
technique tend to be more important than improvisation, and vocal me-
lodic improvisation is usually confined to variation in ornamentation. In
contrast, among instrumentalists improvisation is a conscious item of
practice and discourse.
Čoček/Kyucheck
In the Balkans the most characteristic Romani musical genre is called

čoček, or čuček in Macedonia, Serbia, and Kosovo and kyuchek in Bul-
garia. Note that čoček also refers to the solo dance genre associated with
this music, discussed in Chapter 6. In Chapter 9, I discuss how the genre
has traveled north since 1989 to Romania (and even Hungary and Slova-
kia). Whereas before 1989 čoček was found in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria,
Greece, Albania, and Turkey, today it is shared across much of Eastern
Europe. It has also spread with the Romani diaspora to Western Europe,
North America, and Australia and is the mainstay of Balkan Romani cele-
brations in New York.
Čočeks use Turkish-derived scales (makams) that sometimes employ mi-
crotones and sometimes Westernized pitches. There is no one typical scale
or typical makam for Balkan Romani music, and indeed the term “Gypsy
scale”12 is a misnomer. A variety of scales are used, including major, minor,

phrygian (similar to the Turkish makam kurd), and other modes and Turk-
ish makams (modal scalar patterns) such as hicaz, nihavent, etc. Čočeks
typically have precomposed sections plus solo sections distinguished by
taksim or mane,13 a highly improvised free-rhythm or metric exploration
of the scale or makam, often using stock motives and figures, played over
a metric ostinato. In the mane musicians display their improvisatory vir-
tuosity. Čočeks are associated with characteristic rhythms, some of which
are displayed in Figure 2.1. Actually there are many variations on the
rhythms in this figure, each imparting a distinct style that sometimes indi-
cates to dancers what should be danced. Number 6, for example, is known
as čifteteli.
The 9/8 meter is associated with Turkish-speaking Roma in the Balkans,
and in fact in Turkey it is the characteristic rhythm of Roma.14 The meter
can be played fast and light or slow and syncopated, as in the Bulgarian
Romani rhythm known as kaba zurna (low-pitched zurna), whose name
suggests it was a zurna style adopted by the clarinet. Kaba zurna is rhythm
number 14 in Figure 2.1. Bulgarian wedding musician Filip Simeonov’s
(Fekata’s) “Shalvar Kyuchek” is a kaba zurna, see audio example 2.1 (he can
also be seen in video example 7.9, playing a Bulgarian rŭchenitsa in 7/16);
the whole piece is an improvisation—there is no precomposed part. He
explores the various timbres of the clarinet while playing in a makam sim-
ilar to a minor scale with a neutral second degree (between a major and
minor second). The neutral second is characteristic of solo improvisation
in both Bulgaria and Macedonia; in almost all the taksims discussed in
this chapter, regardless of the scale or makam, the second degree has this
microtonal element.
Another important rhythm is 7/8, especially in Macedonia and south-
west Bulgaria, where it takes a number of forms. Fast and light forms of
7/8 (sometimes known as lesno, light or easy in Macedonian) are used in
many songs from Macedonia such as “Oj Borije” (Oh Bride!) and “Zapev-
ala Sojka Ptica” (The Jaybird Began to Sing [Macedonian]), sung during a
wedding (see Chapter 5, video examples 5.26 and 5.32) and Esma
Redžepova’s song “Naktareja Mo Ilo Phanlja” (With a Key He Closed My
Heart), discussed in Chapter 10. A slower 7/8 is illustrated by “Sitakoro
Oro” (Sieve Dance), in rhythm number 10 in Figure 2.1, performed by
Orkestar Titanik (Titanic), a well-known band from Šutka (audio example
2.2); note that the sieve is used in the wedding ritual in reference to fer-
tility (see Chapter 5). Again there is no precomposed tune; rather, the
whole piece is improvised around familiar motives by the saxophonist,
followed by the synthesizer player. The phrygian mode is used, and the
second degree of the scale tends to be microtonally high. If the piece were
longer, it would characteristically end with a short fast section, typical of
Macedonian dances. Titanik’s repertoire also includes several Albanian-
influenced pieces, reflecting the fact that Skopje Roma have regularly
played for Albanian speakers (both Romani and non-Romani). This sets
them squarely apart from Bulgarian Roma, who have only recently
imported Albanian-influenced styles.
28 Introduction
Figure 2.1. Variations of Čoček Rhythmic Patterns
The tunes for čočeks are sometimes drawn from older Romani tunes but
are more often composed by wedding musicians. They are inspired by an
eclectic array of sources: folk and popular music from neighboring Balkan
regions, film scores from the West, cartoon music, Middle Eastern music,
and Indian film music. Kyuchek titles in Bulgaria during the 1980s in-
cluded “Sarajevo ’84” and “Olimpiada,” in honor of the Olympics; “Alo
Taxi” (Hello Taxi [Bulgarian]), from a pop song; and “Pinko” (in 9/8),
based on the musical theme from The Pink Panther. Since 1989, inventive
labels for kyucheks have been added, such as “Evro,” “Germaniya,” “Arab-
ski,” “Bingo,” “Hazart” (Hazard/Risk, a gambling game), “Isuara” (from a
Latin soap opera), and more. As mentioned above, among Romani musi-
cians there is a cross-fertilization of musical styles, with a premium on
innovation. For example, soon after the American election in November
2008, “Barack Obama Kyuchek” was composed.15
Peycheva divided Bulgarian clarinet kyuchek styles into regional
“schools”: the Makalov and Pamukov clans belong to the Kotel school,
characterized by energetic, sharp, staccato playing; Osman Zhekov, Nesho
Neshev, and Ivo Papazov (see Chapter 7) belong to the Kŭrdzhali school,
characterized by legato playing and fluid movement from pitch to pitch;
and Filip Simeonov (Fekata) from Trŭstenik (audio example 2.1, see
above), Marin Dzhambazov from Knezha (see below), Dimitŭr Paskov
from Vŭrbitsa, and Kuti from Dobrich, all in North Bulgaria, have a
“northern style,” which is somewhat similar to Kotel playing but charac-
terized by more tonguing and more staccato playing (Peycheva 1995:16).16
Peycheva has also thoroughly analyzed clarinet players’ repertoires and
their hybrid styles (1999a; 2008b).
Song Variants and Versions
The largest part of the Balkan Romani repertoire is dance music, both
instrumental and vocal, reflecting the fact that dancing is a vital part of
celebrations. In addition to dance music in regular meters, there are also
unmetered songs and instrumentals performed around the banquet table.
The vocal portion of the unmetered repertoire has been neither well docu-
mented nor recorded (but see talava below).
The dynamism of the Romani oral musical tradition is shown by how
tunes and texts have traveled across borders, been traded among musi-
cians, and been remade or covered by singers. The song “Phirava Daje” (I
Went, Mother), for example, exists in multiple variants across Serbia,
Kosovo, Macedonia, and Bulgaria, and also in Western Europe and the
United States. The text of this song and analysis of three variants are
found in audio examples with text supplement 2.3–2.5. Another illustra-
tion of the breadth of variation comes from comparing versions of one
song by the same singer performed or recorded at different times. In audio
examples with text supplement 2.6–2.8, I compare three variations of a
song by Macedonian singer, Džansever, and discuss her life. Note that any
30 Introduction
good piece of Romani music, vocal or instrumental, tends to exist in mul-
tiple variants; that is a mark of its excellence. If fellow musicians embrace
a piece, they do not hesitate to change it; Pettan’s research in Kosovo, for
example, presents several variations of songs and instrumentals (2002:251–
276). One of the most common paths of dissemination is from Serbia to
Bulgaria or Macedonia, and another path is from Greece northward; how-
ever, all directions are operational.17
Stylistic Trends
The current Romani wedding bands in Macedonia are heirs to the urban
professional čalgija tradition of the early twentieth century, which flour-
ished until World War II. The word comes from the Turkish root çalg,
meaning instrumental music or a musical instrument. Čalgija ensembles
played Ottoman-derived multi-ethnic vocal and instrumental music in a
heterophonic style based on the makam system, emphasizing innovation
and improvisation. Roma were the major performers, joined by Macedo-
nians, Armenians, and Jews (and, though rarely, Turks). Seeman specu-
lates that the absence of Turks was due to the association of čalgija music
with the lower social classes (1990a). In addition, secular music had a
somewhat ambiguous status in Islam; thus musicians were often non-
Turkish. Families of Roma such as the venerated Čun family have played
čalgija for generations; Roma may have played a significant role in import-
ing this genre from Turkey (Seeman 1990a:17–19). The Čuns lived in
Kosovo before moving to Macedonia, and their repertoire also draws from
Kosovo styles. Muamet Čun played in the Radio Skopje čalgija band and
also for community events (see video example 5.18). In audio example 3.2,
Muamet’s brother, Medo Čun, performs the song “Ramajana” with Muha-
rem Serbezovski on vocals (this song is discussed in Chapter 3, video ex-
ample 3.1), and on video examples 10.3 and 10.5 he plays “Čhaje Šukarije”
(which he claims to have composed) with Esma Redžepova and the Teo-
dosievski Ansambl (this song is discussed in Chapter 10).
Early čalgija ensembles in Macedonian cities consisted of violin, ud
(plucked, short-necked, fretless lute), kanun (plucked zither), dajre (frame
drum with jingles), and voice, but they grew to feature džumbuš (fretless,
plucked lute with a metal resonator and skin face), clarinet, truba (trumpet
or flugelhorn), accordion, and tarabuka (Seeman 1990a:13; Džimrevski
1985). Čalgija repertoire included light Turkish classical pieces, rural folk
music, and urban popular songs in the many languages of the Ottoman
city: Turkish, Albanian, Vlach, Macedonian, and Romani. Čalgija music
flourished in the Ottoman period in contexts such as the coffee house,
weddings and other life-cycle celebrations, fairs, and saints’ day celebra-
tions. Note that Macedonian Roma have never played rural instruments
such as gaida (bagpipe) and kaval (end-blown flute); nor have they sung
the ritual songs of Slavic Macedonian villagers. Profound changes in the
1960s, such as migration of rural populations into urban centers, the

spread of Western harmony and instruments, and introduction of amplifi-
cation, affected the style and texture of čalgija (Seeman 1990a). Wedding
bands in Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Kosovo were updated to include saxo-
phone, keyboard, and drum set.
In comparing Skopje Romani celebrations of Herdelezi (St. George’s
Day) over a ten-year period, for example, Dunin notes that in 1967 un-
amplified music with no singer was the rule, but by 1977 amplified music
including synthesizer and vocalist was more common. Amplification ne-
cessitated a fixed location for the band: a raised stage that is now ubiq-
uitous (1985). At events such as weddings, the amplified band plays for
the large dance gatherings, but either zurla and tapan or a smaller, un-
amplified, portable version of the amplified band plays for the rituals
and processionals.
Through the Yugoslav socialist period, Romani music was available on
recordings and on radio and television in Macedonia, as part of Tito’s
multicultural agenda. By contrast, the state music industry and institu-
tions were themselves discriminatory to Roma; in Chapter 10 I trace the
challenges of musicians in this period through the life history of Esma
Redžepova. In Chapter 6 I describe how the amateur Romani dance en-
semble Phralipe was formed in Skopje in 1949 and toured widely. I also
describe how Yugoslav ensembles danced Gypsy suites using gross stereo-
typical movements and excluding Roma performers. Alongside the en-
sembles, however, there was a relatively healthy commercial Romani
music industry.
Coming from a long line of male wedding musicians, Ferus Mustafov
was one of the first Macedonian Romani instrumentalists to regularly ap-
pear on Western recordings. The son of the famous saxophonist Ilmi
Jašarov, Ferus was born in 1950 in Štip, a center for brass bands. Ilmi
issued some of the earliest LPs of čočeks in Yugoslavia in the 1970s; Fer-
us’s mother was also a saxophonist (but not a professional), a highly un-
usual role for a woman. He went to music school until he was thirteen
years old and then became a professional (Cartwright 2005b:125; Burton
1995). For several years, he left Macedonia to live in Sarajevo in order to
work for the Bosnian television orchestra, and he later worked for Mace-
donian television. Ferus developed his father’s style into a tighter, slicker
sound and was more influenced by Bulgarian wedding music. In Chapter
7 I discuss how he traded tunes with Bulgarian wedding musician Ivo
Papazov on the telephone; for example, his signature “Tikino” (Small) is
claimed by Ivo. His son, Ilmi Mustafov, is now a respected musician. In
video example 2.3 and photograph 2.4, Ferus plays a 2/4 čoček as a guest
musician at the babina (birth party) of Muamet Čun’s granddaughter.
In video example 2.4, from a 1985 Macedonian television show, Ferus
and his band perform a 2/4 čoček (rhythm number 1 in Figure 2.1) dressed
in pseudo-Turkish costumes, including turbans (illustrating the oriental-
izing and self-stereotyping that I discuss in Chapter 12). Also note the
staging: in addition to two solo belly dancers who have much exposed skin
but use characteristic Romani stomach movements, there is a group of
32 Introduction
non-Romani performers (the Ballet Troupe of Macedonian Television)
doing unsubtle modern dance choreographies that have little in common
with Romani dance (see Chapter 6).
In Macedonia today, a viable but somewhat unstable commercial re-
cording industry regularly produces Romani artists (although it is smaller
than in Bulgaria). Political rallies often feature music, and Romani radio
stations are often aligned with politicians. In 1992 the private television
station BTR began programming; in 1994 the private television station
Šutel began; and since 1992 a national station, MTV 2, has produced the
Romani language program Bijandipe (Renaissance). There are also several
Romani radio stations in Skopje and others in smaller cities that feature
music; they are financed by local advertisements and paid “greetings,”
mostly in the Romani language (for example birthday, wedding, or anni-
versary messages) that patrons write.
Roma in the Macedonian diaspora keep abreast of music through re-
cordings, visits of performers for events, and most recently YouTube and
Facebook postings. Popular Macedonian Romani bands of the last decade
include Versace (cf. the Italian fashion house), Mladi Talenti (Young Tal-
ents [Macedonian]), Veseli Momci (Jolly Boys [Macedonian]), Bistijani,
Ongeni Momčinja (Fiery Boys [Macedonian]); Gazoza (Shpritzer), and
Titanik. Performers listen widely across Balkan borders. The older reper-
toire of Feta Šakir’s band from the 1990s, is featured in video examples
5.9–5.16.
I discuss Romani music festivals in Chapter 8, but here I want to note that
other institutionalized events in Macedonia (e.g., Romani calendrical
holidays, beauty contests, and film festivals) sometimes feature music.18 For
example, the spring holiday of Herdelezi and International Roma Day (April
8) are often celebrated with concerts sponsored by NGOs. In January 1998,
a combined celebration of Romska Vasilica (Romani St. Basil’s Day) and
Romska Ubavica (Most Beautiful Romani Woman contest) featured a
singing contest with cash prizes. It drew singers from the diaspora, was
attended by more than 1,200 people even with little advertising, and was held
in the largest theater in Skopje. It was sponsored by one of the two Skopje
Romani television stations, which is affiliated with a Romani political party.19
The history of Bulgarian Romani music has been documented in great
detail by Peycheva (1999a, 2008) and Dimov (2009a, 2009b). Ibro Lolov
(accordionist), Yashar and Anzhelo Malikov (composers), Hasan Chinchiri
(composer and violinist), and the Takev brothers (violinists and guitarists)
all represent a strain of Sofia-based Romani music that can be contrasted
with the more Turkish-influenced styles in Thrace and north Bulgaria. As
mentioned earlier, Yashar Malikov was a prolific song writer, composer,
and arranger who (along with his son and Lolov) was involved in several
pioneering recordings in the 1980s featuring songs in the Romani
language. Since the 1990s, Lolov has issued new recordings and remakes
of older songs.20
After the fall of socialism, Bulgarian Romani music burst forth in the
public domain after years of government suppression.21 The excitement at

the time was palpable; in fact, the first concerts were tied to political mo-
bilization, as Romani nongovernmental organizations sprang up every-
where. Anzhelo Malikov organized a Sofia Romani dance and music
ensemble, but it disbanded after a few years for lack of financing and
infrastructure (Peycheva 1999a). New commercial recording companies
such as Lazarov Records, Sunny Music, Payner, Ara/Diapason BMK (Bul-
garian Music Company), Unison Stars, and Milena began issuing scores of
cassettes of Romani music (in addition to other genres); bands often
self-produced master tapes and sold them to these companies, which
functioned as distributors (Peycheva 1995: Dimov 1995). In the 1990s pi-
racy was rampant, production standards were low, and the mafia con-
trolled parts of the music business.22
In addition to ubiquitous cassettes, other media venues such as private
radio and television channels sprang up in the early 1990s (Dimov 1995).
Radio Signal Plyus and Radio Veselina offered pop/folk music, wedding
music, rock music, folk music, and liberal amounts of Serbian, Macedo-
nian, and Greek genres, which were the new rage,23 financed by paid greet-
ings and advertisements. Radio Veselina, for example, broadcast Muabet
Bez Parsa (Dinner at the Table Without Tips [Bulgarian]), which accepted
free requests. Music videos made inroads into homes in the 1990s, at first
through videocassettes and later through private cable television stations.
The Payner company started Planeta TV for pop/folk in 2001; Ara TV, Fen,
Veselina TV, and other channels followed. (See Chapter 9 for discussion of
Balkanika TV and folk/pop fusions.)
Today practically every Bulgarian family has cable, as prices have
dropped to just a few dollars per month. In 2008, a corporately financed
channel, www.gypsytv.tv started to broadcast sporadically from Sofia. Its
programming includes clips from Romfest (see Chapter 8), Ivo Papazov
(Chapter 7), and Goran Bregović (Chapter 13), as well as Gypsy jazz and
belly dance instruction (Chapter 6). Romani music is widely available via
privately owned media, but government channels rarely feature Romani
music. Lack of government support is nothing new for Roma, and thus
they do not rely on it. New talent quickly becomes known via dissemina-
tion of clips, and more recently via YouTube. For example, since 2008 the
young clarinetist Sali Okka has become widely known in Romani commu-
nities even though he hasn’t cut an album (Peycheva 2008a); similarly, the
clarinetist/vocalist Alyosha (formerly with Orkestŭr Kristali) has received
acclaim with Orkestŭr Universal, which has limited recordings. Musicians
comment that they make their money from weddings, not from albums.
With rampant sharing of music files and clips, fewer Roma buy music. On
the other hand, the most popular Romani bands, such as Nasmi’ler,
Kristal, and Kristali, have healthy album sales.
In the early 1990s, the band Džipsi Aver (Another Gypsy) from Sofia
captured the spotlight for their innovations, for example with rap in the
Romani language; they won the grand prize at the Stara Zagora Romfest
in 1995 (see video example 2.5). Their name came from the English term
Gypsy, previously unknown in Bulgaria but probably taken from the Gipsy
34 Introduction
Kings. They also adopted stylistic elements from the Gipsy Kings, notably
guitars, Flamenco-style clapping (synthesized), and dancers dressed in
flared pseudo-Gitano skirts and scarves. On their video Imam li Dobŭr
Kŭsmet (Do I Have Good Luck? [Bulgarian], Video Total) vocalist Dzhago
Traykov performs a rap version of Esma Redžepova’s song “Čhaje Šukarije”
(Beautiful Girl; see Chapter 10). This video, in contrast to the slick videos
of a decade later, depicted the band casually shopping in an open-air mar-
ket; it has no back-up dancers and no set choreography, but there are two
kyuchek dancers (with exposed midriffs) and a Michael Jackson imitator.
The rap element links Roma to African Americans; this is a resonant tie,
because both Roma and African Americans are minorities of color who
have had a strong influence in popular culture but face discrimination
(see Levy 2002; Currid 2000; Marian-Bǎlașa 2004).24
Amza Tairov is a relatively new but extremely popular artist in the Bal-
kan Romani scene. Around 2003, a legend started circulating among mu-
sicians about a young Rom from Vinica, Macedonia, who shut himself up
in his room for several years to learn the synthesizer. Although the legend
is untrue, it illustrates the aura surrounding “Amzata.” Synthesizer players
from all over the Balkans have tried to imitate him, including his tendency
to use only three fingers, and his equipment: a small Casio keyboard
mounted above a larger Korg Triton that he uses for sampling. Note that
Amza’s reputation was established without the aid of commercial media
recordings; it happened among musicians via traded live-performance re-
cordings, much in the same manner that wedding music was transmitted
in Bulgaria the 1970s and 1980s via unofficial cassettes (see Chapter 7).
Because Amza plays the synthesizer, he is able to innovate in multiple
ways: melodically, harmonically, rhythmically, texturally, and timbrally
(video example 2.6). Rhythmically he pushes the limits by syncopating
inventively. In addition, he is a master of melody, especially improvisation
and ornamentation, distinguished by his pronounced use of the pitch
bender. Using a Korg Pandora effect processor, he also is a master of tim-
bre; he samples folk instruments such as zurla for timbral and textural
variation. He is a composer, arranger, and performer all in one. Not sur-
prisingly, Amza’s reputation has become trans-Balkan; he is now featured
on several albums produced in Bulgaria, has been a guest on Bulgarian
cable television, and is hired to play for Romani weddings all over Bul-
garia. He is a pan-European star with multiple engagements in western
Europe in the Romani diaspora and with multiple videos on YouTube
(Peycheva 2008a).
Amza is much influenced by Romani styles from Kosovo. He imports an
Albanian style into Macedonian music, and this has been adopted by
many musicians and even exported to Bulgaria. Another significant musi-
cian in this Macedonian/Kosovo trajectory is the singer Ćita, from Mitro-
vica, Kosovo, living in Germany. Ćita is a master of the talava or telava
Kosovo style. Talava is believed to be a contraction of the Romani phrase
tel o vas, literally under the hand, referring to the solo women’s Romani
dance čoček where the hands are waved delicately.25 Until the 1980s, talava

was performed in segregated female gatherings by singers who were pre-
sumed to be homosexual (Pettan 1996a and 2003). Talava style is charac-
terized by highly ornamented and syncopated vocal lines, often against a
drone or constant chord, with amanes, vocal improvisations often sung on
the syllables of the word aman, in which names of guests, commentary,
and greetings are inserted. As a Macedonian Rom in Toronto stated, “They
don’t have a specific melody; they make it up on the spot, commenting on
the bride, the groom, and their families.” A New York Romani musician
commented that “it has free style words about the people involved.” These
textual improvisations are especially evocative in the diaspora; Roma
react emotionally when they hear personalized greetings from distant
family members. This emotional and personal way of singing, with mas-
terful technique, is admired by Roma all over the Balkans and in the dias-
pora. Even in Bulgaria, where it was never done before, Romani singers
now improvise over a drone in talava style.
In audio example 2.9 with text supplement, Ćita performs a talava-style
song over a repeated chord (with rhythm number 9 in Figure 2.1) at a
Kosovo Romani event in Germany. Ćita’s song comments on the perils of
life as a refugee, raising themes of domestic violence, alcohol, and poverty.
Other talava singers now popular are Ševćet (see above), Babuš (from
Kosovo), Erdžan (from Kumanovo, Macedonia), Muharem Ahmeti (from
Tetovo, Macedonia), and Džemailj Gaši (from Mitrovica, Kosovo, now
living in Italy); Džemailj is the son of Nehat Gaši, popular in the 1970s.
Many of these performers now live in Western Europe and command high
fees, sometimes several thousand euros (see YouTube videos from western
Europe and the Balkans). These singers employ the ornamental virtuosity
characteristic of talava in their song repertoire; as one Rom stated, “They
take an older style and put it in modern songs.” It is ironic that Kosovo
Romani music is currently such a strong influence among Balkan Romani
musicians precisely at a time when Kosovo Roma lead a precarious exis-
tence; they are displaced, dispersed, and unwelcome in Kosovo.26
In concluding this chapter, I want to emphasize the vitality of Romani
music in Macedonia and Bulgaria, as well as the huge number of perform-
ing musicians and the popularity of music in the diaspora. Although eco-
nomic times are very bad, there are still celebrations among various ethnic
groups, even if these events are shorter than they were in the 1980s. In
Macedonia and Pirin, Bulgaria, zurla and tapan are typically used for rit-
uals and processions, with an amplified band on stage for the banquets
and evening dance. On any summer weekend in large Romani neighbor-
hoods such as Šutka, there are still numerous weddings. There is also a
prominent trend, especially in the Western European Romani diaspora, of
hiring Romani musical stars from various countries. For a Romani wed-
ding in Hamburg, Germany, in 2003, for example, the musicians included
Husnu Senlendirici (a Turkish Romani clarinetist who leads the band
Laço Tayfa, or Good Band), Vasillis Saleas (a Greek Romani clarinetist),
Bilhan (a clarinetist from Mitrovica, Kosovo), and the Kosovo Romani
singer Babuš. A 2007 wedding in Bujanovac, southern Serbia, featured
36 Introduction
Orkestŭr Universal from Bulgaria (with Sasho Bikov on drums, and Alyo-
sha, clarinet, saxophone, and vocals), along with Macedonian guests Amza
and saxophonist Džafer.27 A celebration in Dusseldorf, Germany, that I
attended in 2011 featured the band Južni Kovači from Šutka, the violinist
Sunaj, and talava singers Džemailj Gaši and Tarkan (living in Belgium).
The New York community also hosts many talented musicians; in Chapter
5 I describe how musicians from the Balkans visit New York regularly to
perform at community celebrations.

3
ab
Dilemmas of Diaspora, Hybridity, and Identity
A lthough the title of my book solidly invokes diaspora, in this chapter I

interrogate its theoretical provenance by exploring its applicability to
Roma. Do Roma fit received definitions of diaspora? If not, what does this
say about the model, and about Roma? How can the Romani case help
interrogate related concepts of transnationalism, hybridity, and cosmo-
politanism? Finally, I explore how these themes highlight identity issues in
relation to music and the current Romani rights movement. Although the
scholarly literature on diaspora is vast, only recently have ethnomusicolo-
gists tackled this concept (Slobin 2003; Ramnarine 2007a).1
William Safran’s classic definition of diaspora, in the inaugural issue of
the journal of the same title, relies on several core factors: migration from
a singular historic homeland, vivid memories of the homeland postulating
an eventual return, and belief by migrants that “they are not—and per-
haps cannot be—fully accepted by their host country” (1991:83–84; also
see Clifford 1994).2 The Jewish and Armenian cases are usually posed as
examples, but Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin (1993) have illustrated how
variable the Jewish case is, and this may provide some parallels with
Roma. Safran’s definition fits Roma in terms of historic migration from
India but does not fit in terms of migrants’ consciousness of a homeland
or their desire to return. Many Roma have learned about their Indian or-
igins (and their victimization during the Holocaust) from scholars and
activists, not from oral history. Activists are trying to inform them, as I
discuss below. Note that although Roma do not wish to return to India, it
figures symbolically in activist agendas and musical motifs. Rather than
having a primary consciousness of an Indian homeland, Balkan Roma
relate to more recent homelands in their historical rediasporization from
the Balkans to Western Europe, North America, and Australia.3 Macedo-
nian Roma, for example, vividly refer to Macedonia as “home” (doma;
Macedonian); those few who are informed of their Indian origins see no
contradiction.
39
Homelands may be multiple and invoked strategically depending on
context. For example, in the performance and marketing of Balkan
Romani music, both the Indian homeland and the new homelands are
invoked. The challenge remains to resist essentializing diasporas by
attaching them to particular places of origin, i.e., homelands. A second
challenge is to resist equating all diasporic subjects merely because they
are related to a posited homeland; a third is to resist diluting the concept
so much as to equate it with all migration. Mark Slobin writes that since
the concept of diaspora has grown to embrace myriad forms of move-
ment, it is overwhelmed by complexity and multiplicity (2003:290–291).
Perhaps it is more practical to see diaspora as a special kind of migration
involving some kinds of homelands, but not necessarily fixed ones. The
Romani case, like the Jewish case, evinces multiple rediasporizations
“which do not necessarily succeed each other in historical memory but
echo back and forth” (Boyarin and Boyarin 1993, cited in Clifford
1994:305).
For diasporic Macedonian and Bulgarian Roma, I posit that Macedonia
and Bulgaria, not India, are the more relevant “homelands.” But even so,
they do not function like iconic homelands in that Roma do not seek to
return; rather, they make new homes in which they invest physically and
emotionally but that they might leave. The very notion of home has to be
reconceived (Malkki 1995:509). By asking “what does it mean to be
emplaced” (515), we can approach the relationship between displacement
and emplacement. The goal, then, is to study how ties to various home-
lands “are conceived and articulated and whether or not they erase signif-
icant historical differences . . . in different locations” (Dirlik 2000:177).4
For Balkan Roma, migration—whether forced or voluntary—has become
a way of life and a mode of adaptation; it is prevalent and valued because
it is often necessary and irreversible. As Massey et al. write, “As migration
grows in prevalence within a community it changes values and cultural
perceptions in ways that increase the probability of future migration. . . .
Migration becomes deeply ingrained into the repertoire of people’s behav-
iors, and values associated with migration become part of the communi-
ty’s values” (1993:452–453).
Arif Dirlik, in analyzing the “Chinese overseas,” offers a useful critique
of how the concept of diaspora tends to level disparate peoples into one
diasporic unity. This may lead to a “cultural reification” that erases the
particulars of history and class and furthermore racializes the group
(2002:95–99).5 Similarly, Roma constitute a multiplicity of cultures that
neither intermarry nor identify as one group; this variation is erased by
conceiving of the Romani diaspora as a unified cultural unit. Notions of
Romani identity that are based on Indian origins and homogeneous
culture, then, may racialize Roma by emphasizing their non-European
origins. Activists can sometimes capitalize on these notions and use them
in pursuit of political agendas; similarly, musicians and music producers
may use the Indian homeland concept in their art. But there may be a risk
of exotification, which I will discuss below.
40 Introduction
Transnationalism and Hybridity
In part to overcome the diasporic emphasis on a singular homeland,
Basch, Glick Schiller, and Blanc promoted transnationalism as “the pro-
cesses by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social rela-
tions that link together their societies of origin and settlement” (1997:7;
also see Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc Szanton 1992 and Glick Schiller
1995).6 This concept easily applies to Roma because it sidesteps the issue
of origins and focuses on people and communities. According to Roger
Rouse, diasporic groups “find that their most important kin and friends
are as likely to be living hundreds of miles away as immediately around
them. More significantly, they are able to maintain these spatially extended
relationships as actively and effectively as the ties that link them with their
neighbors” (1991:13). In Chapters 4, and 5, I detail how Roma in New
York and Macedonia communicate via telephone, internet, and videos of
music and ritual, as well as trips for new spouses. Here I emphasize the
agency of transnational actors in enabling an “active display of identifica-
tion in the making of diaspora” (Werbner 2002b:11); enactment of identity
via performative genres, especially music, is a visible, audible symbol in
the Balkan Romani diaspora. Through performance, identity is conceptu-
alized: “the imagination of diaspora is constituted . . . by a compelling
sense of moral co-responsibility and embodied performance” (11; also see
Ramnarine 2007b). Some genres of music and dance play have become
veritable emblems of identity in the diaspora.
At the same time, we must remember that diasporas are not homoge-
neous; a diaspora is a “site of multiple consciousness” (Toloyan 1996:28).
Diasporas are “lived and relived though multiple modalities,” as “differen-
tiated, heterogeneous and contested spaces, even as they are implicated in
the construction of a common ‘we’” (Brah 1996:184). The tension among
modalities applies to Balkan Roma; sometimes they identify as Roma and
sometimes they adopt other labels, as I discuss in Chapter 4. Sometimes
they unite with Roma from other places and other religions, and some-
times they reject other Roma. Finally, wherever they are, all of their nego-
tiations are informed by historical discrimination and stereotypification.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett reminds us that historically diaspora
has had a negative, almost pathological connotation: “The terms diaspora
and ghetto form a linked pair. What is not blamed on one is attributed to
(and often entailed by) the other—stranger and marginal man flow from
them” (1994:340) It is no accident that in America Jews, African Ameri-
cans, and Gypsies iconically define the diaspora/ghetto mold in terms of
where they lived and how they were conceived and rejected as “others.”
The classic American social science literature sees all three groups as
problematic and deficient, needing to be assimilated and acculturated.7
For refugees in particular, according to Malkki, “The bare fact of move-
ment or displacement is often assumed a priori to entail not a transforma-
tion but a loss of culture and/or identity” (1995:508). Roma, for example,
are often assumed to have no culture (especially music) of their own and
Dilemmas of Diaspora, Hybridity, and Identity 41

to be inveterate borrowers (see Chapter 1). Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s state-
ment “This is not a site of privilege” (1994:340) is echoed by Ong and
Nonini: “There is nothing intrinsically liberating about diasporic cultures”
(1997:325).
Current diaspora studies reject this pathology in favor of reclaiming hy-
bridities, routes, mixings, and border crossings, but these concepts may
be too celebratory and too ahistoric. The concept of hybridity, first popu-
larized by cultural studies and postcolonial studies and then adopted by
anthropology and other disciplines, is useful to destabilize binaries and
bounded notions of culture that permeate the classic social science litera-
ture. As part of the postcolonial project, hybridity challenges Eurocentric
master narratives, homogenization of ethnic identities, and the assump-
tion that nations are composed of singular nationalities.8 Perhaps its rad-
ical potential lies in its implicit rejection of those who have had the power
to label and classify: “Hybridity in contemporary culture is in a fundamen-
tal sense a rebellion of those who are, or feel, culturally disposed . . . who
challenge the claims of the centers of power” (Dirlik 2000:182).
The fact that Roma embrace hybridity and that Romani music is hybrid
is perhaps obvious, but if the concept is to have any validity we must show
how this hybridity works, why it exists, and how it differs from other ex-
planatory models. Indeed, the fluidity of Romani music grows from the
multiple diasporas of Roma, their openness to adopting non-Romani and
multiple Romani styles, and their outsider status. For centuries Roma
have had neither a singular state nor a national language, territory, reli-
gion, or culture. Historically, the professional marginal musician must be
a hybrid to survive; multiple patrons require multiple musical repertoires.
Hybridity, however, can be a problematic concept because of its vague-
ness and its theoretical positioning. Hybridity is now so fashionable and
applied to so many situations that it has begun to lose its specificity. As
Dirlik writes: “If hybridity is indeed a condition of everyday life, what is
radical about it?” (2002:189). Hybridity also brings up the problem of an-
tecedent purity: “The idea of hybridity, of intermixture, presupposes two
anterior purities. . . . I think there isn’t any . . . anterior purity . . . that’s why
I try not to use the word hybrid. . . . Cultural production is not like mixing
cocktails” (Gilroy 1994:54–55).9 Either hybridity is everywhere, thus losing
its theoretical force, or else it exists in specific places and is contrasted
with the nonhybrid. I align with the latter position but do not subscribe to
Paul Gilroy’s view that hybridity always implies prior purities. True, no
cultures are pure or bounded, which is to say, nothing is nonhybrid; but
some interactions are more hybrid than others. I believe we can usefully
recover the concept if we keep it grounded in historical specificities and
resist its vague discursive seduction.
This brings up another criticism of hybridity, its abstractness, or more
precisely its location in discourse rather in specific socioeconomic condi-
tions. In Edward Soja’s and Homi Bhabha’s writings, hybridity is claimed
to be a mode of consciousness that “releases the imagination to conceive
of the world in new ways” (Dirlik 2000:182). Soja’s term “thirdspace”
42 Introduction
(1996) and Bhabha’s term “inbetweenness” (1994) are similar to Appadu-
rai’s term “global imaginaries” (1996) in that they emphasize the realm of
thought and creativity rather than on-the ground realities. Although this
realm can fruitfully lead us to performance and style, it can also become
too abstract, losing sight of precisely the material realities that inform the
imaginary. Dirlik has been a vocal critic of valorization of the hybrid and
the diasporic because these concepts can easily elide specific histories,
structures, and power inequalities (1997, 2000, 2002). He points out that
hybridity as an abstract concept may actually blur “in the name of differ-
ence, significant distinctions between differences . . . as if the specific
character of what is being mixed (from class to gender to ethnicity and
race) did not matter” (2000:184). Dirlik reminds us that hybridity may
serve “not to illuminate but to disguise social inequality and exploitation
by reducing to a state of hybridity all those who may be considered ‘mar-
ginal,’ covering up the fact that there is great deal of difference between
marginalities” (184). Specific histories must always be examined.
Another danger in glibly using a term like hybridity is that it takes on a
life of its own in identity discourse and loses political mooring.10 Further-
more, the power of hybridity can be harnessed by reactionary as well as
progressive causes: “Hybridity in and of itself is not a marker of any kind
of politics but a deconstructive strategy that may be used for different
political ends” (Dirlik 2000:187). Rey Chow elaborates the position that
hybridity, though valorizing difference and disjuncture, may acquiesce to
and support the status quo of global capitalism: “The enormous seductive-
ness of the postmodern hybridite’s discourse lies . . . in its invitation to join
the power of global capitalism by flattening out past injustices” (1998:156).
John Hutnyk similarly writes that there is no problem with creative trading
of cultures, but rather we must investigate the terms of the trade: “To think
that a celebration of the trade is sufficient is the problem. Celebration of
multicultural diversity and fragmentation is exactly the logic of the mass
market” (2000:135). Along these lines, in Chapter 13 I investigate appro-
priation of Romani music by non-Roma for commercial transactions.
Dirlik points out that hybridity means different things to different class
constituencies. To business investors it means internationalizing con-
sumption markets, but to postcolonial scholars such as Bhabha and Soja
it means a new kind of radical politics (Dirlik 2002). Concepts of multicul-
turalism, transnationalism, and globalism have been successfully used by
corporations to recruit wider markets (Dirlik 1997:94–95). Gilroy simi-
larly points out that hybridity has been annexed by corporate culture
(2004:xix), and Žižek underlines that multiculturalism is manipulated by
commerce (1997). Indeed, music marketers and producers have played an
important role in the proliferation of hybrid Gypsy fusion genres such as
Gypsy Punk, Balkan Beats, and DJ remixes under the rubric “world music”
(see Chapter 13).
These critiques are useful for showing that celebrating hybridity may
mask underlying inequalities. Similarly, generalizing all Roma as hybrid
flattens them into one homogeneous group and obscures on-the-ground

differences. Roma are divided by class, religion, language, sense of home-
land, and identity label. Just as Dirlik’s Chinese colleague felt “silenced by
a concept such as hybridity which erases his differences from other Chi-
nese” (2000:198), Roma, both activists and ordinary citizens, often reject
pan-Romani scholarly labels such as hybrid in favor of historically
informed particularistic labels and positions. The label Roma is a case in
point because it is sometimes rejected as an outside imposition; the histor-
ical reasons for adoption or rejection of the label reveal much about social
positioning. Communities of Muslim Turkish-speaking Roma in eastern
Bulgaria, for example, label themselves Turks. They “became” Turkish
during the Ottoman Empire, when Turkish culture and language were the
marks of civilization and they could ascend the social scale by adopting
them.11 Today these communities are not so easily convinced to join the
pan-European Romani rights movement; a change of identity would
require deep reevaluation of selfhood and political awareness. Note that
they persist in calling themselves Turks in spite of the fact that the local
population (including Turks) refer to them as Turkish Gypsies. The label
Gypsy is, of course, pejorative, and they do not see the term Roma as an
improvement. On the other hand, in Chapter 11 I show how one musician
from this community, Yuri Yunakov, employed multiple identification
labels throughout his life (including Bulgarian, Gypsy, Romani, and Turk-
ish) depending on context.
The concepts of cosmopolitanism and modernity may also help to inter-
rogate Romani identities precisely because Roma have often been ex-
cluded from these categories; Roma are usually presented by non-Romani
scholars, music producers, and sometimes themselves as “traditional,”
“premodern,” bound by kin, custom, and conservatism (Van de Port 1998).
On the other hand, Roma may also be viewed as the epitome of global
postmodern European citizens: motley, diasporic, urban, transnational,
with ultimate loyalty to no one state (or to many states), having no
common religion, language, or territory. Their cultural traits sometimes
resemble those of their non-Romani neighbors more than other Romani
groups, and their music is innovative and open to various generic influ-
ences. They are always multilingual, multicultural, and multioccupa-
tional: in short; they are multisited and cosmopolitan, at home everywhere
in a Europe that despises them. (See text supplement 3.2 for a fuller dis-
cussion of cosmopolitanism and modernity.)
Hybridity and World Music
In his 2000 book, John Hutnyk, a Marxist anthropologist specializing in

popular fusion musics of England, provides an insightful critique of hy-
bridity in relation to world music.12 World music is above all a marketing
label; it emerged in the 1980s and converted the conservative “interna-
tional folk” section of record stores into a hip site of fusion and hybridity
(Taylor 1997). But what does global capitalism’s embrace of heterogeneity
44 Introduction
really mean? Bringing the musics of marginal peoples into the mainstream
may yield visibility and even hard cash for formerly impoverished per-
formers if they have fair contracts. But valorization of hybridity rarely
changes the structures of inequality. For Roma it is true that some per-
formers have become rich (even supporting whole villages in the Balkans)
and Gypsy styles have been appropriated by mainstream non-Romani art-
ists (see Chapter 13). But the overall structural domination of Roma has
not changed. On the other hand, as I illustrate in several chapters, there
have been many emancipatory artistic moments and even movements that
could count as resistance.
Hutnyk shows how certain cultural forms become “the flavour of the
month . . . the seasoning for transnational commerce. . . . Hybridity sells
difference as the logic of multiplicity” (2000:4–5). In its meekest form, hy-
bridity is not too far from the Disney version of multiculturalism: watered
down, safe, distant. Liberals can feel good when buying a hybrid product
like a world music CD because of the imputed connection to the dispos-
sessed. In fact, marginality can becomes a kind of asset, a type of political
cache, because of the assumption that marginal folks make good music,
and we owe it to them to buy their products. It is certainly no accident that
African Americans and Roma occupy similar positions vis-à-vis race and
music. Hutnyk writes that “other love (anti-racism, esotericism, anthro-
pology) can turn out to be its opposite” (2000:6). This is reminiscent of
Renato Rosaldo’s concept of “imperialist nostalgia,” whereby the powerful
destroy a form of life and then yearn for it aesthetically: “Imperialist nostal-
gia uses the pose of ‘innocent yearning’ both to capture people’s imagina-
tions and to conceal its complicity with often brutal domination”
(1989:69–70). Thus Roma (or African Americans or Native Americans)
suffer discrimination for years, and then white folks idolize and appropriate
their music (or spirituality) as a means to erase this history and feel good.
Although marginality may be an attraction in music, it also may be erased
by the illusion of success on stage. Part of the deceptive seductiveness of
hybridity for audiences is the assumption that in art there is a level playing
field. Hybridity, especially in music, comes with an aura of equality. The
logic goes something like this: if Africans or Gypsies use Western harmony
and electric guitars and appear in large festivals, they must be already inte-
grated into the West and successful; and if they are successful, we assume
they are compensated fairly and accepted fully by the mainstream as musi-
cians and people. Of course, these are all false presumptions.
Hutnyk writes: “Difference within the system is a condition and stimulus
of the market—and this necessarily comes with an illusion of equality, . . .
‘crossed’ cultural forms merely competing for a fair share” (2000:33). Few
audience members bother to find out what performers are paid, what West-
ern styles and instruments mean to performers, or how performers are
treated once the show is over. Romani musicians relate many stories of
being idolized on stage but being suspect in walking down the street (see
Chapter 12). Furthermore, successful performers are unrepresentative of
the vast majority of poverty-stricken Roma. Neither can we presume Romani

world musicians to be representative of all Roma; nor can we presume that
they have solved the problems of marginality.
The role of the exotic in representation of many world music styles has
been noted by numerous scholars (Taylor 1997 and 2007; Stokes 2004;
Radano and Bohlman 2000; Kapchan 2007). As I explore in several chap-
ters, Gypsies are iconically pictured as sexual, eastern, passionate, geneti-
cally musical, and defiant of rules and regulations. It is precisely their
outsiderness, their otherness, that makes them a valuable marketing com-
modity; many performers know this very well and capitalize on it. But
performers are always negotiating the fine line between exoticism and re-
jection, between being a Gypsy on stage and passing as an ordinary citizen
so as to avoid discrimination. Esma Redžepova’s life history (Chapter 10),
for example, illustrates how she embodied the multiethnic agenda of
socialist Yugoslavia through her music at the same time she presented
herself as an authentic Gypsy star on stage; simultaneously she faced prej-
udice in the Yugoslav recording industry.
In an ironic twist, the hybrid often becomes a mark of authenticity (even
purity), and the two terms can even be found side by side in music mar-
keting. In Chapter 12 I show how Gypsies are pictured as Europe’s last
bastion of authenticity by Europeans who are mourning their own loss of
authenticity. Perhaps the authentic emanates magically from the hybrid
because it is enacted by marginal artists: folks who look like they come
from real communities with real rituals, songs, and dances, the very things
most Europeans and Americans have lost, or think they have lost. Although
the label “authentic” may valorize Romani music, it can also serve as a
straightjacket, limiting choices of performers. In Chapter 13 I illustrate
how West European audience members prefer acoustic instruments for
Romani bands because then they can be sure they are getting “the real
thing.” As Hutnyk states, “The ghettoization of purity and authenticity
serves only to corral the ‘ethnically’ marked performer yet again” (2000:31).
One of Hutnyk’s most important points is that the celebration of hy-
bridity by both postcolonial scholars and marketers is occurring precisely
at a time when identities are becoming more political and battles are
being waged for representation and turf:
Why is it that cultural celebration rarely translates into political trans-

formation? . . . At a time when class politics in the West seems blocked,
does the shift to identity, hybridity and the postcolonial express a
decline in aspirations (to transform the entire system) and an accom-
modation to things as they seem now and forever to be? Importing
culturally “hybrid” styles via the mass media that sanitises and decon-
textualizes the political context for those styles . . . might be recog-
nized as a danger [2000:119].
Hutnyk calls for engaged cultural studies where hybridity is not merely
celebrated aesthetically and discursively but enmeshed in political strug-
gles. The challenge I accept from Dirlik and Gilroy is to keep a focus on
46 Introduction
representation, performance, and aesthetics while still maintaining a solid
connection to material conditions and history. Thus I turn to the relation-
ship of music to identity issues and the current struggle of Roma for polit-
ical rights.
Identity Politics and the Romani

Rights Movement
As discussed earlier, Roma constitute a rich mosaic of groups that distin-

guish among themselves culturally and do not usually intermarry. The di-
versity of Romani groups is in part due to their diaspora; some Roma
became sedentary, some are nomadic to varying degrees, some assimi-
lated more than others linguistically and culturally, some adopted the reli-
gious beliefs of their neighbors (Hancock 2002; Guy 2001). Discrimination
is sometimes the only thing that seems to unify Roma, and this is precisely
what Roma seek to eliminate. Activists recognize this diversity:
While East European administrators tend to look for the “unique-

ness” and unity of a people’s culture as a prerequisite for promoting
distinct cultural entities . . . the Romani people is presenting itself as
a huge diaspora embracing five continents, sharing the citizenship of
a multitude of states, while lacking a territory of its own. The Gypsy
“archipelago” is formed by a mosaic of various groups speaking both
different dialects of Romani as an oral language and a variety of lan-
guages of the surrounding societies. The Romani communities share
a number of religions . . .; they maintain cultural boundaries not only
between themselves and the surrounding environment, but also
between various Romani groups themselves [Gheorghe and Acton
2001:55–56].
Will Guy similarly asserts that “in view of the diversity of Romani expe-
rience, it would be more accurate to talk of a constellation of Romani
cultures and . . . a cluster of varying and related identities rather than a
homogeneous identity” (Guy 2001:28; also see Marushiakova and Popov
2001). Gheorghe and Acton also realize that the “multiculturality” of
Roma can be a drawback to political mobilization: “it is still difficult to
imagine how multiculturality and multi-territoriality could become the
basis for the cultural affirmation and development of a people . . . which
strive to identify themselves . . . in terms of unity and specificity” (2001:56).
Although Mirga and Gheorghe suggest adopting the term “transnational
minority,”13 other activists use the terminology “ethnogenesis” (Guy
2001:19) or “nation.” The International Romani Union’s14 Declaration of a
Nation, in 2000, states: “Individuals belonging to the Roma Nation call for
representation of their Nation which does not want to become a state. . . .
We share the same tradition, the same culture, the same origin, we are a
nation” (Acton and Klimova 2001:216).

Like indigenous rights movements that have used symbols for unifica-
tion (such as the powwow of Native Americans), the Romani rights move-
ment has created national symbols. They include a unifying label (Roma),
a singular narrative of Indian origin, the Holocaust as a symbol of oppres-
sion, a flag, a literary language, and an anthem. Each is a trope that
inscribes the legitimate historical place of Roma in the world; each corre-
sponds to the dominant European tropes of defining the heritage of a sin-
gular nation. This is no accident, as the Romani movement seeks to
legitimize the place of Roma in European politics. As discussed earlier in
this chapter, the term Roma is used as an in-group label largely by Roma
who speak Romani, but these Roma constitute only about half the world’s
Roma. Other designations, such as Gypsy, Sinti, Gitano, and Tsigan, have
regional provenance but are sometimes contested in pan-European ac-
tivist forums. Roma has emerged as the unifying term even in regions
where it was never used.
Marushiakova and Popov claim a significant part of Romani nationalist
ideology is “a fresh approach to Romani history emphasizing the Holo-
caust” (2001:49). Indeed, the Romani word for the Holocaust, porrajmos,
is now widely used in Romani circles. The Holocaust has become a sym-
bol of Romani oppression for several reasons: close to a million Roma
perished at the hands of the Nazis; the facts are still not widely known
and more research is needed; few Roma received compensation; and
most important, Romani scholars and activists have had to fight to be
included in Holocaust museums, memorials, and commemorations, both
in Europe and America (Hancock 1987 and 2002). Unlike the Holocaust,
which is a badge of suffering, the Romani anthem and flag are positive
affirmations of Romani heritage and identity. Both were adopted at the
First World Romani Congress, which took place in London in 1971. The
flag is composed of a green lower portion, a blue upper portion, and a red
wheel in the middle (photograph 3.1). Common explanations assert that
green is the earth, blue is the sky, and the wheel is migration, but I have
also heard activists claim the wheel is a spiritual sign, a mandala, signi-
fying Indian ties.
Formation of a singular Romani literary language and production of a
Romani dictionary were mandated several years ago by the International
Romani Union, but progress has been slow. Many Romani dialects exist,
and the language has changed and continues to change in relation to
surrounding languages (V. Friedman 1985, Matras 2002). Deciding which
dialect of Romani to elevate to the literary language is problematic, as
well as deciding which orthography to use. According to V. Friedman
(2005) and Matras (2005), a multiplicity of forms of literary Romani are
emerging, which have national or regional provenance rather than inter-
national provenance. The challenge is how to network among these
forms. According to Matras, the web of Romani language varieties (rather
than a single form) “fits the specific Romani situation of a trans-national
minority with dispersed regional centres of cultural and public life”
(2005:31).
48 Introduction
Music in the Romani Rights Movement:
Origins and Anthems
The Indian origin of Roma is supported by historical linguistics, but the

precise time, location, and nature of the Indian exodus is contested
(Matras 2002; Hancock 2002).15 Activists, however, sometimes use du-
bious historical connections to prove cultural ties to India, such as assert-
ing that certain Romani musical scales or dance steps come from India
(see Chapter 2). Furthermore, Western European Gypsy music festivals
are usually modeled on the documentary film Latcho Drom, which depicts
linear nomadic migration, starting in Rajasthan, India, and ending in
Spain (see Chapter 12). This may convey a misleading message that Raja-
sthani music today is what Romani music sounded like a thousand years
ago. Furthermore, as discussed in Chapter 1, not all Roma are nomadic.
In the 1970s, Macedonian and Serbian Romani musicians embraced
Indian-inspired melodies and songs, reflecting the growing diaspora con-
sciousness of Roma. In Macedonia there was a veritable craze for Indian
culture; parents gave their children Indian names such as Rajiv and Indira,
and one famous singer made pilgrimages to India (see Chapter 10 on
Esma Redžepova).16 Movies from India were widely viewed by Roma (who
could understand them because Hindi, like Romani, is related to San-
skrit), and movie tunes were turned into čočeks. For example, in 1990 the
snake theme from the Indian movie The Cobra became “Sapeskiri Čoček”
(the snake’s čoček; Pettan 2003).
Muharem Serbezovski’s Serbian song “Ramo Ramo,” a tune inspired by
an Indian film, became a hit in the 1970s.17 Many versions were released
in Yugoslavia. A Romani version appeared in Serbia/Kosovo in the 1970s
as “Celo Dive Mangasa” (All Day We Beg; audio example with text supple-
ment 3.1). This version emphasizes the themes of poverty and loss of a
friend. Note the older Kosovo style of acoustic instrumental accompani-
ment, comprising clarinet, accordion, džumbuš (long-necked, fretless,
plucked lute with a skin face), and tarabuka (the synthesizer had not
entered the scene yet).
Another 1970s song invoking India is Serbezovski’s “Ramajana,” whose
title refers both to the Hindu epic and his daughter’s name. Like many
musicians, Serbezovski (born in Topana, Skopje, in 1950) moved to Sara-
jevo in the 1970s to further his career; there he married a non-Romani
Bosnian woman and faced issues around assimilation of his children.18
This chapter of his life is chronicled in the song: when he asks his daughter
if she speaks Romani, a chorus of children answer, “No I don’t know
Romani” (audio example with text supplement 3.2, video example 3.1). The
song displays Indian elements not only in the text but also in the music.19
In the mid-1990s, the Serbian Romani singer Zvonko Demirović
released “Stranci” (Strangers; Serbian) which deals with Indian origins
and the tragic fate of Roma (audio example with text supplement 3.3).
The song has a pop/jazz introduction followed by a slow 4/4 meter
(number 5 in Figure 2.1). The text is more about the suffering of Roma

than about Indian origins, but it does mention the posited origins of those
in Macedonia who call themselves Egyptians. Hundreds of other songs
deal with poverty, suffering, orphaned children, death, and lack of work—
in general, the hard lives of Roma. In fact, these are the some of the most
common themes of Balkan Romani song texts.
A few songs deal with resistance to suffering, that is, fighting back or
rising up. One such song is “Kemano Bašal” (The violin plays; by the
singer Džansever, discussed in Chapter 2; on Bašal Kemano/ Violino Sviri,
Sokoj MP 21102), which metaphorically calls for the unity of all Roma
(audio example with text supplement 3.4). Some Macedonian Roma refer
to this song as their “anthem.”20 Besides Kemano Bašal, there are other
local “anthems” such as “Ciganyhimnusz” (The Gypsy anthem), which is
widespread in Hungary (Lange 1999). Recently, a group of Romani musi-
cians including Esma Redžepova, Kal, and rapper R Point composed ver-
sions of the European Union anthem for the antiracism campaign Dosta
(Enough), funded by the Council of Europe (http://www.coe.int/T/DG3/
RomaTravellers/dosta_en.asp, accessed June 17, 2011).
The song that is claimed most widely as the Romani anthem is “Dželem
Dželem” (I traveled and traveled), whose trajectory is a good illustration of
the interplay between politics and music. The melody of the song (in a
minor scale) was in oral circulation in multiple variants in the Balkans at
least since the late nineteenth century. It is possibly a Romanian song
adopted into Serbia (Marushiakova and Popov 1995:20–21). It became
popular when it was featured in the 1960s in the Yugoslav feature film
Skupljači Perja (literally, the feather buyers, known in English as I Even
Met Happy Gypsies, 1967), directed by Aleksandar Petrovič.
The song’s more recent political import is tied to the April 1971 meeting
of the Comité Internationale Tsigane in London. Romani activists gath-
ered and reconstituted the Comité as the First World Romani Congress,
which was eventually constituted as the International Romani Union. Ser-
bian singer Jarko Jovanović embellished the song for the Congress by
taking several verses from oral tradition and writing several new ones. The
British sociologist Thomas Acton reported that “Jarko composed them on
a bus, the day people from the congress formed a delegation and went to
Walsall, where three little Romani children had been burned to death in a
trailer while the police were towing [it] away” (Gelbart 2004:1). Donald
Kenrick, a British linguist and educator who was also there, remembers
that Dr. Jan Cibula, a Romani activist from Slovakia, contributed to the
text. It was adopted as the official song of the Congress and sung at its
closing (Marushiakova and Popov 1995:21). It eventually became the
“Romani anthem” through use at numerous political gatherings, and it
now frequently opens or closes major Romani political events in the dias-
pora such as International Day of Roma, April 8. For example, Esma
Redžepova sang “Dželem Dželem” at the opening of the Skopje Romani
music festival Šutkafest in 1993 (video example 3.2 and Chapter 10).
The lyrics in text supplement 3.1 are taken from Gelbart (2004) but mod-
ified in translation and orthography. Gelbart took them from the Albanian
50 Introduction
Romani group Rromani Dives (Romani day).21 The text exhibits a strong
and indicting reference to the Holocaust, not common in Romani songs.
However, as I noted above, since 1989 activists have mobilized the Holo-
caust as an organizing symbol for Romani unity and resistance. I believe
the song has a more general emotional appeal than a specific historical
appeal. There are hundreds of variants in circulation, and many versions
have been commercially recorded in myriad styles, although its popularity
is greatest in Serbia and Macedonia.22
Most of the variants now in circulation neither have overtly political texts
nor mention the Holocaust. Serbian Romani singer Šaban Bajramović’s
1980s version about love has been countlessly emulated both in text and
melodic contour. According to Gelbart, activist Valery Novoselsky claimed
the song “is important not only for our politicians and representation but
for ordinary people also. . . . [When non-Roma hear it] they can under-
stand more of who we are” (2004:3). Activists point out its political func-
tion, but ordinary Roma often become teary when they hear the song.
It sometimes helps to bridge the gap between Roma and non-Roma.
When Macedonian Romani singer Esma Redžepova performed the song
in Serbian at a private New York City party in 1996, the audience con-
sisted of Macedonian Roma, Serbian Roma, and American Kalderash.
These groups do not normally socialize, and there is little camaraderie
among them. Esma directed her performance of the song (in Serbian) to
the Serbian Roma and the American Kalderash (see photograph 3.2 and
video example 3.3); the rest of her program was directed to the Macedo-
nian Roma. But at the moment of performance, there was a palpable
feeling of unity in the room. On the other hand, sometimes the song fails
to achieve this unifying function. In Chapter 12 I recount how “Dželem
Dželem” was rejected as a finale piece by most of the musicians in the
1999 Gypsy Caravan tour because they didn’t relate to it. Finally, video
example 3.4 shows Esma singing “Dželem Dželem” to a mixed audience of
Macedonians and Roma in 2004 at a Macedonian church in Garfield, New
Jersey. The song thus reveals a complex web of identity politics and charts
how Roma choose to represent themselves.
The Crucible of Identity
In examining use of the anthem, the flag, and the quest for a literary
language, we see that although Roma have been excluded from the domi-
nant tropes of national folklore and cultural heritage (see Chapter 7) they
have constructed their own symbols of heritage as part of a strategizing
process in European politics. Herzfeld points out that “states AND citizens
both depend on the semiotic illusion—that identity is consistent; they both
create or constitute homogeneity and produce iconicities” (1997:31).
Although “essentialism is not exclusively a state activity . . . states do have a
rich variety of devices [and I would add institutions] for essentializing. . . . It
seems like common sense” (31). Marginalized ethnic groups such as Roma

often engage in what Gayatri Spivak has termed “strategic essentialism”
(1988) in the cause of mobilization. Herzfeld reminds us that “powerful
state agents and humble social actors all engage in the strategy of essen-
tialism to the same degree.” In fact, “social poetics is the analysis of essen-
tialism in everyday life” (1997:31).
Herzfeld rightly draws our attention back to essentialism, a concept
that has been so demonized in cultural theory that Werbner called it
“the bogey word of the human sciences” (1997:226). Perhaps the con-
cept of hybridity became so fashionable because it seemed the perfect
antidote to essentialism. Demonization of essentialism is quite unfortu-
nate because we can never understand identity politics without it. Fur-
thermore, as scholars we remove ourselves from the trenches of political
struggle when we point fingers and assign accusatory labels. As Dirlik
writes: “It seems that any admission of identity, including the identity
that may be necessary to any articulated form of collective political
action, is open to charges of essentialism” (2000:188; also see Dirlik
1997).23 Similarly, bell hooks welcomes a critique of essentialism but
warns:
This critique should not become a means to dismiss differences or an

excuse for the ignoring of experience. It is often evoked in a manner
which suggests that all the ways black people think of ourselves as
‘different’ from whites are really essentialist, and therefore without
concrete grounding. This way of thinking threatens the very founda-
tion that makes resistance to domination possible [1990:130].
Both hooks and Dirlik remind us of the irony that postmodern/postcolo-

nial intellectuals have the luxury to repudiate essentialized identities.
These scholars construct “identities and histories almost at will in those
‘in-between’ places that are immune to the burden of the past,” whereas
those who suffer “the sentence of history” are supposedly too caught up in
the past and thus misguided in their collective claims (Dirlik 1997:221).
Too often academics intellectualize an unequal playing field into an
abstract argument. Nicholas Thomas states:
Clifford writes as though the problem were merely intellectual: differ-

ence and hybridity are more appropriate analytically to the contem-
porary scene of global cultural transposition than claims about
human sameness or bounded types. I would agree, but this does not
bear upon the uses that essential discourses may have for people
whose projects involve mobilization rather than analysis. . . . Nativist
consciousness cannot be deemed undesirable merely because it is
ahistorical. . . . The main problem is not that this imposes academic
(and arguably ethnocentric) standards on non-academic and non-
Western representation, but that it paradoxically essentializes na-
tivism by taking its politics to be uniform [1994:176].
52 Introduction
Both Thomas and Dirlik encourage scholars not to dismiss cultural and
historical claims to collective identity as mere essentialisms, but to ana-
lyze them as works in progress in a hierarchical political playing field.
For Dirlik history is critical; he titles a chapter in his book The Postco-
lonial Aura “The Past as Legacy and Project: Postcolonial Criticism of In-
digenous Historicism” to differentiate history as static heritage from
history as a political project. Using indigenous cultural politics as a case
study, he writes that its political significance lies “in its claims to a dif-
ferent historicity that challenges not just postcolonial denials of collective
identity but the structure of power that contains it. To criticize indigenous
ideology for its reification of culture is to give it at best an incomplete
reading” (1997:228). Thus the use of cultural and historical symbols in
political struggles of marginal peoples cannot be merely explained away
as “social constructions.”
With the case of Roma, although we may be tempted to label their na-
tionalist symbols “invented traditions” because they are newly created, we
fall into several traps by employing the term invented. Hobsbawm and
Ranger (1983) first used the term to refer to symbols and practices that
figured prominently in European nationalist discourse but were of recent
historical provenance. They therefore implied that some traditions are
real or authentic (meaning old) while others were invented, hence made-
up and inauthentic. Handler and Linnekin (1984), Wagner (1979) and
Hanson (1989) broadened the argument to claim that all traditions (and
for Wagner, culture itself) are invented in the sense that they are social
constructions. Thus authenticity is itself a social construction. This con-
structivist position fit nicely into the 1980s postmodernist critique of
bounded notions of culture but couldn’t have been more ill-timed in terms
of world politics.
Indeed, the 1980s were precisely the era of the emergence of identity
politics, when marginal groups were finally taking center stage and de-
fining their own histories and symbols. As Clifford states: “For just at the
moment the radical post-structuralisms became popular in the US
academy, a whole range of formerly marginal and excluded peoples and
perspectives were fighting for recognition: women, racial, and ethnic mi-
norities, new immigrants. These groups, for the first time entering the
public sphere, often felt the sophisticated cultural critics to be, in effect,
telling them, ‘Oh yes, we understand your gender, race, culture and iden-
tity are important to you, but you know, you’re just essentializing’”
(2003:64). Indigenous scholar/activists such as Haunani-Kay Trask (1991)
rejected “the implication that dynamic traditions were merely politically
contrived for current purposes” (Clifford 2004:156) and criticized con-
structivists as neocolonial outsiders who were thwarting the legitimate
political agendas of marginalized people. Other scholars analyzed the con-
frontation between these two sides, arguing that we should simultaneously
abandon the loaded language of “invention” and interrogate all positions
as to motivations, agendas, and funding (Briggs 1996).

Taking Briggs’s suggestion, I aim to elucidate how the concept of heri-
tage/tradition can be pried from its narrow historical moorings so we may
understand the symbols of the Romani rights movement as historically
placed responses to marginality. At the same time, an expanded notion of
heritage can help us widen bounded notions of national culture to embrace
multicultural and hybrid forms. Indigenous heritage movements, such as
those of various Native American groups, can serve as useful compari-
sons. Dirlik writes: “Contrary to critics . . . who see in every affirmation of
cultural identity an ahistorical cultural essentialism, indigenous voices
are quite open to change; what they insist on is not cultural purity or per-
sistence, but the preservation of a particular historical trajectory of their
own” (1997:223).
As Clifford notes, indigenous leaders are simultaneously loosening and
reclaiming the notion of authenticity; sometimes authenticity can be “a
straightjacket, making every engagement with modernity (religions, tech-
nologies, knowledges, markets, or media) a contamination, a ‘loss’ of true
selfhood” (2004:156). Rejecting their emplacement in the past, native
leaders are asserting their legitimate place in modernity through global
displays of media, technology, and legality. Simultaneously they are claim-
ing land, reviving languages and rituals, reclaiming sacred objects and
burials from collections, building cultural centers, and representing them-
selves in museums. Similarly, Roma are starting to establish cultural cen-
ters, design exhibits, produce films, publish histories, and produce their
own music festivals and albums (see Chapter 12). As Clifford writes, these
are “zones of contact” (1997:188–219), “whereby authenticity thus
becomes a process—the open-ended work of preservation and transfor-
mation. Living traditions must be selectively pure: mixing, matching, re-
membering, forgetting, sustaining, transforming their senses of communal
continuity” (2004:156). To examine what Roma and other marginalized
groups are doing is to implicitly interrogate and rethink received notions
of tradition and authenticity.
Clifford claims that “what is at stake is the power to define tradition and
authenticity, to determine the relationships though which . . . identity is
negotiated in a changing world” (2004:157). The challenge is to reject both
a pro- and anti-essentialist position and to embrace an anti-anti-essential-
ist position. As Clifford writes:
The two negatives do not, of course, add up to a positive, and so the

anti-anti-essentialist position is not simply a return to essentialism. It
recognizes that a rigorously anti-essentialist attitude, with respect to
things like identity, culture, tradition, gender . . . is not really a posi-
tion one can sustain in a consistent way. . . . Certainly one can’t sus-
tain a social movement or a community without certain apparently
stable criteria for distinguishing us from them. These may be . . . ar-
ticulated in connections and disconnections, but as they are expressed
and become meaningful to people, they establish accepted truths.
Certain key symbols come to define the we against the they; certain
54 Introduction
core elements . . . come to be separated out, venerated, fetishized,
defended. This is the normal process, the politics, by which groups
form themselves into identities [2003:62].
Stuart Hall makes the point that identity politics arises precisely around
issues of representation (also see Hancock 1997): “Though they seem to
invoke an origin in a historical past . . ., actually identities are about . . .
using the resources of history, language and culture in the process of be-
coming . . .; not ‘who we are’ or ‘where we came from’ so much as who we
might become, how we have been represented, and how that bears on how
we represent ourselves. Identities are, therefore constituted within, not
without representation” (1996a:4). Hall’s concept of identity rejects an un-
changing traditional core; it “does not signal that stable core of the self,
unfolding from beginning to end through all the vicissitudes of history
without change. . . . Nor . . . is it that ‘collective or true self hiding inside
the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed “selves,” which a
people with a shared history . . . hold in common’ and which can stabilize,
fix, or guarantee an unchanging ‘oneness’ or cultural belongingness under-
lying all the other superficial differences.” Rather, identities are “never
unified, and . . . increasingly fragmented and fractured, never singular but
multiply constructed across . . . intersecting and antagonistic discourses,
practices and positions” (Hall 1996a:3–4). For Roma, identity has always
been construed in relation to hegemonic powers such as patrons of the
arts, socialist ideologues, European Union officials, and NGO funders.
According to Clifford, “tradition is not a wholesale return to past ways,
but a practical selection and critical reweaving of roots” whereby “some
essentialisms are embraced while others are rejected (2004:157). Tradition
should not be read as “endless reiteration but as ‘the changing same,’ not
the so-called return to roots but a coming-to-terms with our routes” (Hall
1996a:4). Here Hall is referencing Paul Gilroy’s useful formulation of tra-
dition as the “changing same” (1993:101). Gilroy advocates that the term
tradition be used “neither to identify a lost past nor to name a culture of
compensation which would restore access to it” (198). The “lost past” is
sometimes conceived by African-American writers and activists as the
African homeland, whereby “Africa is retained as one special measure of
their authenticity” (191). But, according to Gilroy, this ignores the impor-
tant place of the diaspora in forging African-American identities. Simi-
larly for Roma, Indian origins, whether historical, linguistic, or cultural,
are valorized but diasporic flows and cultural circulations define the
Romani experience.
Rather than standing in opposition to modernity, tradition indicates a
specific relation to it: “We struggle to comprehend the reproduction of cul-
tural traditions not in the unproblematic transmission of a fixed essence
through time but in the breaks and interruptions which suggest that the
invocation of tradition may itself be a distinct, though covert response to
the post-contemporary world” (Gilroy 1993:101). Gilroy, Clifford, Hall, and
Briggs all urge us to analyze specific identity projects in their historical

contexts, paying special attention to inequalities and hierarchies. Just as
the project of African-American identity making was forged in the crucible
of slavery and diaspora (Gilroy 1993) and the project of Native American
identity making was forged in the crucible of genocide and displacement,
similarly the project of Romani identity making was forged during cen-
turies of discrimination and diaspora. The marginal position of these
groups has led to an urgency of cultural matters tied to human rights and
global entitlements. And music in diaspora contexts assumes an especially
important place in this process, as I illustrate in the chapters that follow.
56 Introduction
PART I I
M US I C IN D I AS P O R I C H O MES
4
ab
Transnational Families
T his chapter examines the issue of transnationalism from the point of

view of Romani communities. Romani families are “transnational,”
defined by Bryceson and Vuorela as those “that live some or most of the
time separated from each other, yet hold together and create something
that can be seen as a feeling of collective welfare and unity, namely ‘fami-
lyhood,’ even across national borders” (2002:3). Not only does Romani
music travel in transnational circuits; Romani musicians and community
members travel and communicate in a diasporic network.
As mentioned in Chapter 1, the center of Macedonian Romani life in the
United States is located in the Belmont neighborhood of the Bronx. Ner-
min, a middle-aged woman living in the Bronx, summarized: “We stay in
touch with the relatives at home [in Macedonia]—we speak on the phone,
we send music, we send videos of our weddings. People come here.”
Almost all Roma in Macedonia have relatives abroad in many countries of
Western Europe, in the United States, and in Australia. In this chapter, as
well as the following two, I explore how the New York community cements
its ties to Macedonia and other diasporic locations through marriage,
language, and ritual, all enacted performatively via cultural markers such
as music and dance.
Migration Narrated in Song
Since the 1960s, Balkan singers in general and Roma in particular have
used the theme of gurbet or pečalba (working abroad)1 to lament the sep-
aration of loved ones. For example, after he arrived in New York in 1992,
Ferhan Ismail composed the text of the song “Gurbeti” to a Turkish
melody and recorded it (audio example with text supplement 4.1, photo-
graph 4.1;). Ferhan wrote this precisely when he had emigrated from Sko-
pje, and its text voices the pain of separation. Another song, “O Gurbetluko,”
59
composed by the Macedonian Romani singer Ramko (Ramadan Bislim),
tells about a dying father whose son went abroad to work (audio example
with text supplement 4.2). The father’s bitterness from illness and separa-
tion causes him to curse his son in his last living moments. This is a very
grave utterance in Romani culture, as children are ideally sacred.
Similarly, the song “To Phurano Bunari” (Your old well; audio example
with text supplement 4.3), composed by Abas Muzafer of Šuto Orizari,
laments separation by way of his brother’s wedding in Germany, which he
cannot attend. In this text as well as the previous two, note first that money
becomes worthless or “cursed” when compared to the ordeal of separation
from family. Second, family rather than place is missed, underlining the
person-oriented rather than place-oriented values of Roma. Money is
blamed for the pain of loss, and, strikingly (in “To Phurano Bunari”) it
becomes bloodied money. Third, the guest worker is depicted as suffering
abroad while his relatives suffer at home. He is pictured as lonely and
isolated, reduced to a prisoner begging for bread, even wanting to die. Fi-
nally, in “To Bunaro” home is described as an “an old well.” Muzafer’s
home, indeed, had a well in the courtyard, so this is a personal vision.
These texts provide an artistic view of immigration stories; when the songs
are performed in the diaspora, Romani audiences are visibly moved. Sim-
ilar sentiments are kindled when talava singers improvise greetings to rel-
atives abroad (see Chapter 2).
The movement of people, things, and ideas occurs among several sites
in the diaspora, occasionally even without reference to Macedonia.
Although Macedonia is the nominal “home,” Roma often prefer to travel
to other diasporic locations. A woman in Toronto, for example, saved
money to visit her sister in Melbourne whom she had not seen for twenty-
five years; this was more important than a cheaper trip to Macedonia,
where she has many more relatives. Travel is contingent on having proper
documents and substantial money for tickets and expensive gifts; visitors
are expected to treat relatives to meals and sponsor banquets; these prac-
tices are often the reason families cannot afford to travel.
The trajectory of one family clearly illustrates transnational migratory
patterns. In the late 1980s, Osman lived in Belmont; his natal family con-
sisted of a brother who lived with their aging mother in their hometown,
Prilep; a brother in Germany; and a sister, Aiše, who married Ali and lived
in Skopje. He invited me to meet his wife, Jasmin, and his sister, Aiše, who
was visiting in order to attend Osman’s son’s circumcision party and to
earn some money.2 Short work visits were a common occurrence in the
1980s. Aiše invited me to visit her in Macedonia, and she helped me ar-
range my living quarters in Šuto Orizari in 1990. After Aiše returned to
Macedonia, one of her brothers came to Belmont to visit and work. His
son also came to visit and eventually emigrated. Another brother emi-
grated from Germany with his wife and children. In 1992 Aiše’s oldest son,
Ramo (born 1970), arrived in Belmont, and then Aiše came again in 1994.
During all these extended visits, Osman and Jasmin were their hosts,
housing and feeding them in their small two-bedroom apartment, and
60 Music in Diasporic Homes

helping them find work and social connections. Their generosity was
boundless. I especially remember the care that Aiše gave Ramo when he
had an accident, was incapacitated, and had to be nursed back to health.
Aiše and Ali also had a younger son, Rifat, who had remained home in
Skopje with Ali. I remember a moment in August 1994 when Aiše and Ramo
in the Bronx telephoned Ali and Rifat in Skopje and everyone started crying,
all thinking of loved ones in the diaspora. Since family means everything,
people suffer when family members disperse; yet they must, for economic
and sometimes political reasons. Note that the two sons were at the age
when marriage becomes a factor. In 1995, Ramo planned to marry Metola,
who lived in the Bronx and was born in Prilep. Meanwhile, Rifat (living in
Skopje with his father) became engaged to marry Fatima, a Romani woman
born in 1973 in Toronto whose parents were from Prilep (see the story of
their marriage later in this chapter). The parents wanted a double wedding
for their two sons, but the celebration couldn’t take place because Ali could
not get a visa for the United States. Rifat could travel freely because of his
wife’s legal Canadian status; Aiše and Ramo, however, could not leave the
States, so they couldn’t go to Toronto to see Rifat. The only solution was to
wait and keep applying for an American visa for Ali. After more than a year,
Ali finally received a visa and the wedding was held (see next chapter).
Viewing this situation from both American and Balkan viewpoints
helped me understand how Roma negotiate across distances. When I trav-
eled, I was given gifts to bring to Skopje and was instructed to take co-
pious photographs and videos to show to relatives. Whereas Aiše hadn’t
seen her husband in more than a year, other relatives who traveled saw
him, brought gifts, and gave each side pictures and videotapes (some of
which I had filmed). I even served as part of a large communication net-
work consisting of relatives traveling back and forth visiting, working tem-
porarily, and looking for spouses. After Ali emigrated to America, his
family’s transnational ties multiplied significantly. Almost all of the chil-
dren of his brothers and sisters in Šutka have married Macedonian Roma
in the diaspora. Rifat and Ramo now have cousins in Germany, Austria,
Switzerland, Belgium, and Holland.
Early Emigration Stories
Nermin was one of the first Macedonian Roma to emigrate to America in

the 1960s.3 She narrated:
Before I came to America I worked in a state job in Macedonia. I had

four kids. . . . A cousin of mine came to America via Vienna. . . . My hus-
band was also in Vienna working. My cousin’s wife was here six months
and she encouraged me to emigrate. She said, “You have to come over
here, Nermin, I can’t live here alone.” They sent us documents, guaran-
tees. Roma didn’t go to America then—perhaps to Austria but not any
farther. We came to America in 1968. There weren’t any Roma here then.
Transnational Families 61
Leila, who was ten years old when her family arrived from Prilep in 1971,
described why her family migrated:
My dad [Zahir] was one of the first few Roma in the town to become
educated. That in itself is an accomplishment. He had the opportunity
and the desire to . . . go to school. My uncle supported him—he put
him through school. He became a veterinarian, got married, and had
me and my sister. But, as an educated Rom he realized that opportu-
nities were very limited for us, his children. It was super hard for him
to get to where he was, and he didn’t want it to be that hard for us. So,
he came to the States. We came through Vienna, through some
friends. Once we got established my dad brought his nephew here.
And then my mom brought her sister and her brother, then my grand-
parents—we’ve extended the family.
Whether arriving in Australia, Western Europe, or New York, new-

comers lived with relatives who furnished food, housing, clothing, child
care, and work contacts for them until they could venture out on their
own. Note that a substantial burden of providing for new arrivals falls on
the women, since they are in charge of the domestic sphere. When the
hosts themselves are newly arrived, the strain can be intense. Nermin
illustrated:
After we were here for a year a brother of my husband came with his
eight children. They stayed with us for three weeks. After that, three
more families came. We took care of them for five-six months—it was
a very harsh winter. Then five of my brothers came, then my sister,
then two more brothers, then my mother, then another sister. Gradu-
ally the whole family came and now everyone is here. . . . We lived for
three years as a super4; then we bought a building on Belmont Ave.
More and more came, each one helping the next. We have over three
hundred houses here.
Nermin’s comments illustrate that kin ties are activated in the female as
well as the male line. She sponsored more relatives than her husband,
despite the fact that Romani society is (ideally) patrilineal and patrilocal.
Many of Nermin’s relatives migrated to Western Europe and to Australia as
well as New York. These families are transnational and multisited, although
they label Macedonia home (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002; Al-Ali and Koser
2002). Many family members have lived in at least three countries. This ex-
perience means that multilingualism is the norm. In Macedonia, Roma were
and still are multilingual; the older generation spoke Turkish in addition to
Romani and Macedonian. Today, in Prilep and Skopje, Roma tend to speak
Romani, while Roma in Bitola speak Turkish. The Romani language is, how-
ever, on the decline in Belmont; the trend is to retain Macedonian-English
bilingualism. One counter trend, however, is the constant trickle of new
Romani-speaking spouses and visitors coming from Macedonia.

Work and Family Life
All Belmont families started their immigrant experiences with virtually no

material resources; rather, they relied on human resources. Leila illus-
trates: “When we came, we only had two hundred dollars on us. My uncle
took us in. He helped my dad and my mom get a job. He helped us find an
apartment. He took us under his wing, so to speak. He was a friend of my
dad from back home. My dad bought a house within three years after
coming here.” Both men and women are expected to work outside the
home; this was true in Macedonia and remains true in the diaspora, as
Nermin narrates:
There was work to be found even without the language, but for the
best work you had to know the language. The kids were learning the
language, but the parents? My husband’s brother found work down-
town as a janitor. One of my brothers was a tailor—we found him
work; another brother was an electrician so we found him work. We
worked for $1 or $1.50 an hour, $30 a week [in the 1960s]. My hus-
band made $60 a week. Our salaries together were $90 a week. We
worked at night—we had to leave the kids at home alone. But things
weren’t as dangerous then as they are now. Life was pretty good and
we saved money even though we made so little.
There is a strong work ethic in this community; having a job is the norm
and laziness is condemned. Everyone believes there is work to be had,
even if it is unskilled or menial. Unlike in Western Europe, few Macedo-
nian Roma in America are officially refugees, so they are not entitled to
social services. They view welfare as somewhat of a stigma and prefer to
support themselves.
The occupations in which Belmont Roma engage are coded by gender,
just as they were in Macedonia. Some common male occupations, such as
electrician, construction worker, car mechanic, and tailor, have trans-
ferred well to America. Other occupations such as metalworker do not as
readily transfer. Ali, born in 1948 to a family of kovači (blacksmiths), had
a Skopje home workshop where he crafted metal objects, plus a stall in the
open market where he sold these objects and traded clothing. A creative
combination of trades is very characteristic of Balkan Roma (Silverman
1986). In 1990, I observed that Ali was marketing his metal work in five
languages. When he emigrated to the United States, he crafted fences and
ornamental wrought iron for private homes, but his earnings suffered and
he did not want his sons to continue his profession. Many electricians, on
the other hand, have successfully trained their American-born sons to take
over the family business.
Some males have to take any job available, such as factory work; security
guarding; bread, pizza, and meat delivery; and janitorial work in schools,
nursing homes, hospitals, and office buildings. One family opened a hot
dog booth, sharing hours among male and female members and making a
modest income. Ali’s son, who was well educated, worked his way up from
a meat deliveryman to a manager and eventually established his own meat
distribution company. Several professional musicians combine music with
a day job. For example, drummer Severdžan Azirov worked as a delivery
van driver, and singer Nešo Ajvazi worked as a janitor (see Chapter 5). No
females are professional musicians because of the stigma of performing in
public (see Chapters 6 and 10, and Silverman 2003).
Female employment is a necessity in almost all families, although the
ideal is a sole male breadwinner.5 If there are small children and no older
females to care for them, mothers stay home; day care centers are rarely
used. The middle and older generation of women work as cleaning ladies
in office buildings, as cutters in the clothing industry, as sales clerks in
neighborhood shops, as caretakers for the elderly in their homes, as food
managers in nursing homes, and as hair stylists and cosmeticians. These
jobs are similar to those in Macedonia, with the exception that in the Bal-
kans they were state jobs with stable pensions and vacations. In the United
States, there is little security in terms of employment and benefits. Much
depends on legal status. Those who are undocumented, male or female,
are extremely limited in their jobs. In the 1980s, for example, Roma
worked in a neighborhood plastics factory for $4.00 per hour. Undocu-
mented workers have no job security, no vacations, no pension plans, and
no medical insurance; they are constantly afraid their employers will
report them.
Belmont is a multigenerational community. Despite the youth orienta-
tion of American culture, elders occupy a venerated position in Romani
families. Female elders sometimes work, but they also do child care and
visit. Typical Belmont households are multigenerational vertically, but not
horizontally (via brothers), as is more common in Macedonia. Ideally, in
one dwelling live a son, his parents (and perhaps his grandparents), his
wife, and his children. Girls live at home until they marry, when they move
in with their husband, whereas boys rarely move out. In Macedonia the
zadruga was a patrilineal, patrilocal, extended familial residential unit
that communally owned resources. In its classic form, all brothers with
their families lived together and pooled income. Although this is rare
today in Macedonia, the value of living together in a large unit persists in
the diaspora. Tasks can be divided among available and skilled men and
women, child care is easier for women, and emotional ties ensue.
On the other hand, living in close quarters generates conflict. For daugh-
ters-in- law, who are the least powerful members of the family because
they are female outsiders, living with their husband’s relatives is especially
challenging. The mother-in-law, who supervises and trains the daugh-
ter-in-law in domestic and ritual tasks, can be very critical. Young people
currently crave privacy, and if they can’t get it at home they escape to the
streets, especially if they are males. Monetary conflict may also erupt, es-
pecially when finances are tight. In spite of these challenges, children
rarely move out before marriage not only because of family bonds but also
because they can’t afford it. Musician Seido Salifoski told me his mother

simply fainted when he told her he was moving out. For her, Seido moving
out signaled disrespect for the family and for Romani culture.
The membership in a residential unit, typically a small apartment, is
quite variable not only because of migration but also from a belief that a
variety of related women can raise children. Mothers do not hesitate to
give their children to their mothers or sisters for a few weeks, or a few
months if necessary. For example, one girl was raised by her grandparents
because her mother migrated to Australia after a divorce. The community
is extremely close-knit; everyone knows one another face-to-face, sees one
another often at celebrations, and socializes within the community. Elders
rarely have friends outside the community. For women and children, so-
cializing takes place in homes or in front of buildings where people gather
after work or on weekends. Men, on the other hand, congregate in several
“clubs,” which are community centers or bars in the basement of apart-
ment buildings, where card playing, drinking, and recorded music are
found. When misfortune or illness strikes, families rely on each other. If
someone is ill, the extended family plus friends and neighbors keep vigil at
home or in the hospital. The highlights of community life are life cycle and
calendrical celebrations (see Chapter 5).
Leila illustrated: “Family values . . . are very important. My family was
everything to me. . . . This was always the main issue growing up.” She saw
family as defense against the hostile outside world:
Not to feel alone in the world, like many Americans, that is the main
reason I stayed within the family. I could not imagine going against
the family and the tradition, and being out there on my own and being
ostracized from everything I knew from the time I opened my eyes.
Your family is who you are, and it is there forever. The family is a
positive thing, and it is our only defense. We have no choice, espe-
cially in Europe. If you go and you try to become a part of somebody
else’s community as a Rom, they don’t want you. So you have to make
the best of it. The family is so strong because we are not accepted
anywhere. It has become almost an obsession.
Leila points out that kin orientation is an adaptive mechanism in a world

filled with hostility against Roma. Relying on one’s own family has been a
way to ensure trust to counter the threats from a mistrustful environment.
What defines the field of social relations is a “very high level of interper-
sonal and intercommunal investment and trust—economic, social, emo-
tional and moral” (Werbner 2002a:272). Community members “define
their subjectivities as moral individuals through long term relations of
sociality such as marriage, family, and community” (272–273).
The Muslim religion is a strong cultural identification point, but the
level of practice varies tremendously. In general, Macedonian Roma in the
past were not very observant; even today, most eat pork, drink alcohol, and
do not pray. During the 1980s, I rarely heard of anyone going to a mosque
except for a funeral. But in the 1990s, the Musa Mosque was built in the
heart of Belmont, financed by a rich community member. Subsequently,
the mosque became a focal point; funerals, for example, were very
crowded. Women and young adults became more involved, and some
Romani male children began attending Arabic language classes. About
a decade ago, the community center next to the mosque reorganized
into another mosque. The Islamic Center (see photograph 4.2) is now a
vital community center, and many young Roma have become quite reli-
gious. The marriages of several Romani couples, for example, have fea-
tured a mosque ceremony, and two nonalcoholic weddings took place
recently.6
Identity Issues
As mentioned, New York is home to Roma from every group, but they
neither socialize nor intermarry. If, as the anthropological literature sug-
gests, identity is always configured in opposition to others (Barth 1969;
Appiah and Gates 1995), then the boundary between Roma and non-Roma
is definitive, and one is either in or out (Hancock 2002; Sutherland 1975).
This division, however, applies more to Kalderash Roma, who are much
less integrated into American society, than Balkan Roma.7 The school
system, as an institution for integration into American life, is viewed pos-
itively by most Macedonian Roma, especially the younger generation.
Whereas Kalderash Roma tend to be distrustful of schools because of
drugs and sex, Macedonian Roma are not. Given their history of compul-
sory education in socialist Macedonia, they see it is as very useful for work
advancement. Some Roma voice concerns about drugs and sex, but they
do not pull children out of school at the same rate as Kalderash Roma do.
Most Belmont families educate their children through high school; higher
education is not the norm, although a few families have stressed it.
Belmont Roma feel different not only from majority Americans but also
from other Muslim Balkan ethnicities and from other Roma. When
speaking Romani, they call themselves Roma, when speaking Macedonian
they call themselves Gjupci, and when speaking English they call them-
selves Gypsies.8 For Belmont Roma, identity issues arise in part because
the dangers of assimilation are ever-present. They are well aware of the
tension between American individualistic ethics and the collective family
ethics of their community (Ong 2003:7–8). Living, working, and going to
school alongside outsiders makes them aware of what they claim distin-
guishes them from others: their family orientation, their ties to Macedo-
nia, and their culture, including customs, music, and languages. Note that
this list does not include all the usual features of ethnic identity
(Romanucci-Ross and De Vos 1995): shared territory, history, and language.
Territory and history are missing. Belmont Roma know little about their
origins from India; rather, as mentioned earlier, they relate to Macedonia
as home. Home, however, is a discursive trope, a reference point, not a
fundamental unchanging value. Home is wherever their community is;

this diasporic attitude minimizes a singular homeland. Because they are
people-oriented more than place-oriented, they take their home with them
wherever they are. For example, when people speak of wanting to travel to
Macedonia, it is always to see people, never “to be there.” I was surprised
to hear how often people said they didn’t need to visit Macedonia because
“everyone was here.”
Community members are proud to be Roma, but exactly what that
means may be contested. For the older generation it may be language and
customs, and for the middle generation it may be finding appropriate
spouses for their children. Second-generation Roma, who were born here,
are often challenged to define themselves. A twenty-one-year-old unmar-
ried girl told me she doesn’t really know what or who she is: “I’ve never
been to Macedonia, so am I Macedonian?” When someone hasn’t seen a
homeland, indeed, it may seem very remote. Furthermore, how one con-
structs one’s ethnicity for others is often a different issue from how one
feels within one’s own community.9 Certainly this is true for musicians,
who are forced to deal with marketing images that are usually created by
non-Roma. But all Roma are forced to deal with their public identity
whether they want to or not, because of the stigma associated with it. In
the Balkans, non-Roma readily identify (and often stigmatize) Roma by
where they live, what language they speak, how they dress, or the color of
their skin. Of course there are Balkan Roma who have successfully passed
as non-Roma, but this requires cutting off ties to one’s community so as to
avoid detection. In Europe, passing is extremely difficult.
For American immigrants, however, there are more choices available
because America is a more mobile environment, and Americans tend to
pry less than Europeans; privacy is valued. The American government is
less intrusive into family life than in Eastern European states. In America,
you can hide your family history, you don’t live in an exclusively Romani
neighborhood, few can pinpoint your foreign language, and there are
other dark-skinned people around. As a result, in Belmont Roma exhibit a
diversity of self-presentational attitudes. Many community members do
not readily reveal their ethnicity to non-Roma because of discrimination.
In the United States, stereotypes about Gypsies center on criminality.
Police forces in several cities have divisions specializing in “Gypsy crime”
(Becerra 2006); there have been several “exposés” about con schemes of
American Kalderash families on television. The Peter Maas film King of
the Gypsies was a hit in the 1970s; and in 2007 the FX cable network inau-
gurated the series The Riches about a Gypsy/Traveler family engaged in
pickpocketing, robbery, and credit card and identity theft.
Belmont Roma, then, need to be cautious about their ethnicity. Leila
said that her parents often claimed, “We’re Turkish, to avoid not being
able to find an apartment, a job. To avoid the whole issue.” A Belmont
resident who moved to Australia narrated:
We are very cautious. If you say you’re a Gypsy people begin to look at
you. They think you steal, you can’t be trusted. We would lose our
jobs. We say we are Muslim Macedonians. Australians don’t know the
difference—they just think we are Muslims; but at work if there are
Christian Macedonians and Serbs, they begin to suspect. Then they
hear our last names and begin to figure it out. Then they distance
themselves. My cousin, on the other hand, does the opposite—she
doesn’t hide she is Romani. On her locker at work she wrote “Gypsy.”
She’s not afraid like us.
One Rom neither volunteers he is Romani nor denies it, but if someone
says something against Gypsies he will bring up his ethnicity. One woman
specifically asked me not to tell the proprietors of a banquet hall her family
was renting that they were Roma. She explained: “Gypsies are considered
the lowest level of person by Americans. Blacks, they’ve come up, but we
are still down. I don’t tell people I’m Romani—they don’t have to know.
Once at work I told my co-workers I was a Gypsy and they didn’t believe
me. They said, ‘But you’ve been at this job for over three years—you don’t
live in a tent!’ My husband —he tells everyone, but not me.” Occasionally,
Roma raised the question of my role as a researcher in relation to their
adaptive strategy of passing. One woman told me, “So when you come
along, saying you are studying us, that you teach about Romani culture,
we are suspicious of you. We pull back. We are always hiding who we are
to non-Roma. We hear you say you take photos of Roma. We want to know
why.” One community member did not want me to identify Belmont as a
Romani neighborhood.10
Leila’s older daughter tells non-Roma that she is Macedonian.11 Accord-
ing to Leila: “If they question further, she’ll say she’s Gypsy. And that’s
what I teach her. You can tell them we’re Macedonian because we are. We
were born there. We’re citizens of that state. Our boys died in the war, too.
If we’re not Macedonians, why do you draft our boys?” Fatima, a college-
educated married woman, explained, “Whether we say we are Roma
depends on whom you talk to. You really have to pick carefully who you
tell because they can throw it back at you. Some of my friends and co-
workers know and some don’t.” Similarly, Ramo told me: “I’m proud that
I’m a Rom, but others hide, they say they’re Turkish, whatever. I hate that.
A lot of people think that we steal, that we don’t work. Where I used to
work, I told them I am Gypsy and they didn’t believe it—they said that is
impossible, you can’t be Gypsy. Most people think we live in tents.” In
2007, in the Islamic Center, some women reported hearing disparaging
comments about Roma from other Balkan Muslims.
Roma sometimes hide their ethnicity by refusing to publicly identify
with symbols of their culture. In the 1990s, two brothers from Dračevo (a
village near Skopje), Severdžan and Menderes Azirov, tired to organize a
Romani dance group in Belmont. They are excellent dancers and had per-
formed in several groups in Macedonia such as Kočo Racin, Orce Nikolov,
and the Romani KUD Phralipe (brotherhood).12 Parents, however, were
reluctant to let their children attend, especially the girls (see discussion
later in this chapter, and Chapters 6, and 10). Severdžan said, “When they

reach fourteen or fifteen years old they don’t want to let the girls out. Also,
they don’t want people to know they are Roma. This is art—they should be
proud of Romani folklore. We gave up—these people just don’t under-
stand.” Similarly, several Macedonian Romani musicians refused to play
in a prestigious concert for non-Roma when they learned that they were
identified as Roma in the program notes. These same Roma are extremely
proud of and involved in their music when it occurs in all-Romani con-
texts, but they shy away from the Gypsy label in mainstream American
contexts because of the stigma.
Leila explained that those who experienced racism in Macedonia or
other diasporic locations were the most afraid to admit their ethnicity in
America. She narrated: “In the 1970s I was afraid because my parents
were afraid; I would say I’m Macedonian or Yugoslavian. If someone
would ask how come you’re so dark, I’d say we’re Turkish. While we were
in Vienna . . . the people we were living with said to us, ‘Don’t speak the
Romani language because if people find out we’re Gypsies, they’ll deport
us.’ So we had to keep a low profile. And when we came here, my parents
carried that through.”
After a while, however, Leila realized that she could not reject her
ethnicity:
I can’t deny what I am. Maybe I can deny it to the world, but I can’t
deny it to the mirror. . . . It’ll always stare right back at me. You may
tell everybody you’re Yugoslavian, or Macedonian, or Turkish but I
know you’re Gypsy. You carry your shadow everywhere you go, so
that’s the main reason why. . . . I’m not going to deny it. I never really
felt racism here, growing up in the States. Once I started school and
became unafraid, I would tell my teachers, I would tell my friends
what I am. And I didn’t feel the rejection and the racism like we do in
Europe. So, once I started working, I would tell my manager, and she
would make a comment like, “Oh, but Yugoslavians are so light-
skinned—you’re so dark.” “Well, that’s because I’m a Gypsy.” “Oh,
what is that—those people that fortune-tell?” So, I’ve become open
about what I am, and I haven’t felt the racism.
The ignorance of Americans is sometimes contrasted with the blatant

discrimination back home. “Battle” stories are told and retold, almost as
parables, legitimating why they emigrated. The most striking narratives
are told when relatives visit or when Belmont residents return home from
trips. Leila narrated this story about her 2003 trip home to Prilep (a story
I heard repeated many times by members of her family):
I hadn’t been home in seventeen years. I heard about going to places

where they wouldn’t let you in because you’re a Gypsy. I thought
“Yeah, right” [incredulous]. My daughter and I, we were walking by
this coffee shop. She says, “Ma, I want some pizza.” I went in, I sat
down. The restaurant was empty. There were three tables occupied
and another twenty-eight empty. The guy says, “Sorry, you can’t sit
here. These tables are all reserved.” I said, “Reserved for what?” He
goes, “For the tourists.” I said, “But the place is empty.” “Well, you
can’t sit here.” And, I had to get up and leave. Very blatant! I didn’t
want to expose my daughter to that—she was only eight years old.
She’s never been told she can’t sit here because she’s a Gypsy. And I
didn’t want to create a scene in front of her. . . . I felt prejudice. I felt
it very strongly. My daughter was very uncomfortable in town. She
didn’t want to go any place outside the Gypsy environment. She felt
the stares and the comments. And it made her uncomfortable; it made
her unhappy. She said, “Why should I go there and, and have them
look at me like that?” And now I can understand a little bit easier, why
the Gypsies in Europe tend to keep a low profile.
Musician Erhan Umer (see next chapter) narrated what happened when
he took his family home to Bitola in 2002: “I was so excited to visit the city
swimming pool that I had seen under construction years earlier. When I
arrived with my family, an Albanian guy was selling entrance tickets. He
said ‘Ne zemame Gjupci’ [we don’t allow Gypsies; Macedonian]. I answered,
‘You can’t tell me that—this is my city, I was born here I have every right
you have. In fact, I’m American.’ Things are very bad. I would never go
back to live there.”
Leila also encountered racism via the internet. A few Belmont Roma
participate in diasporic chat rooms with Balkan or Romani themes. She
explained:
I chose a nick [nickname] that says exactly who I am. Romani čhaj
[Romani girl]. When I first went in with that nick, I used to get
bounced right away. Macedonians would throw me out of the room
just for walking in. Because they don’t want Gypsies in their room.
And then they would start making comments. And I fight like crazy.
They know me. They know when Romani walks into the room and if
they make a Gypsy comment, she will start. That’s the only time I
create problems in the room. Otherwise, I don’t argue with anybody. I
just sit there and I play my music. I play Romani music. It’s video-
audio chat. And, I use Romani music as a statement—I put on a
Romani song. In the beginning, they would bounce me right away.
“No Gypsy music allowed in this room!” “Why not? It’s the Internet.
The Internet is free.” “Oh, but it’s a Macedonian room.” “So what? I go
to Macedonia and I hear Gypsy music in the cafés, in the stores. I hear
it everywhere; it’s on TV, on the radio. Who the freak are you to tell me
I can’t play my music on the internet, on my computer? If you don’t
want to listen to it, leave the room.” That’s when I encountered the
racism.
There are, then, a range of responses among Belmont Roma regarding

identifying their ethnicity to non-Roma; while some hide, others boast,

and still others strategically pass. Gropper and Miller’s concept of “selec-
tive multiculturalism” (2001:107) illuminates that Belmont Roma nego-
tiate multiple ethnicities (e.g., American, European, Romani, Turkish,
Macedonian). Their choices resonate with the choices musicians make in
their diasporic encounters. Within the Belmont community, on the other
hand, there is strong pride in being Romani; although the meaning of
being Romani varies, a core value is marrying a Romani person.
Marriage
Marriage underscores the significance of the family and demonstrates

transnational ties via the network for spouses. Everyone is expected to
marry, and those who don’t are more or less stigmatized.13 Musician Seido
Salifoski told me he was derided by his family when he turned twenty
eight years old and still wasn’t married: “I got married because of all the
pressure my parents put on me.” In Belmont, young people congregate in
the streets, at ritual events, on dance lines, at the mosque, and at school.
Officially, there is no “dating,” but rather young people are supposed to
socialize in groups with the elder generation supervising. In reality, how-
ever, young people do sometimes meet surreptitiously. At weddings, for
example, teenagers meet outside for one-to-one conversations. This
mirrors the situation in Macedonia, where people meet on the evening
walk (korzo), at gatherings, in school, on public transportation, and in
shopping areas (Silverman 1996b). Today communicating via cell phone
and Facebook is common.
The ideal is an arranged marriage within the diasporic community. Tra-
ditionally, the parents looked for appropriate spouses and the children
acquiesced. However, there are myriad variations to this process: at one
extreme, parents do indeed pressure children to marry, and at the other
parents may acquiesce to a match entirely orchestrated by the children.
Sometimes surrogate parents such as aunts and uncles enact the role of
parents if birth parents are absent. Parents rarely force a particular spouse
on a child, although they put pressure on children to marry by their mid-
twenties. If two people want to marry, the groom’s parents visit the bride’s
parents to ask for her; the bride and groom supposedly agree before the
deal is sealed. Parents get involved because they claim they can see beyond
romantic love—they check out the reputation not only of the prospective
spouse but also of the entire family. They obtain information such as eco-
nomic standing, level of respectability, and how the family has treated its
brides in the past. Women have “people knowledge”: when they socialize,
they discuss people and their reputations. Thus, although men may be the
public face of the family in marriage negotiations, they rely on women
precisely for the information that makes marriage negotiations possible.14
Marrying their children to Macedonian Roma is the goal of parents in
Belmont; they believe this ensures continuity of the culture. Intermarriage,
though discouraged, happens in a minority of cases. Leila explained: “We
hope they’ll stay within the community. As a mother, if my daughter falls in
love with some American guy who is going to make her happy, and he’s a
good person, I have nothing against it. Because the most important thing
to me is her safety, her happiness.” In the 1980s, a woman married a His-
panic male against her family’s wishes; although she still attends weddings
and other large family celebrations, she is not immersed in the fabric of the
community, and her children do not speak Macedonian or see their cousins
regularly. On the other hand, there are several cases of men marrying Ital-
ian or Hispanic women. Although the parents disapproved, the children
eloped and eventually the parents acquiesced. An Italian wife and several
Hispanic wives have even learned some Macedonian language. Despite his
parents’ disapproval, Seido Salifoski married a Japanese woman, and she
helped him raise his daughter from his first marriage. His wedding cere-
mony creatively combined customs from both cultures.
If a young man or woman can’t find a suitable spouse in New York, usu-
ally the family takes a trip to Macedonia to “look around.” Of course, only
people who have legal status can travel abroad. Every summer, families
embark on this ritualized journey. Word goes out “back home,” in Prilep,
for example, or in a diasporic location such as Vienna, that certain family
members are coming, and their Macedonian relatives network to arrange
meetings with prospective spouses. These trips can be very stressful, con-
sidering the short time period. Leila, who met her husband on a three-
month trip to Prilep, commented:
I met my husband through relatives. It was a group choice. I hadn’t

met anybody that I felt would be somebody I could work with.
When you don’t know people, you don’t want to take a risk. But
eventually, as time neared for me to come back, I had to take a risk.
I have known people who were in love for five, six years, then got
divorced. There are no guarantees in life, even if you know some-
body. When I met my husband, he presented himself really well,
and I thought this is someone I can work with. . . . I was honest
with him about who I am; I’m too honest! I told him: “I’m not going
to be a typical Romani wife. I go to school, I have a mind of my
own, and I’m not afraid to express it. I’ll be working with men; I
may have to go on trips. Sometimes you may have to clean the
house. You may have to pitch in and be an equal partner, and if you
can deal with that, fine. If not, it’s not going to work.” We kind of
agreed. And here we are, still married seventeen and a half years
later.
Leila is somewhat of an exceptional case because she was twenty-five

years old and in college. In spite of her family’s insistence on education
(see discussion later in this chapter), she knew she needed to find a
spouse. She had an aura of self-confidence and honesty that was rare for
young women of the 1980s. Her philosophy has carried through for her
children:

I won’t force my daughter to go back home for a husband. It’s so
stressful, especially if you don’t have the support from home. Every-
body is telling you what you should do. They don’t approve of any-
body, and you don’t know anybody. How are you supposed to make a
decision? One relative says—you can’t pick this one—his family did
something 250 years ago! I hope my daughter finds someone here in
the community that she will be happy with. If not, if she chooses to go
home, she’ll have my support.
A woman from Skopje met her husband when he made a trip home to find
a bride. She narrated:
I was sixteen years old when he came for me. I saw him twice. I really
didn’t want to get married but my parents arranged it. They made a
small wedding but when we arrived in the Bronx my in-laws made a
big party. I cried for weeks to go home, but I stayed, learned the
language, and got used to it. My parents and siblings went to Ger-
many as refugees, and I haven’t seen them for years. The U.S. embassy
turned down a visa for my mother to visit me.
Fatima, met her husband, Rifat, on a 1994 trip to Prilep. Note in Fati-
ma’s narrative that the couple is given some time alone together, plus the
option of refusal on either side:
We were on vacation. My aunt is an in-law of Rifat’s aunt. The two

women arranged for Rifat and me to meet without us knowing. My
aunt woke me up and said, “Get dressed up, we’re having guests.” He
came over with his cousin and we started talking. We liked each other
immediately but we weren’t thinking of marriage at first. Only when
we were leaving, at the airport, did we know that our parents were
involved. At the airport, Rifat and I took a walk and when we returned
to the table where everyone was sitting, we saw everyone was shaking
hands. We asked, ”What’s going on?” and they told us the marriage
was approved. We were very happy.
Aiše, Rifat’s mother, who was in Belmont at the time of the summer trip,
told her version of this story: “Rifat got engaged this summer to a won-
derful Romani girl. She came to see her relatives and they met each other.
At first, Rifat was reluctant. Ali called me to ask what we should do; we
were thinking North America was too far away and Rifat was too young.
But Rifat said, ‘We are in love.’ So we said, ‘Since they are in love how
could we separate them?’ So we gave our blessing. She got him papers.
Fatima is modest, a very good wife.”
There are failed trips, but not many. Seido Salifoski told me of the reluc-
tant trip he took with his parents; he didn’t care for anyone in Prilep, so
they went to Turkey to visit his relatives and “look around.” He agreed to
marry a Turkish woman, but the marriage lasted only a few years. Most
marriages, however, are successful. Some parents of Belmont sons prefer
a Macedonian bride because the girls in America are spoiled; as several
people claimed, “They don’t want to cook, clean, care for children and do
domestic chores.” They reason that if a bride is brought over from Mace-
donia, she is more likely to accept traditional roles because she wouldn’t
know English and her legal status would depend on them.
Bringing grooms to America is more complicated in cultural terms than
bringing brides because it contradicts the patrilocal residence expecta-
tion; nevertheless, it is done regularly out of necessity, as with the case of
Fatima and Rifat above. Given the patriarchal nature of the family, it is
awkward for a man to move in with the bride’s family and depend on them
for language, employment, and legal status. He is known as a domazet,
meaning a live-in son-in-law, in Macedonian, which has a pejorative con-
notation. Leila explained: “When he’s a zet in the house, they are made
aware of it from the moment the marriage is announced. They’ll get the
comments, Sega kje bideš domazet. Žena kje ti se komandva (Now you’ll be
a live-in husband. Your wife will command you [Macedonian]). And they’ll
get that cruel stare.” The stigma, however, is balanced out by the opportu-
nity to emigrate.15
Parents often will not agree to a match because of objections regarding
the family. One family in Šutka refused to give their daughter because the
man had a child with another woman. The bride’s parents usually use
euphemistic terms of refusal, saying the child is “too young,” or “not
ready,” rather than the real reason, which may be related to character or
economics. Elopement is a possibility when parents won’t agree. In fact, it
is quite common for a young woman and man “to run away.” The bride is
then called a našli čhaj (runaway girl) rather than a manglardi čhaj (asked-
for girl). What this actually means is that they go to the home of a friend
or relative, consummate the marriage, and then wait for the reactions.
Sexual consummation is basically an irreversible act, since it signals the
termination of the woman’s virginity (see more on this later). People often
refer to this situation after elopement with the terms “It’s all over” (gotovo,
Macedonian). The parents will typically relent and agree to the match at a
ceremony known as smiruvanje (Macedonian, reconciliation). Some par-
ents, however, never agree to their child’s choice. One young woman ran
away with a married man, and—despite the fact that he obtained a divorce
to marry her, and that they are very happy together, and that his ex-wife
had been having adulterous affairs—the woman’s parents cut off relations
with their daughter. The birth of a child often leads to reconciliation.
The Bride’s Reputation
Among Roma, the test of the bride’s virginity is an extremely significant

custom, both in the Balkans and the United States. It presents visible man-
ifestation of a girl’s reputation and the honor of her family. Moreover, it is
symbol of Romani identity in terms of keeping the proper order of things

in a changing world. Until the 1960s, this custom was practiced among
virtually all ethnic groups in the Balkans regardless of religion, but today
it has declined. Many Macedonian and Bulgarian Roma, however, still
practice it, whether they are Eastern Orthodox Christian or Muslim, and
in the United States it is part of many marriage rituals. Gjulizar Dželjadin
of Šutka commented: “The bride must be honest and honorable. On Mon-
day we want to see the stained sheet. . . . If the bride had brought us all of
Europe’s wealth, it would not have been worth as much as what she gave
us, her honor. That was the most beautiful gift to us.”
Theoretically, in Macedonia the consummation of the marriage takes
place during the wedding at the groom’s house (see next chapter). The
mother-in-law looks for blood stains on the wedding sheet, and if she finds
them she publicly announces “the good news.” Gjulizar explained that
after the couple consummates the marriage, “we send word to her father’s
house that she is honest, that she was worth the expense. . . . The test hap-
pens at night without music. We Roma only accept blood. Even a doctor’s
note is not enough. If she is a virgin we send news to the bride’s mother
right away. If the mother-in-law doesn’t see blood, she will send the bride
home riding on a donkey with pots and pans tied on clattering. All gifts are
returned.” When I asked her if she ever witnessed this, she says she heard
it did happen. Obviously, the threat is enough for most young girls to make
them conform to sexual restraint before marriage.
Leila confirmed that the sheet is shown during the wedding in Macedo-
nia, and I witnessed it may times: “If they haven’t eloped then they show
the sheet during the wedding. . . . They bring the sheet, that night, over to
the mother’s house, and then everybody celebrates. Technically, that’s how
it’s supposed to be done.” I asked her if she knew of instances where the
woman is a virgin but doesn’t bleed; would the sheet then be more of a
symbolic object?
L: No, they want to see the blood.

C: They really want to see it?
L: Darn the symbolism.
C: Really? It’s that literal?
L: They want to see blood.
C: But not everyone bleeds.
L: She’s going have a tough time proving that she was a virgin.
C: I’ve heard all stories about a little chicken blood, whatever.
L: They do what they’ve got to do.
In Macedonia, after the test, the sheet is placed on a metal tray (tepsija),
covered with gauze (see photograph 4.3), and the wedding party (which
includes the groom but excludes the bride) processes to the bride’s house
to bring the good news to the mother of the bride. This is a very important
moment because it vindicates not only the bride’s reputation but also the
family’s; it is the job of the mother to raise her daughter in preparation for
this very test. The entire ritual dramatizes transmission from mother to
daughter of proper control of sexuality. Termed blaga rakija (sweet brandy,
Macedonian), the ritual features a procession with zurla and tapan, led by
the groom’s women carrying a brandy bottle decorated with flowers,
greenery, and red ribbons (fertility symbols). The mother is required to tip
the groom and feed him feminine foods (sometimes literally placing a
spoon in his mouth), most notably eggs. His friends play tricks on him,
such as offering him cigarettes but pulling them away three times, then
finally letting him smoke.
Elvis Huna, the keyboardist with Esma Redžepova’s band, described his
wedding night: “Normally the morning after the wedding I would go to my
wife’s family house and eat eggs. . . . It’s a Gypsy tradition. Eggs signify
birth and so I eat eggs to signal that we have good births” (Cartwright
2005b:118). The groom, in other words, eats fertility foods to display the
transference of the bride’s reproductive potential from her family to his. In
addition he receives gifts from the bride’s family (bovčalok, gifts sewn on
a sheet) such as shirts and handkerchiefs, which are draped over him (see
photograph 4.4 and video example 4.1 from a wedding in Šutka).
Despite the pride in ritual elaboration of the test of the bride’s virginity,
there is a recent campaign in Macedonia to eradicate the custom. It is
based on the human rights dictum that every person has inalienable per-
sonal rights, regardless of culture.16 Activists claim that “the test” is a form
of subjugation of women (since only women need to be virgins), is humil-
iating for both men and women, and often leads to psychological trauma.
The campaign was spurred by Romani activist Enisa Eminova, who in
2001 conducted a survey of 660 Roma (parents and children fourteen to
twenty-five years old, from ten Macedonian Romani communities) funded
by the Open Society Institute. Surprisingly, most Roma agreed to partici-
pate in the survey, and the older generation did not uniformly express
traditional views. Nearly half of the parents said they would accept brides
if they were not virgins, but 70 percent replied they were not sure whether
their sons would. Many respondents saw no need to maintain the custom.
In short, the survey revealed much uncertainty on the issue and opened up
an avenue of debate.17
In Belmont, the custom of checking the sheet is simply called adet (the
general word for custom in Macedonian; of Turkish origin) and is widely
practiced. However, it is virtually never done during the wedding because
the timing of rituals has been altered in the American context. Blaga
rakiya has been removed from the test and is celebrated whether the test
is done or not. It has morphed into a separate party in a banquet hall, put
on by the bride’s side a few days or up to a week after the wedding. The
ritual brandy bottle is still decorated, the ritual foods are still consumed,
and the ritual gifts are still given, but the setting may be at home or a
rented hall, and the bride’s virginity is not the issue (see Chapter 5).
Given Leila’s liberal views on education and marriage, I was surprised to
learn that she and other educated younger women approved of the cus-
tom.18 She said: “It is oppressive. I have mixed feelings about that issue. I
had to do it. And if I could do it, everybody should be able to do it. But, it’s

not necessarily a good thing. I was able to sacrifice, and remain a virgin
and go through it, and it was a demand I had to meet. And if we’re going
to expect these girls to stay in the culture and in the community, then yes.
It is still very important in this community. Very important.” Leila explored
the changes in her attitude as she aged:
When I was growing up, I was against it. I felt, “Why do I have to
prove it to everybody?” “Why does it have to be done so publicly?”
“Why can’t just I bring the sheet out after I do whatever I do with my
husband?” I’ve learned to accept that it is part of the culture, that it is
part of the tradition, part of proving you are what you are. And, if you
can’t fight ‘em, you join ‘em. So, I’ve kind of learned to join them. I
mean, a lot of the younger ones are against it, that is, until they
become women and have children, and they have sons. And, their
sons are expected to bring home a virgin and then all of sudden it
becomes, you know, a major issue.
I asked Leila how the test works if the couple elopes, and she answered:
“They’re supposed to save the sheet, yes. Now, if they’ve run away, or if
they’ve eloped, they’ll pick a date. If she’s menstruating, they’ll wait until
she’s clean. Or, they may wait if the families aren’t in agreement about the
marriage. Some people will wait to see, ‘Well, are they going to take her
back?’ And if the girl says, ‘I’m not going back. I’m here to stay,’ and the
families are in agreement, they’ll do it that night.” Elvis Huna described
how his elopement in Skopje dovetailed with the adet: “I had to steal her.
My family went to ask for her. . . . Then my wife tells me that her family
thinks it is better next year for the wedding, so I take her to my home and
you know it’s important that the Gypsy girl is a virgin . . . and I take her
virginity. So we do it and we show the . . . sheet! Now her mother cannot . . .
take her home. . . . This wedding tradition stretches back through my an-
cestors” (Cartwright 2005b:118).
One couple “ran away because the parents of the girl wouldn’t give her.
So they’ll elope and then it’s over. They will do the adet. We’re going to
have good news tomorrow.” I was also told that one couple “waited to do
the adet” until the groom’s relatives drove to their town. Proper timing
indicates respect. Finally, in one instance a mother who was against her
daughter’s marriage and still refuses to speak to her participated in the
test because this was the respectful thing to do. The test of virginity, then,
is not only about the bride but also about the bride’s family’s honor and
reputation.
The Question of Women’s Power

Romani culture is patriarchal, but the various forms of gendered power
need to be dissected. Education is one important factor that may mitigate
gendered power (see text supplement 4.1 for a discussion of education and
gender). First-generation males have much more freedom of movement
than women, and they expect to be respected and be served in any home.
Women do all domestic tasks: they cook, shop, clean, and take care of
children. Because there is age as well as gender hierarchy, new brides have
the lowest status. This is the standard pattern among all ethnic groups in
the Balkans, but Roma adhere to it very strictly. New brides sometimes
will kiss the hand of and bow before older relatives. Women’s sexuality is
especially restricted; clothing, dance styles (see Chapter 6), and mobility
are closely monitored, and brides also must endure the test of virginity, as
has just been discussed.
Men are the nominal heads of the family and occupy positions of au-
thority; for example, they represent the family in ritual occasions, such as
arranging marriages, even if the knowledge on which it is based is obtained
by women. Males, then, occupy the public sphere of Romani life, while
women occupy the domestic.19 This observation, however, obscures the
fact that women influence the public realm from their position in the
domestic realm (Nelson 1974). They are the links between the two fam-
ilies, and their reproductive abilities perpetuate the family. In addition,
women provide substantial income; they may keep their own salary, and
in fact some manage their husband’s income. Family budgets, then, are
sometimes in female hands.
Claiming I was giving too much credit to women, Leila insisted that
large financial decisions are routinely made by men. She said, “A woman
has a budget to run the house. But when the big things like weddings
come up, when they go to rent the hall, a woman won’t do that. The men
do that. Or they go together. She won’t go alone. Because that involves a
large amount of money, and that has to be a mutual decision. Some men
won’t even take their wives. They’ll just go alone.” Leila took issue with an
article I wrote about Šutka (Silverman 1996b, 2000b) where I claimed that
women exercised substantial power. She saw more sexism than I did, as
this conversation shows:
L: A male-female relationship, it’s never equal. It’ll never be equal.

There’s always times when you have to be the woman and stay quiet.
And there are times when he has to be the man and step away, and let
the woman do what she has to do.
C: I think in many Balkan cultures, but especially in Romani cul-
ture, that women have a great deal of power in the home in terms of
money and raising the children. The men are in the public realm,
for example, when guests come, they’re in the living room, but day-
to-day decisions about money, don’t you think the women run much
of it?
L: Not the money. I read that in your article and it kind of upset me.
I’m like, “No. Not really!” Maybe she has a say in the shopping, but
major decisions about buying a home or a business, or putting on a
wedding, those kinds of things, the man has the final say. If he’s a
decent person, he’ll take the woman’s view into consideration.

My 1996 article dealt with the myriad roles women occupy in celebra-
tions, from leading dance lines to deciding and directing which rituals
should be performed, to managing details of their execution and their
budget (see Chapters 5 and 6). I argued that this leads to respect for ritual
knowledge and a female sphere of ritual power. Leila, however, argued
that men had more monetary power than I allowed: “The women buy the
bride the dress and the gold, etc. But the man gives her the money.”
Precisely because Leila disagreed with me, I think it is worth exploring
how women negotiate power in the family. Leila may be reluctant to admit
the extent of the power she wields. Or her interpretations may reflect the
fact that in New York women are less mobile than men; perhaps they have
lost some ritual and financial power. On the other hand, several female
East European Romani activists have written about the domestic as a site
of oppression rather than power (European Roma Rights Centre 2000). In
Belmont I observed the entire gamut, from supportive husbands to abu-
sive husbands. Supportive men share power and help with child care and
shopping, usually by driving their female relatives to the supermarket
(many women do not drive) and carrying bags; abusive husbands engage
in domestic violence.
The literature on gender and migration has yielded mixed results in
terms of women’s power. According to Brettel, “In some cases scholars
have documented greater independence of women and more equity in the
family. . . . By contrast, other scholars have argued that even when immi-
grant women earn more than their spouses do, this does not necessarily
result in greater decision-making power within the household or greater
autonomy outside it” (2003:147). In the case of Roma, we must keep in
mind that women regularly worked outside the home in Macedonia, and
thus work is not an arena of great change in the diaspora. With the flower-
ing of female education in the younger generation (see text supplement
4.1), however, it will be interesting to chart future changes in gender roles.
Video Diaspora
As I have emphasized, face-to-face communication is highly valued among

Roma, and thus communication across distance poses challenges. Roma
deliberately videotape in order to show relatives in the diaspora what is
happening in their communities. Sometimes I was the conduit for video
exchanges, and sometimes I made videos to facilitate communication
between families. Roma also hire professional videographers to document
their celebrations. Videos, then, figure as valuable gifts in a global network
of reciprocity.
Videotaping in New York typically documents life cycle and calendrical
events, such as circumcisions, baby showers, birthday parties, New Year’s
parties, religious holidays, and weddings. When documenting their cele-
brations, Roma focus on two intertwined subjects: people and music.
There are few video frames that do not include people; location does not
command attention.20 Place is literally absent from Romani videos, sup-
porting the notion that Romani communities exist wherever there are
Roma, regardless of location.
Persons depicted in the videos are usually actively performing, e.g.,
speaking, playing an instrument, dancing, or singing. People enjoy being
the object of the camera; there is neither shyness on the part of performers
nor hesitation on the part of the people behind the camera. This reflects
the positive coding of performance in Romani life. Parents, for example,
encourage children to sing, play an instrument, and dance for relatives at
celebrations. Video subjects either already know the audience for whom
the video is intended, or else they ask and tailor their performance for it.
They often face directly into the camera and offer greetings to the intended
viewers. In video example 4.2, an elderly Macedonian Romani woman in
Melbourne, Australia, sends greetings in Romani to her relatives in New
York in 1998.
Along with personal greetings, music and dance are ubiquitous features
in Romani videos. As I have explained, at Romani celebrations live music
is the medium for hours or even days of dancing, and music also provides
accompaniment for rituals. Time analyses of videos evince long sequences
of dancing, often lasting for a few hours. As will be discussed in Chapter
6, dance is the site of displaying social relations. The video, then, is a guide
to figuring out who is related to whom, who has married whom, who has
children now, who has grown up, who looks ill, who has passed away, etc.
This information is very important in the diaspora, where people rely on
videos to evaluate information. It was also important to me, the ethnogra-
pher, as a graphic guide to who was who in the diaspora community.
Home videos of celebrations are a visual window into the aesthetic
system of the community. The aesthetic system displays stylistic markers,
which serve as badges of identity for the group, and compose a system of
style, related to consumption and economic class (Bourdieu 1984). These
markers surface most obviously in performances, where symbols (objects,
genres, and behaviors) are elevated to representational icons for the group
(Leuthold 1998:18). For Macedonian Roma, these include the musical
genre and dance form čoček, female clothing, the instrument zurla, and
certain ritual acts (such as temana, or bride’s greeting), and gift giving (see
Chapter 5). Videos feature these icons prominently, and they are evaluated
most thoroughly. For example, not only is costume coded as Romani but
also the cost of the fabric and of the seamstress is evaluated. Similarly,
food displays (banquet tables, wedding cakes) and gift exchanges (e.g.,
jewelry) are the object of the camera’s gaze as indices to class. In fact,
there are moments in rituals when the cost of gifts is publicly announced.
Videos, then, capture the verbal and visual dramas of style and class.
If possible, Roma begin watching the videos immediately. If the wed-
ding is a three-day event, the family and guests might return home the
first night and watch the video, no matter how late. Communal viewing
elicits evaluative comments; input is generated as to how the rest of
the event should unfold. Evaluations debate the aesthetic system; for

example, viewers might comment on the costumes (are the hemlines
too short for the women?), the music (how could the hosts afford to
hire those famous musicians?), the dancers (what a great dancer she
is!), the number of guests (few people came to their wedding because
they aren’t speaking to most of their relatives), the money spent on the
event (the limousine cost $200 an hour!), the manner in which rituals
are performed (the parents of the bride really didn’t want to let her
go!), or their omission (she forgot the sieve when she led the dance). In
recent years, YouTube has become a forum for sharing family videos; I
am currently studying this phenomenon.
In 1994, I gathered in the Bronx with Aiše and her son, Ramo, to watch
a video of a double wedding of Aiše’s husband Ali’s brother’s sons. I had
shot this video in Šutka a few weeks earlier; it featured Ali and their
younger son, Rifat, who played a prominent role in the wedding as the flag
bearer (bajraktar; see next chapter). As we watched, Aiše caught up on all
the news about her husband’s family, whom she hadn’t seen in several
months. She commented on the clothing, the hair, the food, the music,
who drank too much, and who was engaged to whom. She also used the
occasion to explain the wedding rituals to Ramo, who was at a marriage-
able age and “needed to know these things.”
Videos illustrate and initiate conversations about the display of symbols
of Romani ethnicity. They are the visual and social medium to concretize
and reconfigure various subjectivities, including representations of iden-
tity. Moreover, they convey information about people and situations across
the distance of diaspora. Following Appadurai, I suggest that videos both
create and reflect a Romani diasporic public sphere transcending the
boundaries of the nation-state (1996:4). Appadurai asserts that a constitu-
tive feature of modern subjectivity is the effect of media and migration on
the work of the imagination (3). For Roma, electronic communication
“impels the work of imagination” (4), which is, above all, the performance
of identity: “People not only position themselves vis-à-vis modernity
through multifarious practices but also struggle to reposition themselves,
sometimes through deploying the very codes of the modern that have
framed them as its others” (Schein 1999:364; and see Chapter 3). Through
collective readings of images and words, videos create “communities of
sentiment” (Appadurai 1996:8; also see Kapchan 2007), which supply
meaning for Roma. The next chapter delves into the layered meanings of
performative celebrations.
5
ab
Transnational Celebrations
C elebrations are the glue that binds Roma to their families and commu-
nities. Both in the Balkans and in the diaspora, community members
not only gather regularly for events, most of which include music and
dance, but also plan them well ahead of time and discuss them long after-
ward; events thus have a long symbolic life. They figure clearly in how
Roma performatively conceive of their identity and how they distinguish
themselves from both non-Roma and non-Balkan Roma. Moreover, cele-
brations are motivations for and manifestations of diasporic migration;
Roma plan travel to coincide with celebrations (e.g., attending a relative’s
wedding), and trips are sometimes the cause of events (visiting relatives
sponsoring a farewell banquet). At any event, participants typically hail
from several diasporic locations, as at the wedding of two brothers, Bilhan
and Irfan in Šutka in 1994, which relatives and friends from Germany,
Austria, Belgium, Australia, and the United States attended.
In the United States, life-cycle events are celebrated more regularly than
calendrical events. The wedding (bijav) and the circumcision (for Muslim
Romani boys, sunet; Romani and Macedonian) are the two most important
celebrations; in Macedonia, some families also sponsor a babina (party for
a newborn baby, especially a girl, since she won’t have a circumcision) or a
soldier-send off celebration; all families arrange Muslim funerals. The
most important Balkan Romani calendrical celebrations are Herdelezi/
Erdelezi/Herdeljezi (St. George’s Day, early May celebration of spring
renewal), Vasilica (St. Basil’s Day, early January), Ramazan (fasting month),
and the two Muslim Bajrams. Baro Bajrami or Šeker Bajram (big or sweet
festival; Arabic Eid-ul-Fitr) falls at the end of Ramazan, and Kurban Bajram
(festival of sacrifice; Arabic Eid-al-Adha) falls seventy days after Ramazan
(Petrovski 1993 and 2002). Note that some Muslims of the Balkans,
including Roma, enact rituals that are related to Eastern Orthodoxy such
as dyeing eggs in the spring (related to the fertility concept that predates
both Islam and Christianity); this underlines Balkan religious syncretism.
83
In New York, Herdelezi is still sometimes celebrated with an outdoor pic-
nic of lamb, the traditional food. Muslim funerals are common and both
bajrams are celebrated in the home or mosque setting. A New Year’s dance
is regularly held by Bronx Roma, and often musicians from the diaspora
are invited to perform.
Celebrations display cultural values and serve as markers or organizing
principles of the year and the life cycle; they are complex events entailing
multiple genres, e.g., music, dance, costume, food, and ritual. Many dramatic
roles are enacted, much economic planning is necessary, reputations are
established or questioned, and individual and family power is negotiated.
Furthermore, via celebration, Romani life evinces a conscious and height-
ened performative dimension. Video and photographic documentation has
been common since the 1970s, and the resulting tapes become treasured
historical documents. In emphasizing community, however, I mean to imply
neither a conflict-free atmosphere nor a functional explanation of a system
in balance. To the contrary, celebrations often lead to conflict or reenact
prior arguments and schisms over resources and reputations.1
By far, weddings are the most frequent celebratory event and the focus
of community attention. They are the ubiquitous subject of evaluative talk,
ranging from the availability and suitability of spouses to future and recent
marriages. Wedding and circumcisions often involve hundreds of guests,
numerous meals, and lavish presents. Of course, poorer Roma put on more
modest events,2 but there is some truth to the claim that Roma spend their
money on weddings.3 For example, in Asen Balicki’s Bulgarian film compi-
lation Roma Portraits,4 a young Romani director, Mincho Stambolov,
explained that he chose weddings for his filmic portrait because they are so
significant: “They [the family] have been saving money for five to ten years
but when . . . it is time for the wedding they are ready to spend everything.
After the wedding they might not have a cent left but they really want a big
feast.” In the same film, a family member explained:
It’s a big celebration for us. No matter how much money you don’t
have, you have to make a wedding. You remember my aunt’s wed-
ding? They didn’t have any money—they sold their animals to put on
the wedding and now they have no animals! They have to buy animals
with the money they collected [at the wedding]. But they had to make
a wedding! . . . There was no other way!
Weddings are sometimes delayed because of insufficient finances, even

into the bride’s pregnancy. The same family member explained: “They
waited and waited. The bride gave birth two days after the wedding.” Sim-
ilarly, several Belmont weddings were delayed because of the lack of fit
between relatives’ schedules and the availability of a banquet hall; it is not
uncommon for the bride to be several months pregnant at the wedding
and “almost showing.”
Weddings are the key to the growth of the family, and the Belmont commu-
nity has indeed been growing thanks to spouses relocating from Macedonia

to America. Because the bride is ideally brought into the groom’s family,
weddings affirm her reproductive importance to patrilocal residency and
patriarchal relations. The bride is thus the ritual focus and the most symbol-
ically endowed personage in the event. She is the person undergoing the
most marked transition, and because the alliance between two families
depends on her she is the most precarious person.5 It is not surprising that
most wedding customs and song texts involve the bride.
Song texts are a guide to the importance of weddings in general, and
specifically of brides. Bori means bride in Romani (plural borja), but its
meaning expands to “a woman married into our family,” dramatizing that
a bride belongs to everyone on the groom’s side, not just the husband. Bori
thus means daughter-in-law to the groom’s parents, sister-in-law to the
groom’s sisters and brothers, etc. The groom’s relatives tend to use the term
bori when addressing her or talking about her; using her name might sig-
nal too much intimacy. Furthermore, a woman remains a bori her whole
life; only perhaps in old age will she outgrow being called bori. Along with
the label comes the expectation of service to the groom’s family (not only
to the men but also to the elder women). “First up in the morning and last
to go asleep” is a proverb found in every Balkan language about the role of
the new bride, but it is especially resonant among Roma. As a woman has
children and matures, however, her status increases and younger borja
serve her. Thus gender hierarchy is mediated by age hierarchy.
The majority of Romani songs, indeed, are about weddings or specifically
borja.6 In Chapter 2, I discussed “Astargja o horo” from the repertoire of
Džansever (see audio examples and text supplement 2.6–2.8). I have heard
this song performed at several weddings in Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia,
and New York. The text reveals the significance of elaborate marriage rit-
uals and illustrates how the bride’s family gives her away and the groom’s
family welcomes her. Most songs in praise of the bride are expressed from
the view of the groom’s father. As the senior male in the sponsoring family,
he represents the voice of authority. In addition, the bride herself has
almost magical powers in that she brings luck and happiness to the entire
family; also note that she is displayed to the Romani public through dance
(see Chapter 6).
Weddings in Šutka
Contemporary Romani weddings in Macedonia are typically three-to-six-day

events; their length distinguishes them from ethnic Macedonian weddings,
which are typically one day or one evening. Several decades ago, however,
Macedonian villagers also had weeklong weddings (Kličkova and Geor-
gieva 1996; Silverman and Wixman 1983).7 The entire Romani wedding
conforms to a pan-Balkan structural pattern that was common fifty years
ago regardless of region, religion, or ethnicity. Pan-Balkan themes include
transference of the bride from her natal family to the groom’s family and
emphasis on her virginity and fertility.8 Structurally, the wedding illustrates
Transnational Celebrations 85
Van Gennep’s tripartite division of separation, transition, and incorpora-
tion, from the bride’s point of view (1961). Muslim Romani Macedonian
and Bulgarian weddings differ from Eastern Orthodox Romani weddings
in costume, use of henna, and more recently in New York the mosque cer-
emony (see discussion later).
In Šuto Orizari, Macedonia, perhaps the largest Romani settlement in
Europe, music and dance are the community’s expressive focus (Silverman
1996b). Weddings can be found every summer weekend, although in the
postsocialist period the size and duration of celebrations have declined
because of economic constraints. Indeed, from June to September in Šutka
on any weekend evening one can find five to ten weddings on the streets.
The outdoor dance portions of the weddings are regularly viewed by scores
of uninvited onlookers, and there are times when uninvited people may
dance. Dance-crazy Šutka teenagers regularly make the rounds looking for
the best music for dancing.
The Romani expression for putting on a wedding is kerava bijav, which
means literally I make a wedding. Note that bijav is also used as a general
term for a celebration; thus the party for a sunet (circumcision) is also a
bijav. Also note that making and working are represented by the same
word, as in kerava buti (I work), which implies that making a wedding is a
type of work. Furthermore, ritual is a particular type of gendered work that
charts the relationship between a family and the community via the aes-
thetic dimensions of music, dance, costume, and foodways. Female iden-
tity is thus constructed by the relationship of economics to kinship and is
expressed aesthetically in a ritual and symbol system. I am inspired by
Micaela di Leonardo’s 1987 article in which she coins the term “kinwork”
to describe female work other than wage work and domestic work. Unlike
domestic work, which occurs within a household, kinwork cuts across
households, and it mobilizes women across households. Kinwork also cre-
ates obligations and reciprocal work for the whole household, including
men. The term nicely describes the kind of work Romani women do in
planning, organizing, managing, performing (including dancing), and
evaluating ritual celebrations (Silverman 1996b). Older women direct rit-
uals much more than men and younger women; in fact, many men and
younger women are quite ignorant about what needs to be done and when.
Music and dance are required at Balkan Romani weddings; music tends
to be a male realm whereas dance is female (see Chapter 6 and Silverman
2008b). Through dance, participants enact some of the most important
rituals in the wedding (Sugarman 1997; Cowan 1990). For example, guest
families are called up one by one to lead dance lines, in the order of close-
ness to the sponsoring family; moreover, dance lines are usually led by
women. Before the family begins dancing, someone requests a tune from
the musicians, and a male family member tips them. Families are called
up to lead by a “speaker,” a man who is eloquent, is a good organizer, and
knows the proper order. He must not insult people by omitting them or
calling them in the wrong order (the sequence must be ko redo, in order).
Dance, then, is a performative display of social structure. One common

speaker’s formula is Akana ka khela . . . (now So-and-So will dance). Often
a speaker is instructed about the proper order by knowledgeable family
members, but I have attended weddings where guests were furious at the
order.
Weddings are occasions for parents to scrutinize potential spouses for
their children. People discuss who is dancing next to whom and who is
wearing what outfit; most important, parents of marriageable children ask
kaske (whose) that son or daughter is, meaning to what family he or she
belongs. Because dance lines are sexually integrated, they serve as a meeting
place for young people. Since dating is not practiced and arranged mar-
riages are still the ideal, young Roma look one another over on the dance
line and exchange glances. Young men and women sometimes dance next
to each other (while friends and relatives watch), and conversations are
initiated. The seeds of future matches, then, are planted at weddings.
As I explain in Chapter 6, women of the sponsoring family are expected
to dance for hours at a time at weddings. Because women have so many
obligations, such as ritual enactments, food preparation, and dancing, men
sometimes end up taking care of children—something that rarely happens
outside of rituals. Male dancing is more optional than female dancing,
although there are some ritual moments requiring male dancing (as when
his family is called up to lead the dance line). The males of the bride’s
family must also solemnly dance with her just before she is transferred to
the groom’s family (see later discussion).
I argue that in addition to dance, food preparation and presentation are
performative because they are public behaviors with a marked aesthetic
dimension that others evaluate according to shared criteria (Bauman 1975).
Both women and men participate in food preparation, but in a segregated
manner. Women, for example, are mobilized across households to prepare
foods, such as baking hundreds of bread products, making salads, and
stuffing grape leaves (photographs 5.1 and 5.2). For one Šutka wedding, it
took five women eight hours to prepare 1,200 sarma (stuffed grape leaves).
Men slaughter animals, prepare meats, and transport ready-made foods
from bakeries and warehouses (photograph 5.3). Serving food at banquets
is done mostly by men who activate kin networks to recruit the necessary
laborers; this is a significant reversal of the normal division of labor and is
necessary in part because women need to be free to dance. Washing dishes
and pots is done by women.
Costume is also an important performance arena under women’s direc-
tion. The most widespread form of clothing worn by Balkan Romani
women (whether they are Muslim or not) is šalvari, also called čintijani or
dimije, wide billowing pants (often 10 feet), matched with vests or jackets
for festive events (Dunin 1984). Women are expected to wear numerous
and appropriately styled outfits during the course of the wedding. Knowing
they are on display on dance lines, females dress up, and sometimes young
unmarried women change their clothes several times (borrowing their
friends’ and relatives’ outfits; see photograph 5.4). Clothing also figures
significantly as wedding gifts. For example, at various rituals during the
wedding (such as the henna party), the bride is given clothing by female
members of the groom’s family, who have tastefully arranged it on tepsii
(metal trays, photographs 5.5 and 5.6). Women shop and sew (or hire some-
one to sew) the outfits they wear and give as gifts; they also financially
manage all of the tasks mentioned here, sometimes quite independently of
men. Does this female ritual knowledge represent power? In the last chap-
ter, I discussed my conversation with Leila about this topic; whereas she
focused on the underlying patriarchal nature of the Romani family, I noticed
the arenas of female competence.
Owing to space limitations I will not describe the prewedding manglar-
ibe, “asking for the bride,” involving visits and bargaining sessions; the
angrustik, the period of engagement; or the postwedding prvič, the first
visit of the bride to her family.9 Note that sometimes lavish gifts are given
by the groom’s family to the bride’s family at the engagement ceremony.
Gjulizar Dželjadin described the engagement gifts of Amdi Bajram’s son10
as follows: “twelve meters of fabric for šalvari for the mother or the grand-
mother, a lamb, fifteen beers, two liters of brandy, ten pairs of women’s
slippers,” plus much jewelry (including the ring). She was careful to point
out that “Our girls . . . have never been sold for money, only for a gift
(bakšiš). But there are Roma that sell them for money, but not ours.”11 All
of these reciprocal exchanges trace the alliance between the two families.
The order of the wedding week in the 1990s was as follows12:
Kana (henna, Romani; kına, Turkish), Wednesday

Banja (bath, Macedonian), Thursday
Igranka (dance parties at bride’s house and at groom’s house, Macedo-
nian) and second henna ceremony, Kana gedže (Romani; Turkish
gece, evening), Saturday
Zemane getting (or taking), transferring, and incorporating the bride
(Macedonian), Sunday
Blaga rakija (sweet brandy ceremony, celebrating the virginity of the
bride, Macedonian), Monday
Džumaluk (bride’s relatives visit the bride at the groom’s house),
Monday
Henna and Bath Ceremonies
The first henna ceremony takes place at the bride’s house during late
Wednesday afternoon; henna is a vegetable dye used for beautification
on women’s hair, hands, and feet.13 The groom’s female relatives dance
while processing through the streets toward the bride’s house. The
groom’s women carry decorated metal trays (tepsii) laden with bridal
gifts such as šalvari, jewelry, shoes, underwear, sometimes the white
wedding gown, and items of clothing for other family members. Often
chickpeas and candies are put on the trays to ensure fertility. One tray
contains the henna paste and is covered with a red cloth. Like many

Romani rituals in Macedonia, the event takes place mostly outdoors; as
a result, neighbors and other unrelated people watch. Romani homes in
the Balkans are typically modest and poorly ventilated, so, weather per-
mitting, people congregate on porches and balconies, or in courtyards,
or spill out into the street. Weddings typically take place June through
September in Macedonia and Bulgaria, a period called the “wedding sea-
son.” Summer weddings allow relatives in the diaspora to attend, and the
hot weather favors outdoor banquets and rituals. The outdoor location
(often blocking traffic on a street) and the loud music both mark the
event as public and performative.
Note that in my analysis of the spatial aspect of the henna ceremony, I am
avoiding use of the dichotomy domestic-public.14 For Roma there are many
publics. First, there is the public sphere of macro society that is dominated
by non-Roma but in which Roma work. Second, there is the sphere of the
larger Romani public, which I term the Romani community. Third, there is
the sphere of the extended family. When I speak of community, I mean the
sphere of local public life that is visible to other Roma, be they kin or neigh-
bors, as in the henna ceremony. The non-Roma public is irrelevant here,
and as a rule non-Roma do not have access to these local settings. For the
henna ceremony, we may speak of a specifically female public sphere. I
deliberately avoid the term domestic to define this female space because it
is too narrow. The configuration domestic-public obscures rather than illu-
minates because the domestic arena is not always private and subordinate
but is instead part of community life.
The henna procession is accompanied by a zurla and tapan band (video
example 5.1; see Chapter 2), while other dance events use a modern wed-
ding orchestra. The two musical styles are markedly different. Zurla/tapan
music is the oldest musical formation, and it evinces a more intense vol-
ume and texture (Blau et al. 2002; Peycheva and Dimov 2002). Note that it
is also used for the actual cutting in the circumcision ceremony, another
intense moment. Also, practically speaking, zurla/tapan bands are mobile,
require no amplification, and are cheaper because they consist of only
three or four people. Note that fifty years ago zurla and tapan bands were
the often the only professional music available and were used for all mu-
sical aspects of the wedding. Today only the best zurla players know the
appropriate ritual melodies for the kana and sunet.15
For the henna party of seventeen-year-old Ramisa, who married Hasan
in 1990, the groom’s female relatives traveled from their village outside
Skopje to the bride’s house in Šutka. The six sisters of the bride’s mother,
Nazlija, had all helped prepare for the henna party, including making the
tel, silver streamers that the bride wears on either side of her face (see
photographs 5.7, 5.8, and 5.9). Tel is usually prepared by the groom’s
females and brought to the bride’s house for the kana, but in Ramisa’s case
her relatives made the tel, perhaps because the groom’s mother was
impoverished. Typically the only males present at the henna ceremony are
the hired zurla/tapan players; male relatives, if present, stand at a distance
and look from afar. At Ramisa’s henna ritual, however, her father, Muzafer
Mahmud, a very famous zurla player,16 took the zurla from the hired mu-
sician and played briefly at the ceremony (video example 5.2).
Outside Ramisa’s house, the bride’s women greeted the groom’s women;
they danced together and were led into the courtyard, where they sat down
and were served lokum (Turkish delight). A representative of the groom’s
women opened the trays and announced each gift with formulaic language
wishing the bride health and happiness: who it is from, where it is from,
and often what it cost; then she handed it over to the bride’s side. At Rami-
sa’s ceremony, Hasan’s sister was the “speaker” and Ramisa’s sister gath-
ered the gifts on a white sheet (see video example 5.3). Since the groom
was poor (Hasan’s father had died), the gifts were very modest. Wealthy
families may give five or six pairs of šalvari, the white dress, and many
gold necklaces.
After the gifts were announced, the music started again and the bride
was led to the courtyard (photograph 5.7) as the women screamed, ulu-
lated, crowded around her, and threw candies and chickpeas. This was a
very loud and intense moment, as it was first time she emerged publicly
(video example 5.4). In 1990 Ramisa wore tel, šalvari, and a white veil
(photographs 5.7, 5.8, and 5.9), but it is more typical for brides to have
their white veil covered with a red veil (red is a powerful color, invoking
blood and life). A series of rituals ensued, enacted by one woman from the
bride’s side (her sister) and another from the groom’s side (his sister); both
had to be nursing mothers. They put sugar in each other’s mouths (for
future sweetness) and squirted breast milk onto the bride’s hair (for future
fertility). Then they dipped a gold coin into the henna and stuck it onto the
bride’s hair (for future wealth); finally, they applied henna to her hair
(video example 5.5). At this moment, they made Ramisa cry by telling her
she would be moving far away and would never see her parents again.
These remarks were formulaic and did not necessarily represent the
bride’s actual situation; they did, however, structurally show the bride’s
transition and the uncertainty of her future.17 After her henna was applied,
dancing resumed with lines led by her relatives (photograph 5.10, video
example 5.6). After the groom’s women departed with the musicians, we
watched the videotape of the whole ceremony at Ramisa’s house. Ramisa’s
relatives evaluated who wore what and how the rituals were enacted.
In intense ritual moments the bride generally assumes a passive stance,
evinced by her downward gaze and how she is led around and told what
to do. Only selected elderly women have the knowledge to direct the
ritual, and they shout out instructions (and sometimes argue among
themselves) as it transpires. At several henna ceremonies, I heard criti-
cism regarding the lack of a red scarf for the bride. Decisions about the
ritual unfold during the moment of performance. Ritual objects may be
prepared ahead of time, but there is neither rehearsal nor instruction of
the bride in advance. One display that is prepared in advance is the bride’s
trousseau, čeiz, which is arranged in her house and inspected by all
females. A parallel display may occur in the groom’s house, consisting of
clothing (borjana šeja) and household gift items.

The next morning Ramisa had her banja, bath ceremony, where the
henna is washed out. Fifty years ago the bride would go to the public bath-
house,18 but almost all bathhouses were torn down in Macedonia and Bul-
garia as part of an effort by the socialist governments to remove Muslim
cultural elements and modernize. In 1990 Ramisa bathed in a neighbor’s
newly remodeled bathroom, accompanied by young female relatives from
both families. Meantime, her aunts prepared pita (salty cheese pastry
baked in a tepsija) and other foods for the groom’s women, who arrived
around noon with sweets, rakija, and trays of meat pastry. Ramisa was led
out from her bath wearing tel and the šalvari and jewelry the groom’s
family gave her the day before, and she performed the ritual kissing of the
hands of her future female relatives, receiving small monetary gifts.
Among Macedonian Roma, kissing elders is performed in a specific
manner: you take their right hand in your right hand, kiss it, and touch it
to your chin and forehead in a bowing manner (video excerpt 5.7). Because
this was a ženski muabet (an all-women party; Macedonian), the dancing
was solo čoček and more sensual than it might be in male company. Video
example 5.8 shows a young girl at this event being instructed to dance by
a female relative. At another bath party, an older female relative did hu-
morous suggestive dances. Women sometimes get drunk at these bath
parties; they laugh, sing, and cry over close relatives they miss who are
abroad in the diaspora.
Igranka
On Saturday, an igranka (dance party; Macedonian) is held at both the

bride’s house and the groom’s house. For the bride’s side, this is the single
most important event; the groom’s igranka is optional and depends on
economic capacity. The term is actually shorthand for a series of rituals
occurring on Saturday. During the day the women decorate a sita (sieve)
with greenery and red ribbons (and sometimes tel plus a grain product
such as popcorn), all symbols of fertility and prosperity (see photograph
5.11); this sieve will be used to lead dance lines. Costume for the igranka
is typically the fanciest šalvari sets (pants and jacket or vest) and western
dresses that women own (photograph 5.12). Often new šalvari are pur-
chased specially for the igranka, and fabric styles change every few years.
Women are quite critical of old-fashioned styles and fabrics, and indeed I
received quite a few gifts of outdated šalvari.19
The igranka is a decidedly female event even though men are present,
and dance lines are usually led by women. The first line dance of the event
is led by the most respected female elder, who holds a sieve decorated with
a grain product, greenery, and a red scarf; this known as sitakoro (the sieve
dance). The sieve symbolically links the fertility of the land (wheat and
flour) to the fertility of the bride (photographs 5.13 through 5.16; audio
example 2.2; video example 5.9). At Ramisa’s igranka, the bride’s mother,
Nazlija, led the first dance, followed by her brother’s wife, followed by
Nazlija’s sisters; eventually Ramisa led, dressed in the šalvari she had
received at the henna party a few days earlier. Women were called up to
lead the line one by one, in the order of age and closeness to the spon-
soring family. Čoček as a female solo dance has an important place in
ritual (see Chapter 6). It is danced in the middle of the area near the front
of the dance line; simultaneously, the line snakes around (video examples
5.10 and 5.11). For example, at Ramisa’s igranka the bride’s close female
kin danced čoček in the middle.
The igranka takes place in the late afternoon, often on the street, accom-
panied by acoustic instruments such as clarinet, saxophone, dumbek
(hour-shaped hand drum), and accordion (and sometimes džumbuš, the
plucked string instrument with skin face discussed in Chapter 3). These
instruments are all portable; they can be played walking, unlike synthe-
sizers and drum sets. For Ramisa’s wedding, clarinetist/saxophonist Feta
Šakir’s band was hired; he led one of the most popular bands in Šutka in
the early 1990s (video example 5.10 shows Feta and his son on drums).
Toward dusk the musicians climbed up to the stage and plugged in their
instruments, adding a synthesizer, džez (drum set), and singer (video ex-
amples 5.9 through 5.15 and 5.17 through 5.21 feature Feta’s band; in
video example 5.15 note how young boys under the stage played makeshift
drums). As more relatives and friends arrived at the igranka, the dance
line grew to fill the street. At first, only those who were “invited”20 danced,
but many others came to observe. A favorite activity in Romani neighbor-
hoods in Macedonia and Bulgaria is strolling around to watch weddings.
Observers tend to wait to dance until all the important relatives have been
called up to lead.
As it gets dark and more people gather to dance, the groom’s female
relatives prepare a tray of henna with candles for the second henna cere-
mony. They leave their family’s festivities and process to the bride’s house
with zurla and tapan music. At Ramisa’s wedding, they arrived after dark
with their music and their lighted candles, causing a loud cacophony and
a visual glow amidst the dancing, thus increasing the intensity of the ritual
(video example 5.16). Ramisa’s female relatives led her into her courtyard,
and the groom’s women put one of his shirts on her head and then applied
henna to her hands and her feet, which were encased in special blue (in
other cases, red) silken cases. The color red, as mentioned earlier, brings
luck, and blue wards off the evil eye, a force to which brides are especially
vulnerable because they are beautiful and happy (photograph 5.18). The
women threw chickpeas and candies over her. While she sat immobile
with the cases on her hands and feet, the bride was made to cry again, as
in the first henna ceremony, with warnings about her bleak future. At this
point, the zurla melodies imitated the girl crying. The groom’s women
then departed with their musicians.
On Saturday night a meal is served at the igranka. During the banquet,
a speaker calls up close relatives, in a respectful order, to lead the dance
line, and the male head of each family tips the musicians. Later, gifts from
each family to the couple are exchanged and announced and recorded by

a speaker. Gifts combine soft goods like blankets and fabric with jewelry
and money. Remembering who gave what and how much is essential
because of reciprocity; at future weddings guests are expected to recipro-
cate with similar amounts.
At Ramisa’s wedding, however, the groom did not host his own Saturday
night banquet because of his family’s economic condition; thus he and his
relatives joined the bride’s banquet (video example 5.17). Many famous mu-
sicians, notably the Romani clarinetist Muamet Čun (video examples 5.18
and 5.19), Macedonian singers Jagoda Filipovska and Jonče Hristovski, and
the group Tavče Gravče, performed because they were colleagues of the
bride’s father at Radio Skopje. A modest hall was rented and the food was
catered; in the 1990s, many banquets were set up on the street with rented
tables and chairs. Conversely, when a rich groom marries a poorer bride,
the bride and her relatives may join the groom’s banquet. Such an arrange-
ment occurred at Amdi Bajram’s son’s wedding in 1992. Amdi’s banquet
took place in a large Skopje convention center, and several hundred guests
attended. Tables of roasted lamb were displayed, and the bride wore a
heavy necklace of gold coins. The music consisted of several local groups,
plus Esma Redžepova and her ensemble and Slobodan Salijevič’s brass
band from southern Serbia. Hiring nonlocal performers is a mark of status
for the sponsors. Similarly, the sponsors of a circumcision I attended in
Šutka in 1990 gained status because Greek Roma were hired. This is also
true in the diaspora; for example, in Western Europe and New York Roma
invite and pay for the transportation of guest musicians from the Balkans
(see Chapter 2).
Getting the Bride
Sunday is the day of transference of the bride from her natal home to the
groom’s home. It is enacted whether the couple are virtual strangers or
have been living together, because it is the symbolic dramatization of the
patrilocal principle. The bajraktar (flag bearer; Macedonian) leads the
street procession to get the bride.21 The bride’s parents, if they can afford
it, engage musicians, and all the relatives dance with the bride in front of
her house (see video example 5.20). She is dressed in a white gown and
her relatives demonstrably show their sadness by crying. As soon as they
hear word that the groom’s party is approaching (typically without the
groom), they seclude the bride inside the house, and the men set up a
barricade in the street. The bride’s men wield sticks, knives, shovels, and
axes and act very threatening. As the groom’s party approaches, the ca-
cophony of the two musical bands becomes more intense. The groom’s
men try to get inside the barricade, while the bride’s men resist. The
groom’s men jokingly buy their way in with bribes and cases of beer. At
many Šutka weddings, the bribe had to be paid in western currency! Note
that this ritual dramatizes the close bond between the bride and her ex-
tended family, and their reluctance to see her leave. The ambivalence
between their happiness to have her married and their pain of separation
is performatively enacted.
The drama continues as the bride is led out from her house by an elder
male relative, who holds her head down (photograph 5.19). In Ramisa’s
case, her brother fulfilled this role (video example 5.21). The bride is
expected to gaze down demurely (photograph 5.20) and she sometimes
performs temana (the expression used is zema temana [Macedonian] she
takes temana), a slow arching movement done by one hand, then the other,
then both (see New York video examples discussed later). Temana is done
primarily in Skopje, Tetovo, and Gostivar and demonstrates respect.22 The
bride is then led into the street and transferred to the groom’s males after
more bargaining (see the end of video example 5.21). This is the saddest
moment for the bride’s side, and all her relatives cry. If they can afford it,
the groom’s family rents a pajton (horse driven cart, Macedonian), to trans-
port the bride. Amdi Bajram rented an airplane to transfer the bride; it ac-
commodated about fifty wedding guests and briefly circled above Skopje.23
In any case, the path taken to bring the bride to the groom’s house must be
different from the path taken to get her; this is to confuse the evil eye.
Note that many rituals express traditional patriarchal values, e.g., the
stance of the bride in which her eyes are lowered and she acts modestly,
which seem to contradict both the powerful position of women in ritual
management and the display of her sexuality through dancing. This par-
adox questions and sets into tension some of the traditional patriarchal
tenants that the rituals themselves enact. Taking the ritual of a male elder
leading the bride out of her house with her head lowered, for example, we
would certainly be correct in assuming this was a symbol of female subor-
dination. Yet we cannot assume a singular interpretation of this symbol.
The fact that the ritual is directed by women who may have alternative
views, and the fact that it is embedded in a complex set of female-centered
performances and economic roles, mediates the patriarchal message.
The song that was performed during the transference of Ramisa from
her natal family to her affine family was “Sine Moj” (My Son [Serbian],
popularized by Muharem Serbezovski), which reflected the theme of the
passing of childhood (video example 5.21). More typical for this moment,
however, are the two songs “Oj Borije” and “Kote Isi Amalalen”; the former
extols the beauty of the bride via a dialogue between her and her father-
in-law (video example 5.26 with text supplement and video example 5.32
from a New York wedding). The latter extols the bride’s pedigree (see
audio example 5.1 with text supplement and video example 5.23). Another
song often performed at this moment is “Ustaj Kato,” a Serbian song in
7/8 telling of a jaybird’s conversation with a young girl about her arranged
marriage. See video example 5.29 with text supplement from a New York
wedding.
The bride is incorporated into her husband’s family with a series of rit-
uals supervised by her mother-in-law (whom she often calls mother, daj).
She is the most significant female to her; she will spend much time with
her and has to follow the rules of her house.24 The groom puts a belt

around his bride’s neck and pulls her slowly into the house as she carries
a loaf of bread under each arm; a third loaf is held above her head. She
smears honeyed water on the three walls of the threshold and kicks over
(or steps on) a glass of sweetened water on the floor. As noted above,
sweets and wheat ensure happiness and fertility.
Depending on the economic standing of the family, there may be a ban-
quet on Sunday night, similar to the Saturday night banquet. If the couple
have not run away, then at some point on Sunday night the marriage is
consummated and the “good news” of the bride’s virginity is announced.
As described in the previous chapter, the blaga rakija ritual requires the
groom and his relatives to process outdoors with music to the bride’s
house to show the blood-stained sheet to her mother. There they receive
gifts and are fed eggs (video example 4.1 shows Ramisa’s groom at the
blaga rakija).
Džumaluk25 refers to the first visit of the bride’s relatives to the home of
the groom. It usually occurs on Monday, the day immediately after the
taking of the bride. Ramisa’s džumaluk is illustrated in video example 5.22,
where the bride’s relatives arrived with decorated trays filled with food and
gifts, and the groom’s musicians met them. Ramisa, wearing her white
gown (by now a bit faded) and looking forlorn, greeted her relatives and
everyone cried as they took turns leading dance lines with her (video ex-
ample 5.23; note the song “Kote Isi Amalalen,” discussed earlier). In video
example 5.24, Ramisa respectfully kissed her aunt, mother, and father as
they gave her money. After several hours of dancing and feasting, Ramisa
tearfully bade her relatives goodbye. Although Monday signaled the end of
the wedding proper, visiting continued for several weeks, including prvič,
the first visit of the bride to her natal home.
Weddings in Belmont
In the American context, many traditional rituals have been eliminated

while a few new customs have been introduced. Rather than seeing
diasporic weddings as lacking, however, I focus on how and why weddings
change, that is, the decisions made regarding inclusion, exclusion, and
innovation. For example, in Chapter 4 I described how in Macedonia invi-
tations to a wedding are typically delivered formulaically face-to-face. In
Belmont, on the other hand, invitations are professionally printed in the
Macedonian language but with Latin letters, because many young Roma
cannot read Cyrillic; but they are still delivered face-to face if possible.
Belmont Roma usually confine their weddings to one or two weekend
days. The rigid American work schedule stands in marked contrast to
more flexible Macedonian work schedules.26
In the diaspora, sponsorship of weddings often departs from the patri-
centered norm. If a groom is brought over from Macedonia, for example,
the bride’s family, especially if they are poor, may feel no need to put on an
event. The groom’s side may have already sponsored an event in Macedonia.
On the other hand, if the bride’s family can afford it and if they have many
relatives here in America, they might sponsor a wedding. When a groom
brings over a bride from Macedonia, there is usually a wedding. Because of
migration, key family members are sometimes absent, and thus substitutes
enact ritual roles. For example, people are assigned to be the bride’s parents
and a Belmont apartment may be designated as the bride’s house. Of course,
this adjustment also happens in Macedonia. For example, the parents of
Bilhan’s bride could not attend her wedding in Šutka because they lived
abroad. To dramatize the transference of the bride to the groom’s side, some
friends of the groom acted the role of the bride’s parents and used their
Šutka house as her home.
As discussed in Chapter 4, Belmont families are involved in choosing
spouses. The prewedding arrangements, visits and bargaining sessions,
and gift giving and engagements are very similar to those in Macedonia, if
both sets of parents are present. Sometimes engagement parties are held in
banquet halls. The six-day wedding, however, is typically shortened to one
to three days, but they are not necessarily consecutive. The henna party is
sometimes eliminated, but if held it is combined with the second henna
ceremony and may take place at any time prior to the wedding banquet.
Surprisingly, in Belmont it is sometimes sponsored by the groom’s side
rather than the bride’s side.
Ramo and Rifat’s double wedding in 1995 (see the previous chapter)
included a midweek kana in their parents’ tiny three-room apartment. Ap-
proximately twenty-five women occupied the living room (which was
nicely decorated with gifts for the two brides), and the few men were rele-
gated to the kitchen. There was recorded music. At Samir and Lebabet’s
wedding in 2004, the groom’s parents sponsored a large henna party on
the night before the banquet in the courtyard of their apartment building
in Belmont. They beautifully displayed clothing and gifts for the bride.
Musicians used a powerful sound system, and guests danced outdoors
until 3:00 AM. The clarinetist and singer, who were born in Macedonia
and were relatives of the bride’s father, were flown in from Germany. Not
only is it very prestigious to hire musicians from abroad; they also bring
news of relatives and return with gifts and videos. For this wedding the
two guest musicians performed with local musicians. They all knew the
same repertoire of songs and dances because every performer’s musical
reference point is Macedonia.
Lebadet led the first dance with a fancy handkerchief (not a decorated
sieve, as in Macedonia; video example 5.25). One by one, her female rela-
tives as well as the groom’s led the line. Before each woman led, she (not a
man) tipped the musicians. Lebadet wore a gown, then šalvari, then an-
other gown. Šalvari are infrequently worn in the United States, but a few
elders insist that brides wear them for rituals. As this was a female-centered
party, the men stayed on the sidelines. The dancing became bawdy as the
women loosened up, and the mothers of the bride and groom climbed on
chairs and mimed sexually suggestive movements in a humorous way. In
terms of the intense female presence, this event resembled the henna

parties I had attended in Macedonia despite the absence of some of the
specific customs.
Henna was brought out on a tepsija (with the song “Oj Borije,” video
example with text supplement 5.26) and, amidst loud screaming, was ap-
plied by an elder from the bride’s side to the hands and feet, which were
then covered in satin bags; a small amount was put on Lebadet’s hair
(video example 5.27). Most brides in Belmont do not want their hands to
look odd at work, so they request just a dab of henna. After a while Leba-
det washed off the henna; there was no bath ceremony. The next day (Sat-
urday) included a ceremony in the mosque (this custom is becoming
common in Belmont) and the formal banquet, but it did not include get-
ting the bride. As the couple emerged from the mosque, they danced to a
band of acoustic instruments, including clarinet, accordion, and tarabuka;
several local musicians took turns performing (video example 5.28). Many
relatives congregated, and although the dancing in the street blocked city
traffic (video example 5.29) everyone was very polite; eventually a limou-
sine arrived to take the couple to the banquet hall.
Other American weddings do feature “getting the bride.” At Ramo’s and
Rifat’s double wedding, both grooms and their relatives first went to
Ramo’s bride Metola’s house (by car and limousine) and bargained their
way into the courtyard, accompanied by an acoustic band. Metola
emerged, eyes downcast and with her head held down by male relatives,
and she “took the temana” (video example 5.30); this is done very rarely in
the United States (Aiše, the grooms’ mother, had previously instructed the
brides in the temana). Metola was ushered into the limousine, and her
trousseau was piled into another car. Then the limousine headed for Rifat’s
bride’s (Fatima’s) house, which was actually out of town, but a relative’s
Bronx apartment was used as a substitute. The same ritual ensued, with
the bargaining (video example 5.31), the leading out, and the temana with
the song “Oj Borije” (video example with text supplement 5.32). Then they
drove to the grooms’ apartment, where, Aiše, the grooms’ mother, took
charge of the incorporation rituals; many people remarked that these rit-
uals are rarely done in the Untied States. Video example 5.33 shows
Fatima as she walked up the stairs with a bread over her head and rubbed
the threshold with sugar water; Rifat led her in with a belt around her
neck and (gently) knocked her head on the walls (note the bridal gifts
pinned to the walls); then he teased her with a knife and everyone kissed
each other. All this was done with Aiše’s formulaic blessings for luck, hap-
piness, and “a male child next year.”
The highlight of the wedding was the evening banquet, whose structure
mirrored American weddings in that it took place in a rented hall with a
dais, catered food, and a wedding cake. Typically, Romani weddings
include a buffet plus cocktails followed by a sit-down dinner with Mediter-
ranean foods. Other American customs include throwing the bouquet,
throwing the bride’s garter, drinking champagne, and cutting the first
piece of cake. Bride’s maids and ushers are other American adoptions;
they are usually chosen from the younger unmarried relatives of both
sides and wear matching gowns and suits. They may enter the hall in
pairs, hold an arch decorated in greenery, and lead the bridal couple under
it. At Ramo and Rifat’s double wedding, the first dance line of the evening
was led by Aiše (photograph 5.21), followed by her female relatives (video
example 5.34); later Aiše led again, followed by Fatima’s mother leading a
slow crossing dance (video example 5.35). As in Macedonia, several close
relatives danced solo inside the curve of the line. Then came the formal
entrances into the hall, announced by the speaker, who was Osman (the
grooms’ mother’s brother).27 When the bridal couples entered, the brides
again took the temana.
The band consisted of Ramiz Islami (clarinet and saxophone), his son
Romeo (clarinet), Erhan Umer (synthesizer and vocals) and his father
Husamedin (drum set and vocals), Trajče Džemaloski (synthesizer), Kuj-
tim Ismaili (guitar), and several other drummers (video examples 5.36 and
5.37). I discuss these musicians later, but here I note that because Ramo
was a singer, his colleagues were glad to play for him. Husamedin some-
times played dumbek and sometimes tapan in the center of the dancers
(see video example 5.38).
After the two bridal couples entered, they did a slow American couple
dance to a Romani song that Ramo sang, which morphed into a free-form
čoček and became more intense as the three fathers threw money over the
couples. As in Macedonia, the speaker called up the relatives to lead dance
lines in order of closeness. This is an entirely constant element in the dias-
pora and, as mentioned earlier, is a visual interpretation of social struc-
ture of the extended family. For example, at Lebadet and Samir’s 2004
wedding, the speaker announced, “The bride’s mother and father will now
dance.” The father requested a tune and tipped the musicians, while the
mother led the line and close females danced solo in the curve of the line.
The father left the line to tip again so the dance would be extended. The
momentum tangibly built up at the front of the line, until there was a vis-
ceral intensity (video example 5.39).
As in the Balkans, women are the primary dancers; they dance for hours
while men dance sporadically. But in New York there is also a small, strong
group of young male dancers. As in the Balkans, the solo čoček is consid-
ered a female specialty, and talented women are surrounded and encour-
aged by their relatives. Toward the end of Ramo and Rifat’s wedding, after
everyone had loosened up, the two couples danced solo čoček standing on
chairs. At another wedding in 2004, the sponsoring family innovated by
hiring a non-Romani American belly dancer. Note that, as will be explored
in Chapter 6, although Romani čoček shares some movements with belly
dancing, the latter is more overtly sexual, is costumed with naked flesh
showing, and is danced by professionals for strangers for money. Wedding
guests had mixed reactions to the belly dancer; elders for the most part
disliked it (because it was not part of their tradition), and younger guests
either liked the novelty or criticized it for taking the focus off the couple.
Another important part of weddings is the procession of the bridal
couple around the banquet hall to every table. This can take several hours

and is accompanied by slow songs, often in Turkish. The couple greets
each elder family member with the customary kiss on the hand, and they
receive money. The largest cash gifts, however, are given in envelopes at
the end of the banquet to the sponsoring family, as each guest family lines
up to bid farewell.
Common but not ubiquitous in New York is a blaga rakija banquet. It is
usually sponsored by the bride’s side, and held in a rented hall anywhere
from a day to a few weeks after the banquet.28 The day after Ramo and
Rifat’s banquet, for example, Ramo’s bride’s parents sponsored a blaga
rakija party. Roughly the same musicians were hired as the night before,
with the addition of Kurte Islami, Ramiz’s son (video example 5.40). The
traditional rituals were enacted, including the groom receiving gifts sewn
to a sheet of fabric (bovčalok; see Chapter 4, and video example 5.41),
eating eggs and doughy products, and joking with his male friends. Guests
also brought gifts for the couple, and everyone danced for hours (see video
examples 5.42 through 5.46).
Note that in New York weddings the financial outlay of gifts on all sides
is substantially larger than in Macedonia. In New York, a guest (even dis-
tant kin) has to provide gifts for the engagement, the kana, the wedding
banquet (in fact, several gifts during the wedding, plus tipping the musi-
cians), and the blaga rakija. The main gift costs approximately $100 per
adult. This represents a financial strain for most Belmont families, and
they struggle to give honorably in spite of limited resources. They do, of
course, expect to reciprocally receive gifts when they sponsor events.
Putting on a wedding in New York is a huge financial commitment; if sev-
eral hundred guests are invited, the cost of the rental hall, the caterer, and
the musicians runs over $20,000, not including the gowns, gifts, limou-
sine, and tips. According to Condé Nast Bridal Magazine the average na-
tional cost of an American wedding in 2005 was $28,000. This is precisely
why families save up money.
Belmont Musicians
As I have emphasized, music in Romani communities is an important con-

duit through which social obligations are enacted. There are more than
twenty regularly performing Macedonian Romani musicians in the New
York area, and a younger generation is now emerging. They are all male,
including singers, because it is considered immodest for a woman to be a
professional and perform for strangers (see Chapter 6). Belmont Roma
engage musicians for weddings from the local or diasporic Romani com-
munity because a successful performer needs to be familiar with the
language, the rituals, and the dance repertoire. Families typically contract
a lead player, who then assembles the rest of the band and secures a sound
system (usually owned by one of the musicians). A fee is negotiated, but the
musicians also expect to receive tips. Typical fees vary from $100 to $400
per person. For example, at one Belmont wedding in 1996 the saxophonist
received $300, the keyboardist $250, one singer $200, another singer $400
(because he also owned the sound system), the guitarist $200, and the
drummer $250; tips totaled $1,500, which were divided among the six mu-
sicians. These fees increased until 2008, when the economy declined and
events became more sporadic. This is not a small income for one event, but
Romani weddings are sporadic, and thus most musicians need to service
other ethnic groups and have day jobs.
Some Romani musicians play for Bosnians, Serbs, Montenegrins, Mace-
donians, and Albanians as well as Roma; in Chapter 11 I discuss Yuri
Yunakov in depth, who also plays for Turks, Armenians, and Bulgarians.
Patrons hire musicians to perform for weddings, circumcisions, baptisms,
graduations, and New Year’s parties. Musicians also play in restaurants
and ethnic nightclubs in Astoria, Ridgewood, Staten Island, and the
Bronx, but these establishments frequently go out of business; for ex-
ample, a Bosnian club in Clifton, New Jersey, employed Roma for many
years as well as Bosnians, Serbs, and Bulgarians. For each patron group,
musicians must know the appropriate dances and songs. Thus for non-
Romani events musicians usually engage a singer from the ethnic group of
the patron.
In the diaspora, good Romani musicians try to cast a wide net for
patrons. Once someone is known to be talented and trustworthy, he is
asked to perform by many colleagues. On a good weekend, for example, a
musician may play in a Bosnian club on Friday, at an Albanian wedding on
Saturday, and at a Romani circumcision on Sunday. Local musicians often
combine with visiting Macedonian Romani artists, as at Samir and Leba-
det’s wedding discussed earlier. In the last fifteen years, visiting artists have
included Esma Redžepova (see photograph 3.2 and Chapter 10), Bilhan
Mačev (clarinetist who trained with Esma and Stevo Teodosievski), Tunan
Kurtiš (clarinetist, now living in Germany), Ferus Mustafov (clarinetist
and saxophonist see chapter 2), Severdžan Amzoski (clarinetist, known as
Klepača from Bitola), Gardjian (singer), Vehbi Mefailov (clarinetist, from
Bitola), Rifat Demirov (clarinetist now living in Vienna), and Muharem
Serbezovski (singer now living in Germany; see Chapters 2, and 3).
When Serbezovski performed for a New Year’s party in 1997, the crowd
was especially large since he is a well-known artist and was accompanied
by Bilhan Mačev (photograph 5.22, video examples 3.1 and 5.47). The
older generation especially liked his hits from the 1970s, while the younger
Roma preferred Mačev’s contemporary repertoire. When Esma Redžepova
visited New York in 1996, a group of Bronx Roma organized a dance party
in a rented hall. Esma performed a miniconcert in which she sang her hits,
and she then took requests by walking from table to table (video example
3.3); afterward, her drummer and gifted vocal protégé, Šadan Sakip, sang
for a dance party accompanied by contemporary Skopje-style dance music
played by Bilhan Mačev (video examples 5.48, 5.49, and 5.50).
Because Esma had such a broad fan base and because this event was not
a private family event, Serbian Roma, Kalderash Roma, Slavic Macedo-
nians, and American folk dancers attended as well as Macedonian Roma.

It is quite unusual to have these groups together in the same space because
they do not normally socialize. On the dance lines, ethnicities clustered
but everyone felt welcome. On the other hand, when Roma venture out
beyond their community to musical events, there is sometimes tension;
because of prejudice, they are not readily accepted by other Balkan ethnic
groups. In 2003 I attended a New Year’s party at a Macedonian Orthodox
Church in New Jersey with about fifteen Macedonian Roma from Belmont
(and with Šani Rifati, a Romani activist from Kosovo). The featured vo-
calist was Blagica Pavlovska, who sings in Romani style; the featured band
were the Struškite Svadbari (Struga Wedding Musicians). Roma were not
welcomed by most Macedonians at this event (especially when nationalis-
tic songs were sung) and as a result were ill at ease, did not dance freely,
and departed early. A similar experience happened when Esma played at a
Macedonian Church in 2004 and several Romani families attended (video
example 3.4). On the other hand, Romani musicians are much more used
to interacting with Macedonians and other non-Roma, and they are im-
mune to stares and hostile glances. They adapt readily and are much more
adept at crossing borders thanks to their professional experience playing
for patrons of varying ethnicities.
Ramiz Islami was a seminal musical figure in the New York Romani
community in the 1980s; he lived in Brooklyn and died in 2004 at the
young age of forty-eight. He was the favorite clarinetist/saxophonist for
events through the 1990s, and he played at Ramo and Rifat’s 1995 wed-
ding. Ramiz is from a family of Albanian speakers from the Prespa (Resen/
Ohrid) area, and his uncle, Dule, the most famous clarinetist of the region,
played regularly for Albanians and Macedonians (Leibman 1974).29 Var-
ious incarnations of his band, Grupi Sazet E Ohrit (Ensemble from Ohrid;
Albanian), included Kujtim Ismaili on guitar and vocals (born in Ohrid in
1965, married to Ramiz’s sister); his brother Redžep on clarinet/saxo-
phone; his two sons, Romeo on clarinet and Kurte on drum set; Erhan
Umer on accordion/keyboard; Muren Ibraimov from Bitola on violin; and
Seido Salifoski on dumbek. Ramiz trained Nešo Ajvazi (vocals) in addition
to most of these musicians.
Ramiz had a sweet tone, great mastery of technique, and a varied reper-
toire. Photographs 5.23 and 5.24 and video examples 5.34 through 5.38
and 5.40 through 5.46 feature Ramiz and his band 1988–1995. Today his
two talented sons, who moved to the Philadelphia area, continue his
legacy, although Romeo has somewhat departed from his father’s older
Albanian Prespa style and repertoire in favor of a technically flashier Sko-
pje Romani style (he is also influenced by Ivo Papazov’s Bulgarian wed-
ding style). 30 Kujtim’ s son Muamed (born 1990) is also emerging as a
talented keyboard player.
Erhan Umer (known as “Rambo”) was born in Bitola, Macedonia, in
1973 and emigrated to the United States in 1986 with his parents; at home
his family speaks Turkish and Macedonian. He plays accordion and key-
board, sings, and is a very popular musician. He comes from a long line of
professional male musicians: his father, Husamedin, was invited to play

tapan with Tanec, the national professional folk music ensemble of Mace-
donia; and his uncle, Jusuf, also played tapan; both brothers are excellent
dancers (Jusuf leads a dance line in video example 5.44). Erhan’s older
brother Sevim narrated: “My father was invited to play with Tanec in Sko-
pje 1959. He joined for one month but my grandfather objected, saying
‘How can you leave me alone in Bitola?’ So Husamedin had to drop out!
My grandfather was also a tapan player but he wanted his youngest son
near him at home. Those were the traditions back then.” As a young man
Husamedin played in the Bitola KUD (Kulturno Umetničko Društvo, am-
ateur ensemble) Ilinden. Eran recalls how his father endured the stressful
life of a professional musician even as a child: “Husamedin was eleven
years old and had just received a new tapan from his father—he was play-
ing it with the father for the first time at a wedding, and was so proud. In
the middle of the wedding someone approached the father about buying
the tapan, for a good price. My grandfather took the drum away from
Husamedin and sold it right then and there. Husamedin felt like crying.
Money counted, not a child’s feelings.”
Husamedin switched from tapan to drum set and currently plays regu-
larly for Albanian events in New York (he speaks Albanian fluently). He
still plays tapan when the music and the atmosphere require it (see video
example 5.38). Most of Erhan’s other male relatives are musicians: Vebi
(first cousin) is a singer, Turan (brother, born 1968) plays guitar (he and
his family lived in Germany for several years before coming to New York),
Dževat (brother living Switzerland, born 1960) plays drums and keyboard,
and Sevim (brother, born 1965, speaks Albanian) regularly plays drums
and tours with Albanian stars Merita Halili and Raif Hyseni.
In addition to family celebrations, Erhan performs regularly in clubs that
cater to Albanians, Bosnians, Serbs, and Macedonians. Erhan was trained
by Ramiz as well as his father; video examples 5.34 through 5.38 and 5.40
through 5.46 feature Erhan playing with Ramiz at Ramo and Rifat’s 1995
wedding. As young man, Erhan formed his own band, Amanet (Testament),
which has had varying personnel and produced several cassettes, one of
which features Ferhan Ismail (his cousin) on vocals, Ramiz Islami (clar-
inet), Ilhan Rahmanovski (guitar), Seido Salifoski (dumbek; photographs
4.1 and 5.26 and audio example and text supplement 4.1 of the song “Gur-
beti,” discussed in Chapter 4). Erhan recorded the master tape in New York
and then, to save money, sent it to Macedonia for duplication. On several of
Erhan’s albums, Yuri Yunakov was contracted to play solo improvisations.
In recent years Yuri, Erhan, and Sevim have collaborated extensively, and
Yuri has included them on tours for American audiences (see Chapter 11).
Video examples 5.51 and 5.52 feature Erhan and Yuri at the 2008 California
Herdeljezi festival, sponsored by NGO Voice of Roma.
Erhan’s teenage son Husamedin (nicknamed Uska, born 1989) is emerging
as a talented vocalist and has begun to sing with his father. In May 2007, he
performed with his family band (and guest Ismail Lumanovski) for Ameri-
cans at the Voice of Roma Herdeljezi festival (see video examples 5.53 and
5.54). Like many other young Macedonian Roma in the diaspora, Uska

keeps abreast of the newest musical developments in the Balkans via the
internet. He has thousands of Romani songs on his computer and trades
them with his cousins in the diaspora. He graciously shared his extensive
knowledge of new Macedonian Romani music with me; like many young
musicians, he is also knowledgeable about Bulgarian Romani music.
Ilhan Rahmanovski, who emigrated in 1993, is a guitar player who plays
professionally, as well as a handyman for several buildings (photographs
4.1, 5.22, 5.25, and 11.1). He narrated:
I didn’t play music at home in Prilep, I learned here. I was living in the
same apartment building as Erhan who was learning keyboard. He
encouraged me to learn guitar. I play regularly in clubs and weddings
for Bosnians and Serbs. The clubs were more popular in the 1990s. In
those years Balkan men came over na pečalba, to work, to earn money,
and they patronized clubs. They had no families, low rent, few bills,
and no family life. They went out to clubs to meet each other, to hear
music from back home. I used to play four to five nights a week. Now
there are only a few clubs left. Today they are family men with bills,
rent, and large families. Plus the war in Yugoslavia brought tension to
these clubs.31 But I still play fairly regularly.
Ilhan’s son, Džengis, is a teenage tarabuka player who grew up surrounded

by his father’s musical friends. He watched Seido Salifoski perform for
years, was invited to play with his father at several gigs, and played with
other Belmont teenagers. Video example 5.55 shows Džengis performing
at the East Village club Maia Meyhane with his father, Seido, Šaban Der-
visoski (accordion), and Ismail Lumanovski.
Another young musician, Sal Mamudoski, a cousin of Seido born in
1988, is a promising clarinetist being trained by Yuri Yunakov. Sal debuted
with Yuri for American audiences at the 2006 Zlatne Uste Golden Festival,
in a band that included Ilhan, Džengis, Kujtim, and Muamed. In 2007 Sal
toured nationally with Yuri, Erhan, and Bulgarian Romani drummer/tam-
bura player Rumen Sali Shopov for American audiences. Currently Sal
plays regularly with Yuri in his ensemble at the downtown club Mehanata
with Alfred Popaj, an Albanian keyboardist. Video examples 5.56 and 5.57
feature them at Hungaria House in 2007; video example 5.51 features Sal,
Yuri, Erhan, and Rumen at VOR’s Herdeljezi festival in 2008. Seido and
Yuri are thus training the younger generation and exposing them to varied
American audiences.
Severdžan Azirov (born 1967) and his brother Menderes left their birth-
place, Dračevo, a suburb near Skopje, in 1983, lived in Ljubljana, and
emigrated to Belmont in 1990. When they resided in Macedonia, the two
brothers were dancers in several KUDs, including Phralipe (brotherhood)
in Skopje (see Chapter 6), and in ensembles such as Kočo Racin and Orce
Nikolov. They know a large repertoire of ethnic Macedonian dances plus
the Romani repertoire. At Belmont events, they often lead men’s lines,
and their parents are also strong dancers (video example 5.58 features

Menderes leading Čačak and 5.42 features his father leading a line
čoček).32 Severdžan is also an excellent drummer (photographs 5.22 and
11.1) and performs regularly in clubs and at weddings for Bosnians,
Macedonians, Serbs, and Albanians, as well as Roma (he is playing in
many of the video examples from Lebadet and Samir’s wedding, and also
in video examples 6.4 and 11.1). Almost every New Year’s, for example, he
plays at a Macedonian Church in Garfield, New Jersey. Severdžan’s son,
Sabuhan, in his early twenties, learned keyboard and production skills for
hip hop and for some time played Romani fusion rap music with Yuri
Yunakov’s son, Danko.
Nešat (Nešo) Ajvazi is one of the few professional singers in the commu-
nity, and he also has a janitorial job in an office building. He was born in
Belgrade in 1970 but regularly spent his summers in Priština, visiting rela-
tives from Kosovo; thus Serbian is the language he speaks most fluently,
although he knows Albanian, Romani, Macedonian, and English as well.
His father, a theater director, was from the Aškalija group (Albanian-speak-
ing Roma) in Priština, and his grandfather was a džumbuš player. His
mother, from Gnjilanje, Kosovo, died when he was very young and his
father remarried a woman from Skopje, so he has always been close to
Macedonian Roma. He emigrated in 1985 when he was fifteen years old
and lives in Staten Island. Nešo learned to sing in the United States as an
adult under the tutelage of Ramiz Islami and later with Yuri Yunakov. In
video examples 5.59 and 5.60, he sings at the 2005 Balkan Music and Dance
Workshop, sponsored by the East European Folklife Center, in Iroquois
Springs, New York, accompanied by Ismail, Seido, and ethnic Macedonian
keyboardist Toni Jankuloski.
Ismail Lumanovski (known as Smajko), born in Bitola in 1984 to a
Turkish-speaking family, is a masterful addition to the pool of young
Romani musicians; he is unusual in that he received western classical
training. He started playing the clarinet at the age of nine and made his
debut in 1998 with the Macedonian Philharmonic. He came to the United
States as a teenager as a result of winning a stiff competition to study at
Interlochen Academy in Michigan, making his American debut in 2002 at
the Interlochen Arts Camp with the World Youth Symphony Orchestra
and becoming its principal clarinetist. He graduated from the Julliard
Conservatory in 2008 and is a member of the Juilliard Symphony Orches-
tra; in 2010 he obtained his master’s from the Julliard graduate program.
He has won numerous competitions and awards, including first prize at
the 1998 Folk Music Competition in Macedonia and first prize at the
twenty-third, twenty-fourth, and twenty-fifth National Clarinet Competi-
tions for classical music in Macedonia. He has played in numerous clas-
sical music concerts and competitions in France, England, Australia,
Belgium, Germany, Bulgaria, China, Turkey, and the United States.
Thus Ismail is one of the few New York musicians who read notation
and play Western classical music as well as folk music. His father, Remzi,
sang for Macedonian Radio in the Turkish, Macedonian, Serbian, and
Albanian languages. Ismail is a brilliant master of a wide variety of styles,

including Macedonian village repertoire. He is well connected to ethnic
Macedonian musicians and often plays for the Macedonian church in
New Jersey. He is very highly respected by Macedonian Roma and was
the youngest performer to participate in the Clarinet All Stars at the first
New York Gypsy Festivals in 2005 (see Chapter 13). His own group, the
NY Gypsy All-Stars (www.myspace.com/thenygypsyallstarsband), regu-
larly performs at the downtown club Drom (road). In photograph 5.25 he
performs with Ilhan Rahmanovski and Šaban Dervisoski (from Prilep) at
Maia Meyhane, New York, in 2006. Video example 5.61 shows Ismail
playing “Gaida” (the clarinet imitates a gaida) in 2005 accompanied by
Seido Salifoski on tapan and Tony Jankuloski keyboard in New York;
video example 5.2 shows a masterful solo from 2005; video examples 5.53
and 5.54 are from California Herdeljezi 2007.
Seido Salifoski is one of the most versatile of the New York Macedo-
nian Romani musicians (photograph 5.26). A brilliant dumbek player,
Seido is the son of Nermin, who was one of the first émigrés to Belmont
from Prilep (see Chapter 4); Seido emigrated when he was six years old.
He has remained within the Romani community in terms of kinship ties
but has moved away from it to forge an unusual musical career, live alone
for many years, perform with non-Roma, travel extensively, and marry a
Japanese woman. Surmounting many challenges, he lives in two worlds
by balancing familial loyalties with personal goals. The fact that he is an
only son makes him particularly obligated to his parents. However, he
has had some conflicts with his relatives and can be quite critical of his
community.
Musically, Seido bridges several worlds. From a young age he listened to
Romani music and other folk and popular musics. Growing up in Bel-
mont, he befriended a variety of performers: “At first I got together with
the Black and Spanish musicians in my neighborhood. I was playing Latin
music, Santana, all those styles. I hung out with them, they were my
friends. I was really into that stuff. I brought these guys into my home in
Laurelwood and we played music in the basement. My parents didn’t
mind—I guess that was pretty open of them.” In his younger years, Seido
played regularly at community events with Ramiz and the musicians men-
tioned above, and he recorded several albums with them (audio example
4.1). But he also sought other styles and wider audiences. He has played
regularly with Bulgarian Romani wedding musicians Yuri Yunakov and
Ivo Papasov, Turkish artists Tarkan and Omar Faruk Tekbilek, and Greek
and Arab performers. He is equally at home in the jazz fusion world, and
since 1990 he has been a member of the Paradox Trio, with whom he
recorded four albums. The trio, made up of Matt Darriau, Brad Shepik,
and Rufus Cappadocia, performs Balkan/jazz fusion and tours regularly in
Western Europe.
Seido is one of the few Romani artists, along with Yuri Yunakov, who
perform with and socialize with Americans who play Balkan music. He is
a member of the Zlatne Uste Brass Band (composed of Americans) and
has taught at the East European Folklife Center’s Balkan Music and Dance

Workshops, and many other folk dance camps. In 2005 he formed his own
band, Romski Boji (Romani Colors [Macedonian]), with various Romani
musicians. The band performs in downtown clubs and for American folk
dance events (see video example 5.55). Video examples 5.59 through 5.63
feature 2005 performances; 5.52 and 5.63 show dazzling solos. Seido is
one of the only Romani musicians to offer music lessons to non-Romani
students and maintain his own website (www.seidoism.com), designed by
his wife. He also sells T-shirts (also designed by his wife) with his web logo
and the words “Honorary Rom” printed on a field of blue and green (with
the wheel as the letter O). The packaging of these shirts includes a quote
from scholar/activist Ian Hancock explaining the symbolism of the colors
and wheel as related to the Romani flag (see Chapter 3), and a pledge that
a portion of the proceeds will be donated to Romani political causes.
Seido is thus the most activist of Belmont musicians; he enthusiastically
helped me by furnishing extensive commentary on chapters related to Bel-
mont in this book.
The musicians described here are all respected members of the Belmont
community; the music they offer is the means through which performative
Romani identities are enacted. Diasporic Macedonian Roma, whether in
New York or the Balkans, readily opine that music and dance help define
them and set them apart from others. Now I turn more closely to Balkan
Romani dance to explore diasporic styles and gender relationships.

6
ab
Transnational Dance
A s mentioned in previous chapters, dance is closely imbedded in the

social life of Balkan Romani communities and is especially tied to
music, gender, and status. Dance mediates female sexuality and reputa-
tion; its practice is governed by community ideas of propriety, context,
and talent. As a solo dance, čoček has a long history rooted in Ottoman
professional genres and lies in a continuum to contemporary forms of
belly dance. In the last fifty years, čoček has traveled in the Balkan Romani
diaspora to Western Europe and the United States and has also been
appropriated into new settings, including professional and amateur en-
sembles, Romani music festivals, world music events, and Slavic, Alba-
nian, and Romanian community dance events. This chapter compares and
discusses Romani dance in all these locations, investigating its stylistic,
social, and power dimensions in relation to the marginality of Roma in the
wider society and the ambivalent position of women.1
Professional Dancers of the Balkans:

Ottoman Roots
According to Ottoman sources, from the eighteenth to the early twenti-

eth century Romani women and men were professional dancers, hired in
aristocratic, courtly, and military as well as tavern settings (And 1959,
1963–64:26–8). A professional male dancer was known as köçek (or raqq)
and a female dancer was known as çengi, although both sexes were often
called çengi (And 1976:138). The appellation köçek also became associ-
ated with the style of music played for accompaniment and later for the
sensuous solo dance form known all over the Balkans today as čoček
(Bulgarian: kyuchek). See text supplement 6.1 for a history of Ottoman
dance.
107
It is obvious that older çengi dancing informs contemporary female
professional belly dancing in Egypt, Turkey, and the Balkans, as well as
solo čoček dancing in various Balkan communities. In Turkey, Seeman
reports that professional çengis adopted Egyptian style movements and
tighter choreographies, resulting in a style known as “oriental.” In
Istanbul Romani neighborhoods such as Sulukule, çengis were hired
for weddings and for tourist shows (Seeman 1998:3–5 and 2002;
Potuoǧlu-Cook 2006 and 2007). Seeman also reports that in the 1980s
there was one professional Romani dancer in Skopje who was hired for
men’s celebrations (personal communication). Pettan remarks that in
Kosovo in the early 1980s, “in the area of Peč it is customary that female
musicians perform for a short while for male guests, and one of the
musicians even dances” (1996a:317). In Bulgaria, the budget for a north
Bulgarian panair (gathering) in 1884 included income from the
kyucheks of female performers (Peycheva 1999a:41). And more recently,
in the early 1970s, Turkish-speaking Romani clarinetist Ivo Papazov
partnered with Zvezda Salieva, a professional Romani dancer who per-
formed at weddings. She and her sisters were part of a “dance dynasty”
(214 and 247).
On the one hand, çengis were admired for their musicality and beauty,
while on the other hand they were criticized for their licentiousness and
abandon, and many were assumed to be prostitutes. In the early years of
the Turkish Republic (1920s), belly dancing was “a despised genre” associ-
ated with “fallen women.” It was rehabilitated in 1980 when featured on
television for the first time. Now belly dancers regularly grace tourist bro-
chures and furnish a steady income for restaurants and cafes (Öztürkmen
2001:143). Sugarman points out that the late-nineteenth-century nation-
alist movements of the Eastern Orthodox southern Slavs mobilized specif-
ically against the perceived decadence of Muslim culture (as symbolized
by çengis; 2003:101–102). In this emerging nationalist discourse, Roma
had two strikes against them: they were Muslim and they were Gypsy.
According to Sugarman:
Their identity as Roma was yet another factor contributing to their

poor reputation, leading to a highly ironic situation for them: having
taken up the role of entertainer in part because it was one of the few
economic niches available to them as a marginal social group, they
were then further marginalized by the profession itself. Their per-
ceived indecency could then be ascribed by non-Roma to the moral
character of their ethnic groups, rather than to the particular social
and economic conditions and gender arrangements that prevailed
within late Ottoman society [101].
Later in this chapter I explore how the market has been a constant factor in
determining the place of professional dance, but first we need to examine
čoček in contemporary Romani communities and the historical, religious,
and cultural baggage of ambivalence that surrounds it.

Sexuality and Dance
Condemnation of sensuous dancing is grounded in an ideology of female

modesty and decorum that was historically shared by all Balkan peoples
regardless of religion; today this ideology appears stronger among Mus-
lims. As Cowan writes (on the basis of Eastern Orthodox Greek Macedo-
nian materials), “Dance is a problem for women because in the dance site
‘ambivalent attitudes about female sexuality as both pleasurable and
threatening are juxtaposed”’ (1990:190). The embodied nature of dance
highlights its association with female sexuality. For Muslims “the female
body is the embodiment of seductive power and its open expression is
therefore strongly condemned in moral-religious discourses” (Nieuwkerk
2003:268).
The literature on honor and shame in the Mediterranean region is useful
in that it identifies the honor of the family with control of female sexuality.
But this literature must be criticized for reducing complex and variable
systems to a rigid dichotomy. Various authors have shown that the sup-
posed pan-Mediterranean concept of honor via music and dance means
different things to different cultural groups (Magrini 2003). The Balkan
Romani moral system contrasts pativ (pačiv, pakiv; Romani, respect) with
ladž (Romani; shame). In the South Slavic languages, Roma speak of these
concepts as čest (honor) and sram (shame). A bride who is a virgin is
čestna (honest, pure). A professional belly dancer nema sram (has no
shame). A family’s reputation is expressed by offering hospitality to guests,
respecting elders, and caring for family members in gender-specific ways.
A man works and provides for his family; women work too, but they also
cook, clean, and take care of children, and they serve men. In public,
women are expected to cater to and defer to men, as the latter are nomi-
nally “heads of household.”
This association of women with sexuality bears directly on the stigma of
the female professional dancer, for it is both the commercial relationship
with a paying audience and the display of the body to strange males that
threaten female modesty. For this reason dancing professionally is regarded
as far more immoral than singing professionally (Silverman 2003). In
Chapter 10 I chronicle the challenges faced by Esma Redžepova in carving
out a respectable niche as a vocalist whose performances often included
dance. Yuri Yunakov, a Bulgarian Muslim Romani musician (see Chapter
11), remarked that he would never let his daughter (who is a very talented
dancer) become a professional dancer, as it was a degrading profession.
Dancing for money involves performing for strange men, marketing one’s
sexuality, and thereby devaluing it. Dancing nonprofessionally in the
Romani community also has its challenges (more on this later), although
they are mitigated by the high value placed on dance as a female art form.
Although men are the “heads” of families, the ideology of patriarchy is
contradicted by realms of female power and influence. The female role in
income-producing activities, budget decisions, marriage decisions, infor-
mation networks, and ritual all mitigate her subordination (see Chapters
Transnational Dance 109

5 and 6 and Silverman 1996b). In the realm of sexuality, however, women
theoretically must conform to ideal behavior precisely because sexuality
poses the greatest danger of ladž or sram. Women are scrutinized by other
women as to their bodily appearance and deportment. Clothing (espe-
cially hem lines and bodices), makeup, eye contact, socializing patterns,
company kept, time spent outdoors . . . all are noted and evaluated for vi-
olations of modesty. The most highly charged symbol of the proper de-
portment of female sexuality is the test for the virginity of the bride, still
performed today in many Romani families in the Balkans and in the dias-
pora (see Chapter 4).
The common social structural argument explaining the potency of
female sexuality argues that in patrilineal and patrilocal societies the pos-
sibility of a woman having a child with a man who isn’t her husband dis-
rupts the patriarchal system and poses a problem of affiliation of the child.
Other views argue that it is the female body itself that is inherently sexual,
in contrast to the “productive” body of men (Nieuwkerk 1995:154). A third
view interprets Islam as conceiving of women as more sexual than men,
thus needing to be constrained (Mernissi 1975). These views are some-
what relevant for the Romani case, but they are insufficient explanations.
Balkan Roma talk constantly about the problems of a child who isn’t right-
fully attached to an extended family; children conceived in adulterous re-
lationships are pitied and their mothers are rebuked. But a woman’s
deviant sexual behavior is seen as part of her intrinsic immoral character.
Roma seem to view sexuality as inherent to females, but not in contrast to
the “productive bodies” of males. True, males have to worry less about
public scrutiny of sexuality, but on the other hand Roma view females as
productive bodies. In fact women are often viewed as more productive
than men. Most Roma agree that women hold the family together emo-
tionally and culturally, and in addition many families survive on women’s
incomes.
An important manifestation of the proper deportment of sexuality is
monitoring where and for whom dance is performed. Because dance is so
sexual, it should, ideally, be performed only among one’s own sex. Accord-
ing to Dunin’s pioneering research in Macedonian Romani communities,
segregated male and female dancing was the norm until the 1970s. Women
danced in private home settings to the accompaniment of a female dajre
player and women’s singing; women dancing for men was considered
crude (1971:324–325; 1973:195; 2000; 2006). Note, however, that this was
also true for Eastern Orthodox Christians and for non-Romani Muslims of
the Balkans (Rice 1994; Sugarman 1997). Esma Redžepova, speaking of
her childhood in the 1950s, remembered, “Women used to be in a separate
room, men separate, and they used to celebrate segregated at weddings.”
During the women-only bathing-the-bride ritual at Esma’s wedding in
1968, there was a female orchestra composed of one violin and two daires
(Teodosievski and Redžepova 1984:108).
Some women conceived of older weddings as two simultaneous events:
a women’s party and a men’s party. An elder woman remembered the

1950s as follows: “During the Saturday celebration of the wedding at the
bride’s house, there would be a professional female orchestra—two vio-
lins, a daire player, and the singer, usually the daire player.” The spatial
segregation during celebrations was often described in terms of the
“inside” women’s world and the “outside” men’s world. This concept of
space is shared with non-Romani Muslims of the region (Sugarman 1997;
Ellis 2003). In the henna ceremony, for example, Esma recalls that “the
women were inside, the men were outside with the zurlas and tapans.”
Pettan reminds us not to take the words “outside” and “inside” too liter-
ally. In the Balkans, many courtyards have high walls; thus a women’s
courtyard performance is outside, though not as public as the street. The
courtyard is sharply distinguished from the street, where men perform
(Pettan 1996a:316; 2003). Henna celebrations in Šutka, for example, take
place either “inside” the house or “inside the courtyard” of the bride. As I
described in Chapter 5, women from the groom’s family dance through
the streets and then make the bride’s courtyard into women’s space (video
examples 5.1 through 5.8). Similarly, at Lebabet’s Belmont henna cere-
mony, described in Chapter 5, an urban courtyard became women’s space
(video examples 5.25, 5.26, and 5.27); in both cases, men looked on from
the periphery (except for musicians).
These descriptions do not imply that Romani women are confined to the
domestic sphere. Although they are associated with the domestic, both
historical references and ethnographic observations show that Romani
women regularly occupy the public sphere, primarily for economic activ-
ities such as music, dance, seasonal agricultural work, and selling at mar-
kets. Pettan observes greater freedom of movement of Romani women in
comparison to other non-Romani Muslims of Kosovo: “Similarly to non-
Gypsy ethnic groups and musicians in Kosovo, Gypsy men are oriented
towards the public domain while Gypsy women primarily towards the pri-
vate domain. Their private domain, is however, extended in comparison to
most non-Gypsy women” (Pettan 1996a:316). Pettan further explains that
although this is true for sedentary Roma, nomadic Romani women are
even more exposed in the public realm, through fortune telling, selling
herbal medicines, and begging (Pettan 1996a:316; also see Okely 1983).
In the 1930s, freedom of movement of Romani women was noted by
Catherine Brown, a British traveler: “One of the most striking features of
these gypsy women is their great freedom and independence of bearing as
compared with other Mohamedan women in Macedonia. Although among
orthodox Mohamedans [non-Romani] one may occasionally see on feast
days groups of men strolling about the village together, tinkling gently and
rather halfheartedly on small stringed instruments, no women are ever to
be seen with them, the women’s festivities being invariably quite separate
and confined to the harem. Here [among the Roma] men and women
joined freely together in whole-hearted enjoyment. The whole scene re-
sembled an enormous ballet” (C. Brown 1933:307). Unlike upper-class
non-Romani Muslims, Romani women have historically worked outside
the home among non-Romani women and men.

To return to the theme of propriety, Dunin’s Macedonian research in the
1970s showed that line and processional dancing were sexually integrated
while solo dancing (which is more sexually suggestive) was segregated.
Dunin remarked that “whenever the dancing began during segregated
parties, the curtains or drapes were secured so that no one could look
indoors. If a child playfully pulled the curtains from outside, he was sent
scurrying for fear of being punished. . . . This dance was meant to be per-
formed by women for women and not in mixed situations” (1973:195). By
the 1980s, however, thanks to relaxation of gender divisions in many areas
of life, solo dances could be found in mixed company. Women now dance
solo in the presence of men; women also continue to dance in sexually
segregated events such as henna parties. How women negotiate varied
contexts is discussed later.
Čoček in Diaspora Balkan Romani Communities
Čoček, or čuček in Macedonia and Kosovo (kyçek, Albanian) and kyuchek

in Bulgaria, is the most characteristic Romani solo dance form. Note that
čoček can also refer to the musical genre used for this dance, in 2/4, 7/8,
and 9/8 (see Figure 2.1 and Chapter 2); the term thus serves a double func-
tion. Note too that čoček can also refer to the line dance performed to this
musical genre. As a solo dance, čoček is improvised, using hand move-
ments, contractions of the abdomen and pelvis, shoulder shakes, move-
ment of isolated body parts (such as hips and head), and small footwork
patterns. Men as well as women perform it, but it is overwhelmingly asso-
ciated with women. Čoček is clearly an heir to the dances of the Ottoman
çengis (the term comes from köçek), but in Romani communities its sub-
tlety and restraint distinguish it from contemporary belly dancing. I con-
ceive of solo čoček dancing as a continuum, with subtlety and a covered
body (as found at Romani community events) on one end and belly
dancing and exposed skin on the other.
Čoček is embedded in ritual events, which are numerous and obligatory
in Romani communities, as discussed in Chapter 5. Close kin women are
expected, even obliged, to dance for hours at weddings, sometimes for
three or four days in a row, no matter how tired they are. The only excuse
not to dance is illness or mourning. Women who do not dance well or are
mentally or physically disabled also dance and even lead dance lines. Male
dancing is more optional than female dancing. As I explained in Chapter
5, there are some moments where a man’s dancing is required. Men dance
for entertainment too, and some men dance a great deal, but they are
rarely obliged to dance.
On the dance floor one finds both children learning by immersion and
seasoned elders. A typical wedding dance line, whether located in the Bal-
kans or in the diaspora, has a ratio of approximately three to one women
to men. Men often dance together, put a great deal of energy into the dance
for a short while, and then sit down. In Belmont, there are groups of young

men who always dance together; they look for each other at celebrations
and try out complicated steps. In fact, men seem to demonstrate their
masculinity more in line dances rather than solo dances. Women and girls
also tend to dance with their relatives and friends; they too join the dance
line in pairs or groups, rarely alone. But unlike men, women and girls are
on the dance floor for practically the whole event.
Dunin’s research describes ordinary Romani women looking “very com-
fortable and confident of their movements probably due to the frequency
of dancing, which occurs almost every week” (1971:323–324; also see
1973; 1977; 1985; 1997; 2008; 2009). Indeed, čoček as a solo dance has an
important place within all rituals. It is danced in the middle of the floor by
important females near the front of the dance line; simultaneously, the
line snakes around (see video examples 5.6, 5.11, 5.12, 5.25, and many
others in Chapter 5). For example, in Šutka, at an igranka, the bride’s close
female kin will dance čoček in the center as relatives are called up to lead
the dance line. A few female members of the beckoned relatives (rarely
men) might also join in the center. The style changes as new tunes are
played and new family members are summoned. Even though women
may be ostensibly doing the same dance for hours, its texture migrates, for
example, from fast and bouncy to slow and heavy. Dancers may show their
exuberance by climbing on tables to perform; photograph 6.1 shows a solo
dancer on top of a car during a circumcision procession.
Ritual contexts of dance are obligatory, but dancing for entertainment is
also common, for example, during the less ritualized parts of celebrations.
Video examples 5.48, 5.49, and 5.50 show a party in New York in honor of
Esma Redžepova with line and solo dances; example 5.50 shows a talented
solo dancer. A good čoček dancer has the admiration of the entire commu-
nity, and her family proudly displays her talents. At a wedding in Šutka,
the father of an excellent teenage dancer was very angry with her because
she was nowhere to be found when the family was called up to lead the
dance line (video example 5.11). His family’s artistic competence depended
partly on his daughter, who possessed a valuable female asset. Women and
girls squarely take center stage as excellent dancers, and people crowd
around them to watch. Esma Redžepova remarked, “That was the most
beautiful, to show dignity. A mother-in-law might say to another moth-
er-in-law, ‘my daughter-in-law raises her hand [while dancing] as if she
could take everyone’s life!’ This would show how delicately she danced;
this was the realization of Romani tradition.” Girls more than boys are
coached by family members to dance (see video example 5.8). At home,
taped music is played as experienced female dancers demonstrate tech-
niques. At dance events, mothers “put up” their daughters to dance on
tables (video example 5.19).
The female art of dancing čoček is chronicled in hundreds of songs; for
example, see audio example with text supplement 6.1. In “Romani Čhaj
Sijum” Macedonian Romani singer Džansever (see Chapter 2) sings of
“throwing” the stomach, implying that the movement is quite sharp and
rhythmic; this is a characteristic move for Turkish Roma, and the phrase

describing it is shared by Turks and Roma (see video examples 6.1 from
Bulgaria and 6.2 and 6.3 from Šutka). Peycheva’s Bulgarian Romani infor-
mants all speak of the stomach flick as an essential part of kyuchek
(1999a:244–245). Seeman also documents the importance of the stomach
flick (2002 and 2007); it becomes especially dramatic in the 9/8 rhythm
that has become emblematic for Turkish Roma. In fact, at New Year’s
dances sponsored by Macedonian Roma in New York, 9/8 tunes are played
exactly at midnight.
Although family members seek to show off the dancing of unmarried
girls, they must delicately negotiate the propriety of the display. Some dis-
plays are crass and transgressive while others are appropriate, depending
on context and audience. At Ramisa’s wedding banquet in Šutka, for ex-
ample, a mother put her sixteen-year-old daughter on a table to dance
while she, her sister, her husband, and the dancer’s sister and brother all
danced in front of her (on the floor), encouraging her with shouts of ap-
preciation and even with monetary tips (video example 5.19). Similarly,
female relatives of good dancers often stop dancing and clap for the tal-
ented performer. In spatial terms, the nearest audience for proper female
čoček dancers is composed of relatives. Strangers, however, do watch
from afar. Ironically, it is precisely for strangers that the girl’s talent needs
to be shown (for marriage purposes). The physical proximity of relatives
is not only a permeable wall—a shield of protection against claims of
sexual immorality—but also a transparent screen through which to view
female bodily displays.
Also note that Roma (especially in Macedonia) do line dances to čoček
music that vary in step and style by region, age, and subgroup of Roma.
Rhythms of 9/8 and 7/8 are less common than 2/4, and 9/8 tunes are often
played later in the evening and induce increased intensity. The most
common 2/4 line dance in Macedonia, Kosovo, and southern Serbia is a
three-measure dance, sometimes called oro,2 with versions that vary by
rhythm and footwork (see video examples in Chapter 5); it is also danced
to 7/8. Note too that in addition to čoček Balkan Roma have always
adopted some of the dance repertoire of the non-Roma in their region.
Line dances often start slow and speed up at the end, in typical Macedo-
nian style. The New York Macedonian Romani repertoire of line dances
includes Bugarsko (Bulgarian), Lesno (light), in 7/8 danced slow or fast
(see video examples 5.38 and 5.44 from New York and 6.4 from Šutka);
čačak (video example 5.58); Bitolska or Romska Gaida (Bitola or Romani
bagpipe); Eleno Mome (Oh, Elena, girl); Jeni Jol (New way, Turkish; video
example 5.48); and several 9/8 dances (including Afe Dude, video example
5.12 from Šutka). Beranče or Ibraim Odža is another popular line dance,
especially loved by Roma from Bitola (it is often in 12/8, 3+2+2+3+2; see
video examples 5.43 from New York and 6.5 from Šutka). Elder Roma or
talented young Roma are often called on to lead the older, slow, heavy line
dances (Pharo/Teško, heavy; Romani/Macedonian) in 2/4 or 7/8 and
crossing dances that many young people do not know (see video examples
5.35 [second part] from New York and 2.1 and 6.6 from Šutka). Several

older women in the New York community are excellent dancers. An excep-
tional solo dancer can even receive bakšiš (tips) on her forehead (see video
example 6.1 and photograph 6.2).
Č oč ek as Social Dance Among Non-Roma in the Balkans

and the Diaspora
As solo dance, čoček can currently be found at community events not only
among Roma but also among Bulgarians, Albanians, Macedonians, Serbs,
Romanians, Greeks, and Turks—that is, among virtually all the ethnic
groups of the Balkans. The three-measure line version of čoček known
among Roma in Macedonia is found among Macedonians and Albanians
from Macedonia, but not among Bulgarians. As a variant of lesno/pravo/
oro, it probably disseminated from Skopje and was picked up by Macedo-
nians and Albanians in the 1970s (Dunin 2008); by the 1980s it had spread
to Albanians in the Prespa region of Macedonia, and by the 1990s to Alba-
nians in the North American diaspora, according to Sugarman (2003 and
personal communication).
As a solo dance, čoček encodes a number of meanings for non-Roma,
who to varying degrees may be aware of its sexual associations and its ties
to Roma. Sugarman thoughtfully explores how contemporary young Mus-
lim Albanian women from Macedonia redefine aspects of their own sexu-
ality and their own modernity when they dance čoček with other women.
They still condemn professional female dancers, but “the genres once as-
sociated with them have been adopted by ‘respectable’ women and even
men” (2003:112). Furthermore, they relate čoček to Turkish urban culture,
thereby placing it in the realm of art and “civilization.”
I observed Bulgarians dancing solo kyuchek at community events in the
1970s (up to the present) when wedding bands included them in their rep-
ertoire (despite prohibitions against them). The typical pattern among Bul-
garians is for guests to dance kyuchek at the middle or end of a wedding—
at a moment of abandon and release. This may be a time for enacting the
perceived freedom and unbridled sexuality of “the other” in the form of the
internal Gypsy or Turk. For some Eastern Orthodox Bulgarians, Muslim
and Romani cultures are coded as unbounded by the constraints of civiliza-
tion. As I discussed in Chapter 1, the Muslim cultural and political issue has
a long history and is still sensitive in Bulgaria today (Neuburger 2004;
Ghodsee 2008 and 2009). For example, in Chapter 9 I explore how the pop/
folk genre chalga is criticized by many Bulgarians for being too uncivilized,
which means too Muslim and too Gypsy.
Van de Port reports a similar phenomenon among Serbs who frequent
cafes with Romani music in Novi Sad, Vojvodina (1998). Neither Serbs
nor the Romani musicians who play for them are Muslims (both are East-
ern Orthodox); nevertheless, Roma function as the internal uncivilized
“other.” In the cafes, Serbs dress like Gypsies, dance čoček, and drink with
abandon, as if enacting what they perceive as the culture of Roma: “Within

the Gypsy bar the door is opened to all those forbidden and hidden things
which were deposited in the figure of the Gypsy. . . . As would-be Gypsies
the visitors gain access to what is labeled as primitive and Balkan in the
civilization debate” (188).
Similarly, in Romania since the late 1980s a form of solo čoček known
as mahala or manele has been adopted into popular youth culture.3
Drawing models from the southern Balkans, manele does have histor-
ical roots in urban Romani Romanian dance of the Ottoman period
(Garfias 1984). Critics associate it with commercialism, sex, and
Roma—all marks of the uncivilized. Despite public condemnation by
intellectuals and folk music scholars and performers, it is widely danced
and heard and has a growing fan base among Romanians as well as
Roma (Beissinger 2001, 2005, and 2007). For example, the Romani
brass band Fanfare Ciocarlia from the northern Romanian region of
Moldavia currently tours with two female manele dancers performing
čoček with bare midriffs. Upholding the tradition of performing with
family members, these women are the Romani wives of the German
managers of the band.4
In the last decade, čoček in its belly dance incarnation has become pop-
ular in American and West European clubs where young urban hipsters
congregate to dance to Balkan music, either live or spun by DJs. I explore
this phenomenon in Chapter 13, but I note here that the atmosphere in
these clubs is close to wild abandon. In my preliminary interviews with
clubbers, I found that they viscerally identify with the unbridled frenzy of
sexualized belly dance, which they attribute to Gypsies, thus enacting “the
exotic other.”
Cˇ oč ek as Professional Dance: Ensembles, Festivals, and

Music Videos
Since World War II čoček has been incorporated into professional and
amateur Balkan ensemble choreographies, some of which feature roman-
tic and orientalist images of Roma (Dunin 2008). According to Shay and
Sellers-Young, “Belly dance contexts . . . negotiate a transnational dis-
course of exoticism” (2006:25). Similarly, in her research on tango, Savi-
gliano notes that “exoticism is a way of establishing order in an unknown
world through fantasy” (1995:169). Dance choreographies are effective vi-
sual communication about what constitutes civilization, the nation, and
the folk versus “others” (Shay 2002).
In Yugoslavia, ensembles incorporated Gypsy suites into their reper-
toire to illustrate Tito’s ideal of “brotherhood and unity” of the nation’s
ethnicities. Note that Roma did not typically dance in these companies.
The Kolo (Serbian State Ensemble) suite, titled Vranje (a city in southern
Serbia), choreographed by Branko Marković in 1949, has become a classic
for many amateur and professional ensembles. According to Dunin, it
depicts Gypsies nonrealistically: tapping tambourines on their hips,

elbows, and shoulders; dancing solo steps in unison; and doing intricate
footwork (including spinning) over large distances (2008:118).5
Shay describes another Gypsy suite with dances from Vojvodina, per-
formed by Kolo in 1987 and displaying Roma “as childlike, irresponsible,
sexually lax individuals who dance, sing and fornicate the night away. . . .
All the visual clues—the campfire, the gypsy wagon, the false mustaches
are present” (2002:8). The men pull knives and carry the women off, and
the women wear costumes revealing their legs and breasts, uncharacteris-
tic of Serbia’s Romani communities (8):
The Gypsies are shown as childlike, indolent, oversexed . . . people.

The choreographies featured stereotypical props [such] as a Gypsy
wagon, camp fire and the clothes were covered in patches. . . . In the
Serbian folk dances the women were portrayed as demure. . . . The
Gypsies, on the other hand, have their hair free and disordered to
signify “sexual looseness,” and the blouses are off the shoulder and
they show bare legs (none of this is what actual Gypsies would do). At
the end of the dance, a man runs his hand up the woman’s leg under
her skirt until the lights fade out, indicating a night of unbridled pas-
sion ahead (171–172).
I viewed a suite with similar images in 1989 at the Ohrid Folk Festival in
Macedonia, performed by a visiting Dutch group. The men were bare-chested
and had whips, and the women had flare skirts and off-the-shoulder
blouses. While I was offended at the stereotypification, a Romani jour-
nalist accompanying me clapped wildly. When I asked him how he could
approve, he answered that it was wonderful that the Dutch performers
sang in Romani; he was pleased at any public recognition of Roma. Later
in this chapter, I discuss the implications of stereotyping for marginal
minorities.
The Serbian dance company Frula (which broke off from Kolo and is
known for acrobatic stylizations) had an entire show titled Tzigane (pho-
tograph 6.3). Its 1986 press release states:
Lacking any national folk heritage of their own, the Gypsies have
adopted the cultural traits of the localities in which they have settled . . .
and have mysteriously made it their own. In addition to the many songs
and dances, the program will feature performances of hitherto secret
tribal rites celebrating marriage, birth, and death, as they have been
practiced since time immemorial in Gypsy encampments all over the
world. For centuries Gypsies have been the objects of curiosity, fascina-
tion and persecution among the world’s people. Their carefree, no-
madic life style has inspired envy in the hearts of some, suspicion and
disgust in the hearts of others. Their caravans and campfires have sung
of the open road. Their flashing eyes, unbridled zest for living, and their
passion for singing and dancing have made them popular attractions
wherever they have settled or roamed. Though often identified with the

supernatural and the occult, Gypsies generally will adapt to their envi-
ronment and are happy carefree people.
Although I do not have the space to analyze all the implications of this
text, note that all the major Gypsy fantasy themes are present: mystery,
secrecy, the occult, rootlessness, freedom, music, wildness, passion, and
sex. The message is: these are people are not like us. Note also the alterna-
tion of the dual polarities of fascination and repulsion.
Up to 1960 Tanec, the Macedonian State Ensemble, included one tradi-
tional Romani line dance in its repertoire, “Čuperlika/Kjuperlika,” per-
formed to a well-known 7/8 melody. The 1950 Tanec program lists
Čuperlika as a Turkish women’s dance, but it is also widely done among
Macedonian Roma. The dance was collected by the Janković sisters in
1939 in Skopje (1939:75–77). Tanec’s 1950s line dance choreography was
changed to add a solo čoček, and for the 1956 United States tour “cos-
tumes were changed from Turkish style shalvare to translucent and nar-
rower type pantaloons because Americans like to see more of the legs”
(Višinski and Dunin 1995:127).
In 2004 the Budapest Ensemble (composed almost entirely of non-
Romani Hungarian dancers) presented an international tour of Gypsy
Spirit, sponsored by Columbia Artists. Most of the show featured tasteful
Hungarian Romani dance; one scene set in the Balkans aimed to capture
the grace of čoček but slipped into the stereotypical trap of exaggerated
belly dancing and flimsy šalvari. In Chapter 12, I explore the problematic
staging of this show, but here I note that a Hungarian Romani female au-
dience member was appalled that in one scene a male dancer put his head
onto a female dancer’s lap. For her, the proximity of his head near her
crotch was a violation of public sexual modesty, and she wrote the man-
agement a letter of complaint.
When ensembles are composed of Roma, they too must constantly nego-
tiate how to present “Gypsy” dance. For example, government-sponsored
amateur Romani ensembles in Yugoslavia were encouraged to present their
folklore and that of neighboring ethnicities at festivals. A Romani KUD
(Kulturno Umetničko Društvo, Cultural Artistic Group) in Serbia was
founded in Priština, Kosovo, in 1969, followed by others in Serbia (Dunin
1977:14). In the mid-1970s, a festival for Romani KUDs from all over Ser-
bia was organized; it was an important moment in the non-Romani public’s
recognition of Romani musical talent. Not surprising, groups followed the
typical ensemble model of presenting complicated choreographies, most
unknown in Romani communities. Although subtle čočeks were danced
in some Romani KUDs, other “Gypsy suites” in Romani KUDs imitated the
gross erotic movements done in state and amateur ensembles (15).6 This
brings up the question of self-stereotyping, which I discuss shortly and in
Chapters 12, and 13.
Known as Phralipe (brotherhood), the Macedonian Romani KUD
founded in 1949 in Skopje was very popular, won prizes at Yugoslav folk
festivals, and even traveled outside the country to France, Poland, Bulgaria,

Italy, and other locations (Džimrevski 1983:216). According to Dunin
(2008), the group performed mostly Macedonian line dances (plus non-
Romani dances from all over Yugoslavia, as was common for all KUDs) but
also included the stereotypical Vranje choreography mentioned earlier.
After 1969, a wedding scene was introduced and solo čočeks were incorpo-
rated (Dunin 2008). Dunin counted three Romani KUDs in 1988 (KUD
Phralipe in Skopje, and Tetovo and Folklorna Grupa Trabotiviste from a
village near Delčevo; Dunin 2009). By 2008 she counted twelve, five (from
Kumanovo, Bitola, Veles, Kočani, and Delčevo) of which performed for
International Romani day in Kumanovo in April 2008. According to Dunin’s
research, the young female čoček dancers in KUD Ternipe (Youth) from
Delčevo learned their orientalized movements from the Brazilian television
soap opera O Clone, which features scenes of belly dancing in Morocco
(Dunin 2009).
In the 1970s, Skopje Phralipe members told Dunin that “it was difficult
to maintain a repertoire of Rom dances, because the girls did not continue
in the group beyond marriage (usually between the ages fourteen and sev-
enteen)” (1977:13). Similarly, in 1990 I learned from former Phralipe
members that the group had problems recruiting girls and had to disband
for a while in the 1980s. As sites of male-female socializing, ensembles
might compromise the morals of unprotected females. Pettan writes of
Kosovo Roma: “Engagement of Gypsies with music and dance within the
school or amateur ensembles ends with marriage. This is more strict with
the female part of the Gypsy population than with its male counterpart”
(1996a:316). This very same problem of female reputations plagued
Severdžan Azirov in New York when he tried to start a Romani performing
group. As I described in Chapter 4, parents were reluctant to let their
daughters attend dance rehearsals.
The performance of Romani dance by ensembles in Yugoslavia can be
contrasted sharply with its virtual absence in Bulgaria during the socialist
period. In the 1980s, the genre kyuchek (both dance and music) was pro-
hibited in the official media because the state claimed it was not “purely
Bulgarian” (see Chapter 7). Weddings were sometimes raided by the police
if musicians played and guests danced kyuchetsi. Of course, Roma, Turks,
and Bulgarians found ways to resist, and the dance thrived in private set-
tings, eventually emerging in vital form after 1989.
During the 1980s and early 1990s in Yugoslavia, gala television pro-
grams (for example for New Year’s Eve) regularly featured Romani mu-
sicians and dancers performing čoček. Some Romani performers such
as Esma Redžepova (see Chapter 10) danced modestly; others enacted
orientalized versions of čoček with writhing, scantily clad belly dancers.
In Chapter 2, I discussed video example 2.4, which features Ferus Mus-
tafov and his band with two solo belly dancers who have exposed skin
but employ characteristic Romani stomach movements; in addition
there is a group of non-Romani performers (the Ballet Troupe of Mace-
donian Television) doing modern dance choreographies that have little
in common with Romani dance. Watching these programs with my

Romani friends, I heard them remark how the solo dancers had virtu-
ally nothing in common with Romani community dancers; plus they
gave Romani women a bad name. On the other hand, it is clear these
programs exposed non-Roma to Romani music and dance, albeit an
orientalized version.
The television program Maestro, with Ferus Mustafov from 1987, for
example, featured him as a doctor in uniform playing to his bed-ridden
female patients who shed their hospital sheets and emerge as belly
dancers. Singer Esma Redžepova commented:
In recent times, . . . there has appeared . . . with Ferus Mustafov a

Macedonian woman (she isn’t Romani) who does belly dance—and
they show this as if it were Romani. This isn’t Romani, it is Turkish.
That is Ferus’ mistake. He makes a profit—money—from this. . . . A
Romani woman would never be undressed to show her belly button. . . .
Women used to be in a separate room, men separate, and they used to
celebrate segregated at weddings. At our weddings our women used to
be dressed in beautiful dimije, beautiful shoes . . . nothing at all bare—
beautiful vests, underdresses, handkerchiefs at their hands, blouses
with handmade lace. When they got up to dance, two-by-two . . . all of
the elders . . . would cheer whomever danced better. Among us, we
didn’t do any mixed [sex] dances—we only danced čoček. You dance
čoček with your stomach, you don’t dance (with your hips) in a circle,
you don’t dance it with moans; we didn’t have any of the new things
with which people now deceive people.
Esma’s modest sensibility prevailed at Šutkafest, the 1993 Romani spon-

sored festival in Skopje (see Chapter 8); the performers were fully clothed
in šalvari and danced modest solo or line čočeks. Video example 6.7 from
Šutkafest shows the line dance Bitolska Gaida and solo čoček.
The tension between modesty and overt exhibition of female sexuality is
juxtaposed in Romani beauty contests in Macedonia; they have emerged
since 1991 as a forum for music, dance, and costume display, and some-
times music and dance contests are imbedded in them. Given the scrutiny
of female behavior found in Romani communities, it may seem surprising
that Romani beauty contests have been held annually in Macedonia with
great success since 1991. With the typical walkway passes, panel of judges,
and bathing suit and gown competitions, beauty pageants seem to embrace
the opposite of feminine modesty and instead promote Western objectifi-
cation of femininity. Closer examination reveals a more nuanced reading
of these events. Beauty contests are framed to address intertwining issues
of the modern world: the political struggle of Roma, the significance of
Romani culture, the role of Romani women, and the importance of
Romani music. Either music is liberally interspersed as entertainment
during the contest (as in the 1997 International Miss Roma Contest) or
music contests are piggybacked onto the beauty contest (as in the Romska
Ubavica Contest of 1998).

Promoters clearly describe their motives related to women. A news
release for the 1996 international contest reads: “Since 1991 this event has
been extremely successful in strengthening the Gypsy Community of Cen-
tral Europe as well as aiding in the cause of emancipation of Romani
women. This event is a showcase for Romani culture and the talents and
beauty of the Gypsy people, their songs, dances, folklore, art and fash-
ion. . . . The pageant is open to young women between the ages of 18 and
24, preferably women who can represent Romani communities and orga-
nizations in their part of the world.” Similarly, the producer of the 1997
contest said his vision was “to demonstrate the emancipation of the Rom
woman and to remove the stereotype of the Roma as a backward peoples”
(Dunin 1997:1). We should not, of course, naïvely believe the words of
promoters, for they are primarily businessmen; rather we need to interro-
gate how and why displays are produced. Beauty contests, as well as por-
nography, have invaded all of postsocialist Eastern Europe, signaling
objectification and commodification of all women and demonstrated by
awarding “feminine” prizes such as jewelry, clothing, and cosmetics. We
must also remember that the marketing of Romani dance and the traf-
ficking of Romani images have always capitalized on the sexuality of
females. In postsocialism, beauty contests have become a mark of moder-
nity and progress for some women. In spite of Western feminist critiques
of objectification of women in these contests, they do bring women more
squarely into the public realm. However, it remains to been seen at what
price.
It is clear that commercial dance images are directly related to the high
market value of the hypersexualized female Gypsy body, a phenomenon
with a long history.7 A cursory glance at the graphic design of cassettes,
CDs, videos, and DVDs with Romani music produced in Macedonia and
Bulgaria since 1990 reveals that many of them feature seminude belly
dancers, and some are explicitly pornographic.8 The rise of this music/
dance imagery is related to the spread of pornography throughout the
Balkans after the fall of socialism, which is in turn related to reconfigura-
tion of female roles and to economic insecurity (Daskalova 2000; Gal and
Kligman 2000a, 2000b). In Bulgaria the genre chalga (a fusion of pop and
folk with predominantly kyuchek rhythms) capitalizes on association of
kyuchek with erotic belly dance. In Chapter, 9 I analyze several examples
of how the feminized oriental is produced via belly dance.
Although we may view most of these examples as the product of non-
Romani marketing, Roma themselves are not immune to these stereo-
types. Activists condemn these images, but entertainers often capitalize on
them. For example, even Esma Redžepova, whose eloquent protest against
belly dancing we have just read, made videos in the 1970s and 1980s with
veiled belly dancers;9 Esma claimed that the dancers in her videos were
Macedonian, not Romani, and she did not have full artistic control over
the staging. Her videos also featured campfires, tents, and other stereo-
typic symbols that have nothing to do with the actual history of Esma’s
urban-based music. She explained to me that she thought the scenarios

were staged beautifully, even though she knew they were not representa-
tive of her culture (see Chapter 10). Similarly, Lemon discusses Kelderara
Roma in Russia who embraced stereotypic dancing around a campfire for
a documentary film about them (2000:156–157).10
The postsocialist mania for belly dancing in Bulgaria illustrates the
interplay of gender stereotypes and politics. During postsocialism Bulgar-
ian kyuchek became more “orientalized” and was influenced by trends in
Turkey and Yugoslavia. In 1990, at one of the first public concerts to be
labeled with the words Tsiganska Muzika (Gypsy Music), the all-Romani
audience was ecstatic to hear and see the formerly prohibited kyuchek.
The dancing, however, was not the subtle kyuchek that Roma do at their
in-group events but rather belly dancing with bare midriffs and bodily
contortions. Belly dancers (some non-Romani, some Romani) now regu-
larly appear on commercial videos with Romani singers in romanticized
stagings. Furthermore, since the early 1990s in Bulgaria, belly dancers
have been appearing with bands at festivals, creating a virtual craze. At
the 1995 Romani Music Festival in Stara Zagora (see Chapter 8), the win-
ning band Džipsi Aver (Gypsy Friend) appeared with five kyuchekinyas
(kyuchek dancers) with bare midriffs and oriental-style outfits (video ex-
ample 2.5). There is now a prize for the best kyuchekinya.
Russian Romani dance and costumes (flared skirts and shawls for
women, wide shirts and boots for men) are also becoming more popular
in Bulgarian Romani dance groups (Peycheva and Dimov 2005:21). In
2000 a new award category was created at the Stara Zagora Romani Fes-
tival, for best dance ensemble (10). As a result, many new dance groups,
such as Ansel from Vidin, Šukaripe from Sofia, Romska Veseliya from
Septemvri, and Romaniya from Sredets, have been formed and have wide
Romani repertoires, including Russian, Hungarian, and Indian dance;
these groups make a statement about a pan-Romani consciousness (see
Chapter 3). The groups showcase teenagers, both girls and boys, and bring
a welcome degree of pride and gender integration to young Roma. The
dance groups also serve as community centers and gathering places for
young Roma.11
The group Džipsi Aver also performed in the 1990s with another type of
dancer: a Michael Jackson imitator. Partially clothed kyuchek dancers and
Michael Jackson imitators may seem to have nothing in common, but I
believe they are both viewed as symbols of a modern Romani identity that
goes beyond the local Balkan region. Recall that in Chapter 2 I mentioned
the emergence of Romani rap at this time, and in Chapter 9 I describe the
use of rap in pop/folk videos. Indeed, Roma (as well as non-Romani Bul-
garians) are experimenting with African-American hip-hop styles; Roma
may have a special affinity for American-American pop culture because
they are similarly configured in musical and racial terms (Levy 2002).
In Bulgaria, the belly dance boom has complex connotations embedded
in ethnic and political displays of the postsocialist period. First, it is pre-
dominantly a youth phenomenon. In Chapter 8 I describe how the an-
nual Stara Zagora festival, for example, has grown tremendously since its

inception in 1993 and regularly attracts several thousand Roma, most
under thirty years of age, who actively dance while watching the perfor-
mances. There is a party atmosphere, and it is one of the places where
Roma feel safe in congregating. Second, the festival is tied to the cultural
and political mobilization of Roma. Romani festivals often feature
speeches by politicians and are sponsored by political organizations or
nongovernmental organizations.12 Thus professionalization of čoček into
belly dance is embedded in economic and political projects, all propelled
by the precarious position of Roma in Bulgaria society.
Returning to the issue of dance stereotypes, we can begin to tackle the
thorny question of why professional Romani productions of čoček now
resemble non-Romani productions. Indeed, with the orientalization of
čoček it is sometimes hard to distinguish anymore what is produced by
Roma. Roma engage in self-stereotypification (or mimesis of other’s
projections of them) in part because it is economically profitable.
Romani dancers, like Romani musicians, have never been in control of
their own imagery, and they are quite used to being made (and making
themselves) into “exotic others” (see Okely 1996; Lemon 2000; and
Chapter 12).
We must also remember that the commercial success of belly dance
performances and videos is one of the only positive economic niches in an
otherwise bleak economy. Yet here too Roma remain marginal—they do
not profit nearly as much as non-Romani performers, managers, and pro-
ducers. Throughout history Roma have had to rely on outside patrons and
the trade in outsider imagery for work. Some observers, even Romani ac-
tivists, have criticized Roma for “cashing in” on outsider stereotypes. This
position ignores the tremendous power inequalities between Roma and
the non-Romani world of promoters and media producers. In truth, Roma
have historically had few choices about their work and their images, and
even today they lack access to image-creating mechanisms (Hancock
1997). Few Roma produce their own music and dance, and most are sub-
ject to the marketing decisions of others.
Female belly dance performances sell precisely because they fit the
image non-Roma have of Romani women: sexually alluring, promiscuous,
dangerous, provocative, and musically talented. The historical informa-
tion about Ottoman çengis can be interpreted from this angle: çengis were
selling not only their musicality but also their perceived (and often actual)
sexuality. This is in contrast to Romani community čoček performers,
whose sexuality is muted. A community dancer is monitored for modesty
but must also display the potentially sensual fluidity of body movement
that defines a talented dancer. Traditional social arrangements, such as
where and when she dances, shield the čoček dancer from criticism, but
the ambivalence about the female dancer remains. For Roma, female
Romani professionals are suspect but necessary. Because they embody
commodification of sexuality, they can disrupt the social system from the
inside. On the other hand, their performances in the marketplace under-
line the paradox of economic necessity versus ideal modesty.

PART I I I
M US I C, S TATE S, AN D MA R K E T S
7
ab
Dilemmas of Heritage and the Bulgarian
Socialist State
T his chapter examines the relationship of Roma to the nation/state via

music, taking Bulgaria as a case study. Although diasporas are usually
defined in contrast to the nation and state, dispersed peoples often are ideo-
logically, culturally, and historically connected to states (Werbner 2002a,
2002b; Lemon 2000). Bulgaria is a particularly illuminating case because
the socialist state consciously targeted Romani music in its ethnonational-
ist cultural project of “Bulgarization.” This chapter traces the historical
trajectory of definitions of heritage and authenticity through the socialist
period in Bulgaria to show that Roma pose the question of belonging.
Roma raise the issue of exclusion versus inclusion in the nation/state; they
interrogate the framework of heritage by exposing its monoethnic frame-
work. Inspired by Herzfeld’s concept of cultural intimacy (1997), I investi-
gate the complex performative relationship between Roma and the socialist
state through analysis of the politics of zurna and tŭpan ensembles and
Bulgarian wedding music.1 I also explore the issue of resistance to state
policy, noting that resistance is often paired with collaboration. I continue
this discussion in Chapter 8, where I deal with the postsocialist period.
The terms heritage, tradition, and folk had great weight in nineteenth-
century East European nation-building projects; indeed, heritage and tra-
dition were used to culturally define the nation as a community composed
of homogeneous “folk,” thereby excluding Roma as well as other minor-
ities. See text supplement 7.1 for discussion of the relationship among
Bulgarian nation building, socialism, and folklore policy. Because folk
music became a politicized symbol of the Bulgarian nation, its definitional
borders were carefully patrolled, and Romani music was clearly outside
those borders. Romani music, then, has never been performed in ensem-
bles, festivals, or music schools under the rubric folk.
127
Zurna and the 1980s Anti-Muslim
Campaign in Bulgaria
As mentioned, Balkan Roma have had a historical monopoly of ensembles
consisting of zurna and tŭpan. Today in Bulgaria this ensemble plays the
traditional dance music of the southwest (Pirin) region. In contrast to
socialist Bulgaria, where zurna and tŭpan ensembles were regulated and
eventually prohibited, in Macedonia zurla and tapan players were regu-
larly hired by state-sponsored radio and ensembles. Dissemination of re-
cordings gave wide media, festival, and concert visibility to zurla and
tapan music in Macedonia. In Bulgaria, on the other hand, zurna was ex-
cluded from most official settings, including folk music schools. However,
even in Bulgaria there were long periods during socialism when zurna
players performed with ensembles; from 1964 to 1969, for example, Man-
cho Kamburov from Razlog was employed by the Pirin Ensemble (Pey-
cheva and Dimov 2002:179; also see Buchanan 2006:267). Sometimes
regional and village ensembles had their gaida (bagpipe) players (typically
Bulgarians, not Roma) learn enough zurna to perform it (Peycheva and
Dimov 2002:184). Romani tŭpan players were likewise sometimes
employed by Bulgarian ensembles; for example, Angel Krŭstev was
employed by the Yambol Ensemble from 1973 until his death in 2010.
Although the tŭpan is regularly played with traditional village instruments,
it is not formally taught in schools.
In 1984 the zurna was officially banned from all contexts, including fes-
tivals, media, urban and village celebrations, and private parties. Even
earlier, however, it was prohibited in certain localities (Peycheva and
Dimov 2002:213–214). In 1980 I attended a Pomak wedding in the village
of Avramovo (Velingrad district, southwest region), where Romani zurna
and tŭpan players were hired despite the local ban (photographs 7.1 and
7.2). Family members served as guards, watching from the roof of a house
to warn if officials were approaching. This underscores how both Roma
and their patrons resisted prohibition. When the zurna was prohibited
from the 1985 Pirin Pee (Pirin Sings) folk festival, government officials
substituted svirki (flutes) to accompany village dance groups. Svirki are
much softer in volume and lighter in tone quality than zurni. Audiences
failed to show up at the stages where dances were performed to svirki, and
when they did they found the dancing boring and uninspired, lacking the
vitality and loudness of zurna and tŭpan.
Despite the ban, Romani zurna and tŭpan players arrived at Pirin Pee
and played for dancing in a meadow above the festival. They attracted a
large crowd (photograph 7.3), and dancers tipped them generously; people
of all ethnicities danced vigorously until the musicians were chased away
by the police. Several zurna players, among them Mancho Kamburov of
Razlog, managed to perform surreptitiously and even teach his son (pho-
tograph 7.4) despite prohibitions. In the mid-1980s, Kamburov had to ac-
cept a state job as a gardener for a hospital, which actually served as a
cover for his music. These examples show how Roma and their patrons
128 Music, States, and Markets

subverted the socialist system of musical management. This resistance
allowed zurna and tŭpan bands to survive until 1989, when prohibitions
were lifted and they emerged as a vital tradition (see video example 2.2
and Chapter 2).
The official reason for the ban was that zurna was a foreign (specifically
Turkish) instrument and thus had no place in Bulgarian folk music. In
actuality, zurna-type instruments are found from India to Spain, and until
World War II they provided much of the outdoor dance music of the
southern Balkans. The Bulgarian state was itself contradictory about the
official performance of zurna; although it was banned at the Pirin Pee
festival, the National Ensemble of Folk Music and Dance permitted its
gaida players to play the zurna for its Pirin suite. Buchanan points out
that the instrument was legitimated by being incorporated into the ensem-
ble’s stylized spectacle of the nation (2006:267). This illustrates Aretxaga’s
point that we need to “rethink the notion of the state in a new light as a
contradictory ensemble of practices and processes” (2003:395).
The rhetoric about purity is directly related to the 1980s state policy of
monoethnism and Bulgarization and its concomitant regulation of dis-
play of Muslim ethnicity (Poulton 1991; Neuburger 2004; Rechel 2008). In
fact, the official Vŭzroditelen Protses (regeneration process) dictated that
there were no minorities; everyone was Bulgarian (thus Roma didn’t
exist). Roma were referred to in official contexts as grazhdani s novo-
bŭlgarski proizhod (citizens with new or modern Bulgarian ancestry). This
policy included name changes and prohibition of religious and cultural
observances among the country’s Muslim minorities—Turks, Pomaks,
and Roma. The policy was enacted among the three groups of Muslims at
different times and with different consequences (Rechel 2008:138–141;
Neuburger 2004).
As early as the 1960s, Roma were targeted with name changes; that is,
their Muslim names were forcibly changed to Slavic ones (Pomak name
changes were initiated even earlier). Several Roma satirized this process
by chosing the names of famous Bulgarians; for example, one man chose
the name Filip Kutev (after the head of the National Ensemble of Folk
Music and Dance). Another well-known television director in Sofia chose
a name that sounded Slavic but was actually part Romani: Manush
Romanov (manush means man in Romani; Romanov is a hybrid of a
Slavic ending (ov) and the word Roma). Many Muslims never fully aban-
doned their Muslim names; they used them at home among their family
and used their Slavic names in official contexts.2 When I asked Muslims in
private “What is your name?” they would answer, “Which one?”
It was rare for Roma to overtly resist name changes;3 they superficially
went along with the process but resisted in more covert ways, as with
using prohibited names and playing their music in private, which illus-
trates Herzfeld’s concept of “cultural intimacy” with the state (1997). Many
Turks, on the other hand, resisted overtly, some arming themselves, going
to jail, and losing their lives in the process. Because the Turkish minority
is very large and because the country of Turkey carefully monitors the
Dilemmas of Heritage and the Bulgarian Socialist State 129

Turks of Bulgaria, the name-changing campaign drew international out-
rage. Human rights organizations reported numerous violations of civil
rights. Perhaps Roma did not resist like the Turks precisely because they
knew no one would come to their defense; no outside country represents
the interests of Roma. Turks, on the other hand, had more security in their
high numbers and in having Turkey next door. In spite of international
outrage, the Bulgarian government forged ahead with the name-changing
campaign. The climax of this process occurred in the summer of 1989,
when 370,000 Muslims (mostly ethnic Turks) departed Bulgaria for Turkey
(Poulton 1991; Eminov 1997). Although it was cast by the government as
a voluntary move (dubbed Golyamata Ekskursiya, “The Great Excursion’’),
it was de facto an expulsion. Some observers have suggested that the fall
of Bulgarian socialism was due in large part to this misguided policy
(Buchanan 1996:221).
In addition to name changing, Muslim clothing (such as shalvari),
customs (such as circumcision), the speaking of Turkish and Romani
languages, production and distribution of Muslim literature, and lis-
tening to and performing Muslim music (see later discussion in this
chapter) were all prohibited in the 1980s.4 School administrators strip-
searched male students, bus drivers refused to pick up women in Mus-
lim garb, and police officers imposed fines for speaking Romani and
Turkish in public. Many of these prohibited practices did not disappear
but rather were driven underground or into the private sphere, which
became a refuge from state regulation.5 At home women would wear
shalvari or distinctive Pomak or Romani aprons, but when they went out
they would remove their aprons and substitute pants worn under a skirt
for shalvari.
In the state’s effort to rid Bulgarian culture of all “foreign” elements,
music played a decisive role. From 1984 to 1989 kyuchek, the main mu-
sical genre among Roma and Turks, as well as songs in Romani and Turk-
ish were eliminated from all Balkanton (the state-sponsored record label)
recordings and from all official performances. Before 1984 there were a
few albums with kyucheks, but the euphemism tanc (dance) was used. The
last record of Romani music that was released in the socialist period was
a 1983 collection of Anzhelo Malikov’s songs and arrangements.6 Anzhelo,
son of Yashar Malikov (1922–1994), was a composer, arranger, and col-
lector of Romani music (Peycheva 1999a:56 and 141). When I interviewed
him in 1986, he was quite pessimistic about Romani music; at that time he
was employed playing the cimbalom in a Hungarian restaurant and was
not allowed to perform Bulgarian Romani music. But he played Hungar-
ian urban music, some of which is influenced by Romani music. In the
early 1980s, he performed a program of Bulgarian, Spanish, and Russian
Gypsy music for the restaurant Ogneni Ritmi (Fiery Rhythms) in Sofia. In
l984, everything was censored from his program except the Russian Gypsy
part, which was in the Russian language. He couldn’t compose or perform
anything in Romani. To understand these prohibitions, we must examine
the rise of “wedding music.”

Bulgarian Wedding Music, 1970s–1989: Instrumentation,
Style, and Repertoire
In the 1970s and 1980s the genre wedding music (svatbarska muzika) cat-
apulted to fame, causing “mass hysteria,” according to one journalist
(Gadjev 1987:10). Roma were prime innovators in the wedding music
scene, and this fact fueled the controversy around the genre. Labeled
“kitsch” and “corrupt” by purists and excluded from folk music festivals,
wedding music was the most popular music of the 1970s and 1980s, with
the most fans. During the 1980s, the socialist government prohibited wed-
ding music from recordings, radio, television, and private settings; note
that Serbian music, as well as western jazz and rock, were also prohibited.
The absence of wedding music from state media ironically promoted its
success in unofficial media. Fundamentally a grassroots pan-ethnic youth
movement, wedding music struggled against state censorship and became
a mass underground cultural phenomenon.
The rubric wedding music is somewhat of a misnomer because it en-
compasses music played not only at weddings but also at baptisms, house
warmings, and soldier send-off celebrations7—in short, at major ritual
events in village and urban contexts, for both Bulgarians and Roma.
Although its history reaches back to urban ensembles of the nineteenth
century that were composed mostly of Roma,8 wedding music as a distinct
genre began to crystallize in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when amplifi-
cation was introduced to folk music in village settings. The loudness of
electric amplification and its affinity to rock music became a symbol of
modernity and the West.
Hiring a band with a sound system enhanced a family’s status in the
village; the bigger the speakers and the louder the sound, the higher the
status. Japanese sound systems were preferred. Every band had an ured-
badzhiya (sound man), who provided, transported, and monitored the
system and received a fee similar to that of the musicians. The loudness
affected the texture of the music. As effects such as reverb and delay were
introduced, an intentional, slightly overloaded distortion became desir-
able.
What defines wedding music is a combination of instrumentation, rep-
ertoire, and style. Instrumentation typically consists of clarinet, saxo-
phone, accordion, electric guitar, electric bass guitar, and drum set, plus
a vocalist.9 In the 1ate 1980s synthesizers were added, sometimes replac-
ing guitar, bass, and drums. These instruments have a greater range and
versatility than Bulgarian village instruments. Occasionally violin or
trumpet or village folk instruments appropriate to the region, such as
gŭdulka, gaida, or kava, are added. Note that the core instruments were
outside the socialist rubric of folk. True, they were imports from Western
Europe, but clarinet and accordion have been used in Bulgarian folk
music by both villagers and urbanites since the early part of the twentieth
century.

Even today, these instruments are not taught in folk music schools and
are taught instead in schools for classical music. Ironically, if a student
wishes to learn folk music on clarinet, he or she must attend a school for
classical music and learn folk music on the side; or else a student can at-
tend a folk music school with a different instrument, and then switch to
clarinet. Such situations happened countless times. Kalin Kirilov, for ex-
ample, a talented musician born in 1975 near Vidin, played folk music at
home on accordion and studied classical music on accordion in Pleven;
when he was six years old he was told by a teacher that if he wanted to
compete for admission to the Kotel high school he would have to play “a
folk instrument” such as tambura, and he should not mention that he
played the accordion. Later he was accepted at the Plovdiv Academy of
Folk Music on tambura but played accordion covertly.10
The repertoire of wedding music can be divided into two main cate-
gories: Bulgarian music and Romani music (kyucheks). Bulgarian
music is divided into slow songs (bavni pesni) and dance music. In wed-
ding music, the most common dance meters are pravo horo and
rŭchenitsa, with an occasional paidushko, krivo horo, or other dance
meter.11 Tunes are either local or drawn from the standardized Thracian
wedding repertoire created by famous wedding musicians. This reper-
toire has a Thracian emphasis because the most famous bands are from
Thrace.
Instrumental wedding music is highly structured in some ways and
highly unstructured in others; there are set passages played in unison or
thirds that alternate with individual improvisations on the melody instru-
ments. The set passages are composed by musicians, sometimes based on
folk melodies; but they often have melodic and rhythmic surprises. Eclec-
ticism is the preferred mode of creation. In the middle of a horo one may
find the “Flight of the Bumble Bee,” the “Can Can” (from Offenbach), a
quote from an advertising jingle, a popular rock-and-roll song, or phrases
more reminiscent of jazz and rock than folk music. The emphasis is on
originality and cleverness. Versatility is also prized. Clarinetist Ivo Papa-
zov composed “A Musical Stroll Around Bulgaria” to display his regional
diversity. He also does an imitation of a gaida on his clarinet, removes
pieces from his clarinet (down to the mouthpiece), and plays clarinet and
saxophone at the same time while the tune morphs to swing (photograph
7.5, video example 7.1). The theatrical element is definitely present. More-
over, audience members, who are often musicians themselves, listen care-
fully for what is new and interesting; they are highly critical listeners and
relentlessly compare musicians and performances.
Above all, ability to improvise is valued by both performers and audi-
ence. Each melody instrument in turn departs from the unison phrases
and shows its virtuosity in original ways. Dazzling technique is displayed
by complicated rhythmic syncopation, daring key changes, arpeggio pas-
sages, chromaticism, and extremely fast tempi. One journalist wrote,
“Rhythms are frantic and unbridled showing a rare virtuosity as if play-
ing were a question of life or death” (Gadjev 1987). Timothy Rice quotes

the phrase s hus (with gusto) to illustrate how proponents differentiated
wedding music from folk music, which they found prosto (simple)
(1996:193). Indeed, musicians contrasted the svobodno svirane (free play-
ing) of wedding music with the shkoluvano svirane (schooled playing) of
folk music.12
From the 1970s to 1989, wedding music was inextricably tied to large,
opulent life-cycle events that were the pride of Bulgarians of all ethnic-
ities. Weddings were a status symbol; villagers saved for years to invite
hundreds of guests for a three-day event. Despite totalitarianism, this pe-
riod was the apex of community celebration and display. Ignoring govern-
ment warnings about “bourgeois conspicuous consumerism,” villagers
insisted on abundant food and drink, expensive gifts, and good-quality
music. Wedding music was central to the rituals (such as daruvane, public
reciprocal gift giving), the banquets, and the dancing that occurred for
many hours. Unmetered slow songs and slow instrumental tunes accom-
panied the rituals and the meals served at long banquet tables, and metric
songs and instrumentals encouraged guests to dance (Silverman 1992).
Thus many Romani wedding musicians had steady professional work in
that era.
Wedding songs are either from the local folk corpus or composed by the
singers and instrumentalists. Songs performed by the most famous singers
in the 1980s are still sung. The vocal style emphasizes rhythmic vibrato
and extensive ornamentation, imitating the melodic instruments and
showcasing technique. The style is based on eastern Thracian models and
was developed by Nedyalka Keranova, born in a village near Haskovo,
Thrace; many musicians assert she was of Romani descent, from an East-
ern Orthodox group locally known as sivi gŭlŭbi, grey doves (see Pampo-
rovo 2009). Keranova was the leading wedding singer until her death in
1996, and her vocal style is widely imitated (Bakalov 1992:229–238). Video
example 7.2 is an excerpt of a signature Bulgarian slow song from the
Trakiya Folk festival in 1994.13
The second category of repertoire consists of kyucheks, comprising
both instrumental music and songs. The tunes for kyucheks are some-
times drawn from older Romani tunes but are more often composed by
wedding musicians. They are inspired by eclectic sources: folk and pop-
ular music from Serbia, Macedonia, Greece, and Turkey; film scores from
the West; cartoon music; Middle Eastern music; and Indian film music.
Kyuchek titles in the 1980s included “Sarajevo ’84” and “Olimpiada,” in
honor of the Olympics; “Alo Taxi” (Hello Taxi), from a pop song; and
“Pinko,” in 9/8, based on the musical theme from the Pink Panther. There
are also covers of Macedonian, Greek, Turkish, and Serbian Romani
kyucheks. Ferus Mustafov, a noted Macedonian Romani musician, per-
forms several pieces based on melodies composed by Ivo Papazov. As I
have emphasized, among Romani musicians there is cross-fertilization of
musical styles, with a premium on innovation. Papazov confirmed that he
and Mustafov would trade tunes over the telephone in the 1980s because
travel to Yugoslavia was impossible.

The Ivo Papazov Phenomenon
The unquestioned guru of wedding music was and still is Ivo Papazov.
Born Ibryam Hapazov14 in Kŭrdzhali in 1952 of Turkish Romani ancestry,
he is a founder (with his cousin, the accordionist Neshko Neshev) of the
band Trakiya. In the 1970s and 1980s he was the highest-paid wedding
musician in the country and was in such demand that people waited
months and years to engage him. People even married on midweek nights
rather than the usual Sunday to accommodate his busy schedule. He nar-
rated: “Some people came to see me about moving their wedding earlier,
but I already had engagements. I offered them other musicians—but they
wouldn’t hear of a replacement. Only later I found out that the bride was
quite pregnant and she had aborted the child so that we, only we, could
play for her” (Sŭrnev 1988:23).
The family that hired Papazov achieved high social status not only for
their monetary expenditure but also for being the guaranteed focus of
attention. Whenever Trakiya played at a village event, uninvited people
showed up from miles around to dance in the public parts of the event, or
merely to crowd outside the tent or banquet hall to listen to the music and
catch a glimpse of the stars. In 1980 I attended a wedding in Iskra, a vil-
lage near Haskovo, where about 200 uninvited fans showed up, some
from several hundred miles away, to hear Ivo play (photograph 7.6). An
added attraction was a simultaneous wedding in the same village, where
Nikola Iliev, a renowned clarinetist and leader of the Konushenska Grupa,
was hired. People viewed the event as a contest between Ivo and Nikola in
terms of stamina, technique, and number of fans. The two wedding bands
set up their sound systems at opposite ends of the village square, and
hundreds of people joined the dance line. The music went on continu-
ously for five hours and resumed after dinner for another four hours at
indoor locations.
Admired for both his technical and his creative talents, Ivo is known for
masterful improvisations, creativity, stamina, daringly fast tempi, forays
into jazz, numerous compositions, and charisma: “A virtuoso in the in-
stinctive meaning of the word, improviser of the highest class, he quite
freely led the horo into jazz, built on a Bulgarian musical foundation—
something, which elsewhere we didn’t find done with such mastery and
strength. . . . He has set the tone for a large musical movement with hun-
dreds of thousands of followers” (N. Kaufman 1987:79). When a journalist
asked Yuri Yunakov, the saxophone player in Trakiya, why no one in the
orchestra looks at the audience, he replied, “There’s no time. Have you
ever seen how a hunted wild rabbit runs? It runs zig-zag, stops, returns,
does 8s, 16s. . . . That’s how Ivo plays. And we chase him like hounds with
our tongues hanging out” (Sŭrnev 1988:25).
In the 1980s, Papasov’s popularity was enormous: “The concert hall liter-
ally exploded when Ivo Papazov, the uncontested king, got on stage. It was
the apotheosis. I compared it in spirit to Alan Stivell, Joan Baez, . . . the
modern bards I respect deeply. I thought about Art Pepper’s15 commentary

after listening to an Ivo Papasov cassette: ‘A man can’t play like that.’ I also
thought of the beginning of the century in the slums of New Orleans when
jazz was beginning” (Gadjev 1987). Numerous fans have testified to his
superstar status:
I have 100 cassettes of Ivo Papazov. When he plays I feel weak in the
knees. His compositions are unending. For at least 40–50 years there
will be no one who can surpass him. . . . He is a magician! A master!
A phenomenon in folk music that we won’t see repeated soon. . . .
When Ivo Papazov plays I stop breathing. I can’t explain why. Can you
explain love? (Sŭrnev 1988:23).
Legends circulated about Ivo and the early emergence of his talent. His
mother, for example, supposedly tied his umbilical cord with a thread
from his father’s clarinet.16 In truth Ivo comes from several generations of
zurna players. Referring to his colleagues from Kŭrdzhali, that is, Salif Ali
(drummer) and Neshko Neshev (accordion), he remarked that “all our
grandfathers were zurna players.” Ivo stated that his elder male relatives
were some of the first musicians to switch to clarinet; before World War II
one of them “traded a cow for a clarinet on a trip to Greece. That’s how the
clarinet was introduced to my family.” Clarinets were valued over zurnas
because of their newness, versatility, greater range, ease of playing in dif-
ferent keys, and chromatic possibilities. For a period of time, zurnas and
clarinets were combined in bands in the Kŭrdzhali region; Ivo showed me
a photograph of his father performing at a wedding in the 1950s that had
a clarinet player, a zurna player, and a tŭpan player.
Ivo played music from a young age; at nine, he switched from accordion to
clarinet and was said to “play like a man.” In truth, he was exposed to many
fine musicians from the older generation who played the Turkish Romani
style of Kŭrdzhali, such as Halil Dzhamgyoz (Peycheva 1999:136–137); he
also listened widely, especially to jazz, which was prohibited: “In those years
we learned the old style from the older performers. But even then we listened
to jazz on illegal cassettes of Charlie Parker and Benny Goodman.” One leg-
end relates that when he was in his teens he went to a local restaurant to eat
and was invited to play outdoors when the resident orchestra took a break.
Even though it was raining, the diners came outside, wrapping themselves in
tablecloths, and for a half hour they didn’t budge. Years after that they were
still asking “Isn’t that boy coming to play again?” (Sŭrnev 1988:23). A second
legend tells of Milcho Leviev, a noted Bulgarian-American jazz musician and
composer, who was given a tape of Ivo to listen to on his return flight to the
United States. He forced the pilot to turn around in midflight because he
insisted on meeting the musician. When I spoke with Leviev, he confirmed
that he was very impressed by Ivo’s playing, but the rest of the story is
conjecture.
Another legend relates that Ivo owns a solid gold clarinet. Perhaps this
claim was inspired by the popular exaggerations of his wealth, or by infusing
his instrument with magical qualities. Indeed, fans lifted their children to

touch Ivo “for good luck.” One story relates how a wedding scheduled in
Istanbul was moved to Bulgaria when Ivo couldn’t travel to Istanbul. An-
other tells of five boys who showed up late for their induction into the army
but were willing to take the consequences because Ivo had played for their
soldier send-off celebration. When asked by the commanding officer why
they were negligent, they answered, “You haven’t heard how Ivo Papazov
plays!” (23).
Ivo claimed, “I can eat the same dish twenty times, but I can’t play the
same thing the same way twice” (25). In 2005 he embellished, “Wedding
music existed for many years, but I modernized it with a new style, mod-
ern chords, modern accompaniment, a contemporary musicality with
more improvisation. And the young generation liked it; from them we
received our popularity.” When a journalist remarked to Ivo that it was
hard to figure out what style he plays, he answered: “I play in Papazov
style. I play in Balkan style, I play in the style of ethnojazz. I play our
jazz. . . . I really get angry when people say they can’t categorize me. . . .
One time Lyudmil Georgiev said ‘I can’t tell you if Ivo Papazov plays jazz,
but he plays incredible music.’ And Georgiev . . . was one of the greatest
jazz players.”17 Ivo narrated: “Neshko and I changed the style. I just can’t
stay in one place. I have to develop. The old ways didn’t please us.”
Video examples 7.1, 7.3, and 7.4 feature Trakiya’s dazzling improvisa-
tions playing Bulgarian music on television in 1987 (later I discuss the
filming of this show). In video example 7.3 Ivo and Yuri improvise in a
pravo horo, and in 7.4 Neshko and Ivo improvise in a rŭchenitsa. Video
examples 7.5, 7.6, and 7.7 were filmed at a Romani wedding banquet in a
tent 1994 where Ivo and Neshko performed with Radi Kazakov (guitar),
Vasil Denev (keyboard), Salif Ali (drums), and guests Matyo Dobrev (kaval
player from Straldzha, Yambol region) and Ahmed Yunakov (Yuri’s son,
on saxophone). Romani kyucheks in 2/4 and 9/8 predominated. In video
example 7.8 Trakiya is featured in on their 2005 American reunion tour
(with guitarist Kalin Kirilov) playing pravo horo and improvising. In
Chapter 11, I discuss this tour.
Besides Ivo, there are also many other fine musicians. I discuss Yuri
Yunakov in Chapter 11 and have mentioned Kŭrdzhali accordionist
Neshko Neshev and clarinetist Nikola Iliev, from the Plovdiv region. The
roster of wedding musicians is too long to list here,18 but some of the most
famous veterans of the 1980s who still perform are Romani clarinetists
Mladen Malakov and Orlin Pamukov (from Kotel, who performed with
Orfei for many years; video example 6.1), Filip Simeonov (see Chapter 13,
video example 7.9, rŭchenitsa, 1994),19 Boril Iliev (from Lyaskovets, North
Bulgaria), Dimitŭr Paskov (from Sofia), Nesho Neshev (from Kŭrdzhali),
and Yashko Argirov (from Brestovitsa, Pazardzhik); Turkish clarinetist
Osman Žekov (from Kŭrdzhali); Bulgarian violinist Georgi Yanev (from
Asenovgrad, Plovdiv region, founder of the band Orfei); Romani accordi-
onist Traicho Sinapov (from Sofia); and Bulgarian accordionists Petŭr
Ralchev (from north Bulgaria) and Ivan Milev (from Haskovo, founder of
the band Mladost; youth).

This list is not exhaustive, but it illustrates the point that although Roma
have had decisive roles in creating wedding music, Bulgarians also mas-
terfully perform it and bands are often mixed. Second, the majority of
well-known musicians are from Thrace. And third, virtually all instrumen-
talists are male. When women perform, they are singers, usually spouses
of musicians. Female singers who perform in bands with no male relatives
are considered by some to be “loose” because of the late-night work and
uncertain lodging arrangements.20 Note too that the musical background
of wedding musicians varies considerably, from a few conservatory grad-
uates who can read music (e.g., ethnic Bulgarians Nikola Iliev Petŭr Ral-
chev, and Ivan Milev) to the majority who play by ear. Romani musicians
tend to play by ear and acquire skills informally within a family context,
the way most ethnic Bulgarians learned before the 1960s. Ethnic Bulgar-
ians are more tied to the ensembles and the folk music schools, which
emphasize musical literacy. The wedding music tradition, however, is
strictly oral.
Economics: The Free Market

and State Control
Understanding the economic framework of wedding music helps us in

understanding attempts in the 1980s at state intervention. Because of the
phenomenal popularity of some bands, the market for them became
grossly inflated. When a family hired a famous band, the family not only
gained in social status but also displayed financial prosperity to neighbors
and kin. At the high end of the scale, Trakiya charged approximately 2,000
leva or $1,000 in 1984, not counting tips, for a two-day wedding.21 This
computed to about 300 leva apiece. If we take 200 leva as a good monthly
salary for a factory worker in the mid–1980s, it becomes obvious that the
stars earned in two days what most Bulgarians earned in six weeks.
Remember, however, that the majority of wedding musicians were not
stars22 and that a more typical salary for a two-day event was forty to fifty
leva. Though nowhere equivalent to a star’s fee, this sum was still roughly
equivalent to a week’s salary in a factory. It is not surprising that in some
Romani neighborhoods almost every male played an instrument. In fact,
among Roma and non-Roma alike wedding music became a viable eco-
nomic niche in the 1970s and 1980s.
Hiring music was always located in the realm of the free market, even
during the socialist period. Someone from the family would approach the
band leader, and they would bargain. Musicians waited to be contacted at
specific places and times, such as pazari za muzikanti (musicians’ markets;
Bulgarian; Peycheva 1999a:236–237). In Plovdiv, for example, at the
chetvŭrtŭk pazar (Thursday market; Bulgarian) wedding musicians gath-
ered over lunch and were contacted by clients. In Sofia, musicians met
Monday through Friday at noon at a restaurant in the center. As Tome
Chinciri, a noted Romani singer and son of the venerated violinist Hasan

Chinchiri from Sofia, narrated: “People pick up musicians for their
bands—I need a singer, you need a guitar player. You have to be careful to
watch out for musicians who take more than their share. It’s better to
work with people you know.” On Fridays the pazar in Sofia was crowded
with thirty to forty musicians (see photograph 7.7), the majority Roma.
Besides securing work, the pazar also functioned as a place to socialize.
Trends in musical style, fees, and sources for buying instruments were all
discussed, and albums from Turkey, Yugoslavia, and Greece were traded.
When a client approaches a wedding musician (in person or by tele-
phone) the tone of conversation becomes more formal and a bargaining
mode ensues. Usually half the money is paid ahead of time (known as
kaparo) and the other half is paid at the end of the event. Nothing is written
down formally; rather, a handshake or verbal agreement seals the deal. In
addition to the fee, the beginning and ending times for playing are fixed. If
they are asked to play beyond the fixed time, musicians require additional
fees.23 Another reliable source of income is from tips, that is, from requests
for particular songs. This money is called parsa (collection) or bakshish
(tips). Patrons often line up at weddings to tell the master of ceremonies
which songs and dances they and their families request. They pay by
sticking bills onto a musician’s forehead or in his instrument, by handing
them to the singer, or by throwing them onto the stage, sometimes osten-
tatiously. Tips are also given when a dancer wants a particular piece of
music to continue, or when someone is particularly moved by the music.24
Tipping is illustrated in the videos of Romani weddings in Chapter 5. Tips
can generate up to 100 percent more than the contracted fee, and they too
are divided (Peycheva 1999a:238); in fact, their division can generate con-
flict. Wedding musicians tell many stories about tipping. One famous
story tells of a guitar player who used gum on the bottom of his shoe to
gather bills for himself!
In the 1970s and 1980s, most musicians had state-sponsored jobs in
addition to wedding work. Many wedding musicians and singers worked
in professional folk music ensembles; to put it conversely, most ensemble
musicians played weddings on weekends. Some musicians preferred res-
taurant jobs to ensemble jobs because restaurant work usually took
place Monday through Friday evenings, leaving the weekends free for
weddings. In Sofia in the mid-1980s, Tome Chinchiri and violinist Ven-
tsislav Takev did restaurant work; Anzhelo Malikov played cimbalom at
a Hungarian restaurant on weekdays and played guitar at weddings on
weekends (photograph 7.8)
In the 1980s, the salary for restaurant and ensemble work was approxi-
mately 150–200 leva ($75–100) a month, relatively low compared to wed-
ding work. Having regular state work, however, entitled a musician to a
pension, medical benefits, and vacation packages. These amenities were
denied to full-time wedding musicians, who were also denied the right to
join the musician’s union (Buchanan 1991:538 and 1996:207; Rice
1994:247–250). Moreover, in ideological terms doing wage labor made you
into a “worker,” thereby affirming your place as a productive member of

society. Still, many wedding musicians, such as Nikola Yankov (founder of
the Lenovska Grupa) and Ivo, resisted wage labor and played only at wed-
dings and concerts. They were permitted to do so, but they were very
heavily taxed (Rice 1994:247). Bulgarian clarinetist Nikola Iliev, founder
of the Konushenska Grupa, explained: “It became really bad for musi-
cians. The government started collecting high taxes from us. Because I
was from a ‘fascist’25 family, they targeted me first; I had to pay back taxes
and fines for five years. The first time I paid over 2,000 leva, an enormous
sum, equivalent to fourteen weddings.” Similarly, in 1985 Nikola Yankov
was fined 2,000 leva in back taxes.
The state, concerned about “conspicuous consumption,” began more
vigorously to regulate the earnings of musicians. In 1985, in a few tar-
geted regions such as Stara Zagora and Sliven, a state commission
assigned each band a category (kategoria) that dictated how much it could
charge. The system was administered by the concert division of the
Dŭrzhavno Obedinenie Muzika (State Music Society), which was respon-
sible for all categories of professional music and dance, including clas-
sical, popular, and folk. Before 1984, Balkanturist, the state tourist bureau,
ran a commission to assign categories for its own establishments, but
after 1985 the system was applied all over the country. The Dŭrzhavna
Atestatsionna Komisiya (State Certifying Commission), comprising gov-
ernment-decorated musicians and professors, traveled to every regional
capitol twice a year to test musicians through a short performance. They
assigned a category according to the level of expertise and mastery of
“pure” Bulgarian music.
Each band also had to submit a repertory list, which was approved or
amended by the commission, to ensure that only pure Bulgarian music
was played (Rice 1994:249–250; Buchanan 1991:538–539, 1996). Finally
the category system also regulated where a band worked. Singer Dinka
Ruseva, for example, told me she was singing at a wedding in the Plovdiv
district when the police arrived and stopped the music; they said she could
sing only in the Stara Zagora district! Wedding musicians were extremely
upset over the imposition of the category system, as my journal entry for
September 24, 1985, shows:
The musicians are all talking about kategorii. Two days ago the com-
mission (headed by Manol Todorov, a professor of music) came to
Sliven to assign kategorii. In Sliven alone eighty groups auditioned,
attesting to the vitality of the wedding scene here. Each gave a list of
their repertoire to the commission and then played for fifteen mi-
nutes. From now on, every group has to receive a kategoria and a
musician has to play regularly with the same band in order to be hired
for events. The government wants to get rid of free-market bargaining
in part because musicians are making too much money. One Romani
musician commented: “They want to have a bureau where you would
go to get musicians for your wedding. The pay would be 52 leva a
musician for two days of work, very little. I’m very willing to pay taxes,

but we need a free market for weddings. They’ve started fining people
200–300 leva in Stara Zagora for violations, so we came here to
Sliven.”
The category system was enforced only selectively. Almost immediately

after it was implemented, musicians began to circumvent the system by
charging the official fee over the table but requiring more money under
the table. During the 1980s wedding music thus stubbornly clung to the
free-market domain.
The Official Rhetoric of Purity
Despite its popularity, wedding music was excluded from official govern-
ment-sponsored media channels such as recordings, radio, and television.
It was also either neglected by scholars or else condescendingly labeled as
“clichéd” or “kitsch.” Manol Todorov, professor at the Music Conservatory
in Sofia, wrote: “The harmonic language is modest and when it is compli-
cated it is unconvincing. . . . Often they master clichés that are imitative
and chaotic. . . . The repertoire [of the singers] is not carefully chosen, they
do not perform the best folk songs. Very often pieces of doubtful Bulgar-
ian ancestry are performed, songs made up ‘especially’ for weddings.
These pieces, devoid of artistic value, are quickly disseminated” (1985:31).
Another scholar referred to wedding music as stateless, impetuous, and
out of control, like “cosmopolitan water” where “Bulgarian music is only
a glaze-like covering.” He further laments that no one has told wedding
musicians which influences are good and which are bad (K. Georgiev
1986:90). Music professor Nikolai Kaufman wrote: “Recently it has been
pointed out that these wedding bands are the illegitimate children of the
music profession. The basis of this attitude was that the bands were not
successful in performing Bulgarian and foreign music and lacked profes-
sional ability in harmony, construction of form, and maintaining pure
Bulgarian style” (1987:78–79).
The most common criticism leveled against wedding music was that it
incorporated foreign elements and did not retain the “purity” of Bulgar-
ian folk music. It was, ironically, simultaneously too Western (like jazz
and rock) and too Eastern (like Romani, Turkish, and Middle Eastern
music). Manol Todorov espoused this position to me in 1985: “No one is
playing pure folk material. We must keep Bulgarian music Bulgarian.
Foreign elements—Spanish, Indian, Turkish—don’t belong. You wouldn’t
throw foreign words in the middle of a sentence. A Spanish motif doesn’t
belong in Bulgarian folk music.” In print, Todorov reiterated: “We heard
harmonic stamps, clichéd in rhythmic treatments, which are foreign to
the melodic tenor of Bulgarian folk music. In essence, the basic task
should be the war against the foreign and clichéd in melody, harmony,
and rhythm, and the search for contemporary musical thought resting on
the great richness of Bulgarian national musical folklore” (1985:31).

This rhetoric about musical purity is directly related to the 1980s’ state
policy of monoethnism and concomitant regulation of the display of Mus-
lim ethnicity. Earlier I discussed the forced name changes, banning of
zurnas, prohibition against kyucheks, and the mission of scholars to prove
that Bulgarian folk music had no foreign influences. Wedding music
became a primary target; its Romani and Turkish manifestations (i.e.,
kyuchek) were banned entirely, and the jazz, rock, and non-Bulgarian ele-
ments in the Bulgarian repertoire were cleansed. Playing and dancing
kyuchek was officially prohibited, and fines and jail sentences were threat-
ened for lack of compliance. In 1985 members of the Lenovska Grupa told
me that the punishment was a 200–300 leva fine or a prison sentence.
Ivo Papazov remembers these difficult years with bitterness:
We played in spite of the fact that many composers did not like our
style. At that time there were people who were in charge of the style,
the order, the framework of the music. They didn’t like our style
because we crossed the boundaries. We had more freedom, more im-
provisation. They didn’t want us to experiment with authentic music—
my music was prohibited in folk music schools so the students
wouldn’t forget authentic music. On the contrary, we used the authen-
tic, but combined with the modern. The critics didn’t like us until
1989, when democracy came and our music was no longer illegal.
He describes the development of wedding style:
We started to create a new style into which we mixed Romani ele-

ments. Even though it was forbidden, we put it in. And for that reason
we were not recognized for so many years. We mixed styles and we
saw that it enriched Bulgarian folklore. There is nothing at all wrong
with mixing two folklore styles into one. And there was an incredible
resonance between the styles, Turkish, Romani and Bulgarian. It was
very beautiful; there were more possibilities for improvisation. The
people loved precisely this, but the government officials in charge of
culture started to follow us around, to harass us, to prohibit us from
playing. This was the reason they didn’t let us appear on radio, even
though we really wanted to record our pieces. They chased us; they
fined us.
I questioned Ivo further about the relationship between his music and
his identity. Growing up, he heard predominantly Turkish and Romani
music, but he was also exposed to Bulgarian music because musicians
serviced patrons from all ethnic groups. Ivo’s Romani consciousness actu-
ally emerged later in his life. He narrated:
I was raised thinking I was Turkish. To this day, my sister argues with
me that we are Turkish even though she is very dark and I am one of
the few light-skinned people in my family. But I knew I was Romani

deep down inside, we just didn’t face it—it was an insult. On our pass-
ports, it said “Tsgani” but we said we were Turks. My grandparents
were basket makers, sieve makers; they sold these items, they showed
me how to make baskets. I realized I was Romani from language,
history, mannerisms, culture. I knew it inside, but to accept it is an-
other thing. Some members of the older generation spoke Romani; in
my dialect of Turkish there are Romani words.
In Chapter 11 I chronicle Yuri Yunakov’s identity shifts, but here I note

that both Yuri and Ivo were raised as Turks yet later realized they were
Roma.
What mattered more than ethnicity was religion: because they were
Muslims (though not practicing), the names of Yuri (formerly Husein
Husein) and Ivo (formerly Ibryam Hapazov) had to be changed. Yuri’s
ordeal is described in Chapter 11. Ivo bitterly recalls: “My mother’s mother
was Pomak from the Rhodopes so we witnessed their name changes in the
1970s. The police were on my trail for a long time, but I was constantly
traveling. Finally they caught up with me and said, ‘We have orders to take
you to headquarters. If you won’t go voluntarily, we’ll handcuff you.’ So I
had to go and my name was changed.” Similarly, Ivo’s cousin Neshko
Neshev, born Nedyatin Ibryamov, had to change his name when he mar-
ried a Bulgarian woman (Statelova 2005). And Ivo’s drummer Salif Ali
became Aleksandŭr Mihailov.
By the mid-1980s, wedding musicians faced a coordinated program of
prohibition, harassment, fines, and imprisonment. As the top musicians,
members of Trakiya were especially targeted by officials to display them as
examples for other musicians. Ivo stated: “In sum, they wanted to slap the
hand of Romani and Turkish folklore to show that, ‘Look, the greatest
artists are in jail—the rest of you, be careful.’ They wanted to warn people
not to make weddings like that. It was a horrible time.” Trakiya members’
cars (or license plates) were confiscated, and they were fined, beaten, and
jailed; in prison their heads were shaved and they were forced to do menial
work such as breaking rock and digging canals. Ivo narrated:
Thank God we were saved—we survived—we only served forty-five days.

I had a white uniform and had to break cement. By the fifteenth day
everyone was my friend and they all gave me Marlboros to smoke. Some
of my friends from the army saved us, otherwise we would have served
longer or been sent to a labor camp, and when you are sent to a camp,
you never return. A police officer warned me that they would send me to
a camp to get rid of me—only me—the others were being released. I got
in touch with someone I knew from the army who loved music, and he
saved me. Actually he came at 3:00 A.M. the very morning they were
supposed to send me to a camp, and he arranged for my release.
Ivo vividly remembered that legal charges of “hooliganism” had to be

fabricated because no official law existed about kyucheks: “There was no

evidence—they had nothing to charge me with! I hadn’t broken a law—
there was no law about music I had broken! They charged me with polit-
ical propaganda, that I didn’t respect their laws, that I was spreading
propaganda—as if I were a terrorist! It was humorous!” Also note that re-
gardless of ethnicity and religion, a musician was guilty by playing wed-
ding music; for example, ethnic Bulgarian accordionist Petŭr Ralchev was
arrested. Ivo’s ethnic Bulgarian wife, Maria Karafezieva, was also incar-
cerated. Ivo narrated: “Maria was inside too—she was arrested but they
couldn’t charge her because she only sang Bulgarian songs. They had to let
her go. She yelled at them: ‘We get Roma to listen to Bulgarian music—
how many times did I sing about Hadzhi Dimitŭr [a famous Bulgarian
hero]?’’
Ivo explained how musicians tried to avoid the prohibitions but ulti-
mately faced them. If they couldn’t play in the official media, they concen-
trated on weddings:
So we started to play illegally. We played at weddings because these

are private and nobody could tell you what to play. People would
record us at weddings and sell these tapes, and we became very
famous. We were approached for weddings because people wanted to
hear this music live. We wanted to work in restaurants but they
wouldn’t let us. We still played Romani weddings even though they
prohibited us from playing Romani music. It is absurd not to play
kyucheks at a Romani wedding. So they hounded us; they wouldn’t let
us play that type of music, but it is impossible to omit this type of
music. . . . And after we were in jail we weren’t allowed to play at fes-
tivals. They followed us everywhere so we had to stop playing wed-
dings for a while. I didn’t want to be arrested a second time. There
were so many weddings that we couldn’t play—we bargained for wed-
dings three years in advance!
Along with musicians, wedding sponsors were also arrested; all were
enraged that the government intruded in the domestic sphere to ruin the
events for which they had prepared for years. Ivo remembers: “My patrons
protested while I was in jail. Our incarcerations ruined their weddings,
their celebrations. You know when Bulgarians celebrate how many people
gather; the sponsors prepare food and drink. You know how much money
they had already spent preparing! People came from Plovdiv to protest
because I cancelled so many weddings from the Plovdiv area. It was
reported in the Radio Free Europe press, but not in the Bulgarian press.”
Musicians and sponsors developed creative tactics for avoiding incar-
ceration; at village events, family members kept watch (often from the
roof) for approaching police officers. An obvious tactic was to hide when
the police approached, as Yuri Yunakov describes in Chapter 11. Yuri
recalled that Ivo was smart enough to hide his car in private garages
during weddings. Yuri admits, “I wasn’t so smart; my car was parked next
to the stage, so even though I hid, the police confiscated my car.” If it was

too late to hide, a common tactic was to morph a kyuchek in progress into
a traditional Bulgarian pravo horo (musicians illustrated this to me by
converting a kyuchek to the popular song Kara Kolyo Sedeshe [Dark Kolyo
was sitting down]). Yuri admitted that despite lookouts, running was
sometimes the only alternative: “As soon as the police approached, most
of us started running. It was humorous to see Ivo, as heavy as he is, run-
ning into the forest behind the stage. The worst thing was to run from the
police. That was the highest insult. You were supposed to stay and face the
consequences.”
Here Yuri alludes to the complicated issue of resistance, suggesting that
the bravest response would have been to continue playing kyucheks and
face the harsh consequences. But resistance is never simple. Musicians,
though brave, were survivors; they did not seek to become heroes because
of lofty antigovernment principles. They defied the state because of eco-
nomic rather than moral imperatives. Music was their profession, and
they made a living by serving their patrons, who requested kyucheks. At
the same time, moral outrage accompanied economic motives. Musicians
did not shy away from critiquing the absurdity of the policy and its racist
message.
Resistance to prohibition was also found among young musician fans.
Ripe breeding grounds for wedding musicians were the folk music high
schools in Shiroka Lŭka and Kotel and the Plovdiv Academy. Although
playing wedding music was strictly forbidden at the schools, students
would regularly sneak out on weekends to play or listen to famous musi-
cians at weddings. After speaking with students at the Shiroka Lŭka school
in October 1985, I made this journal entry:
All the students talk about is wedding music. They are infatuated with
it, and they test us to see what we know: “Who is the accordionist with
Ivo now?” They live for this music but they are not allowed to listen to
it or perform it. Playing weddings is strictly prohibited. The adminis-
tration recently issued uniforms and confiscated all of their “civilian”
clothing so they can’t sneak off and pass unrecognized. Some students
have no warm clothing now. We met a vocal student from Thrace who
does weddings on weekends, but she has to sneak off or take sick leave.
Dragiya Enev (Bulgarian singer Dinka Ruseva’s son) told me that he had
to securely hide his accordion in his room because playing it at the Kotel
school was forbidden. He wanted to move from the dormitory into an
apartment so it would be easier to play weddings, but school officials
locked him in his dormitory and refused to let him move. He managed to
sneak out anyway.
Nikolai Kolev, a Thracian gŭdulka player living in New York, recalled:
We students at Shiroka Lŭka were forbidden to play wedding music

even in our dormitory rooms. We could be dropped from the school if
we were found at weddings. In fact, a friend of mine was kicked out of

the Plovdiv Academy because he went to Varna to play in a restaurant.
In spite of this, my friends and I would slip out at night and somehow
get to weddings to hear Ivo or Nikola Iliev, and then sneak back in, or
sleep on a bench somewhere. We were crazy for the new music. The
atmosphere of Shiroka Lŭka was very enriching—not just the classes,
but outside of class. We played and listened to wedding music all the
time even though it was prohibited.
Kalin Kirilov described how students struggled in secret to learn wedding

music from cassettes that had been poorly recorded and copied many
times. These sentiments were repeated to me by countless other musi-
cians. Many told the legendary story of being threatened about wedding
music by their music teachers, of ignoring them, of sneaking out to a wed-
ding, and of seeing their teachers at these weddings!
Resistance was located in many sites, even the most official. As described
earlier, the teachers at the schools lectured their students about the evils of
wedding music but sometimes broke rules to patronize it. Ivo recalls that
some of his most ardent fans were police officers, and he even played at
their private events. He claims that when he was arrested, the judge loved
his music and so he received a soft sentence (Cartwright 2006c). In 1985,
I attended the baptism of Romani kaval player Matyo Dobrev’s son at his
home in Straldzha, near Yambol, Thrace. One of the guests of honor was
a local police officer, who danced kyucheck with abandon. Similarly, when
I told folklore scholars that I was studying Roma, they responded with the
official line, “They don’t exist,” but there was always an ironic smile.
These examples amplify Herzfeld’s point that cultural intimacy with the
state is highly nuanced (1997). Herzfeld commented on my last example
above by pointing out, “For a brief instant we see the official representa-
tives of state ideology as human beings capable of wincing at the absurdity
of what they must nevertheless proclaim” (2000:226). He further explained
that despite the external formality of states, they can be viewed in social
terms as “intimate apparatuses.” The state embodies “potentially disrepu-
table but familiar cultural matter,” which is “the very substance of what
holds people together. . . . Some of that substance even includes resistance
to the state itself” (224). On both sides, the official and the unofficial, there
were cracks in dogma. Police officers arrested musicians but secretly loved
kyuchek; wedding musicians not only resisted but also accommodated to
the state. In the cracks in official ideology, then, wedding music thrived.
State Ambivalence
I have asserted that resistance is neither singular nor pure; as Ortner

(1995) points out, it is always paired with collaboration. More precisely,
resistance often involves accommodation to the state. Moreover, the state
is not monolithic. I now discuss cracks within the official sphere, and its
relationship to black and gray musical markets. In the 1980s, life was filled

with much ambivalence. Although it was illegal, most Bulgarians pro-
cured western currency on the black market, receiving a rate that was four
times the official rate of exchange. Although it was illegal, most Bulgari-
ans obtained western goods. Although it was illegal, most Bulgarians lis-
tened to kyucheks. Verdery explicates how the socialist state permitted the
unofficial sphere to operate, so rebellion would not erupt (1996). The gov-
ernment, then, simultaneously prohibited wedding music, accommodated
to it, sold it, and tried to control it from within.
In the mid-1980s, for example, the state recording company Balkanton
released several official versions of wedding music that were sanitized of
foreign melodies, jazz, and kyucheks.26 Manol Todorov wrote for the liner
notes of Papazov’s Balkanton record (BHA 11330): “All this is based upon
the sound instrumental tradition of Bulgarian folklore, without the intro-
duction of foreign elements, motifs, or manner of performance.” Todorov
told me that he instructed Ivo not to play anything foreign at the recording
session, or else it wouldn’t be pressed. On these albums, wedding music
was not only censored of foreign influences but also arranged by state
composers. In the process of obrabotka (arrangement), much of the wild,
spontaneous, improvisatory style was lost.
Furthermore, an ensemble-type orchestra was added as backup to the
band, further distancing the music from its typical format. A cassette fea-
turing the winners of the Stambolovo 1986 festival, Trakiya and Mladost
(BHMC 7265), credits Dimitŭr Trifonov and Todor Prashtakov as arrangers
and directors. Even the album S Orkestŭr Na Kanarite Na Svatba (With the
Canaries at a Wedding, BHA 1111, 1982), which is supposed to simulate a
real wedding, has orchestral accompaniment. Musicians greatly resented
this obrabotka, claiming it detracted from the music and merely filled the
pockets of arrangers with money.27 One musician complained, “We got
paid very little for our record. But the composer who did the obrabotka
got paid much more. He only added a few violins and contrabass and got
his name on the record as ‘arranged by. . . .’” Neither wedding musicians
nor their fans accepted these Balkanton releases as representative.
Audio examples 7.1 and 7.2 contrast the same piece, “Kŭrdzhaliisko
Horo,” played by Trakiya at a wedding and arranged and sanitized for a
Balkanton album. Mark Levy and I recorded audio example 7.1 in 1980 at
a wedding in the village of Iskra (described earlier). There is a wild, edgy,
improvisatory quality, and the energy is visceral. On the other hand, audio
example 7.2 from Balkanton BHA 11330 (1983) adds a string orchestra
arranged and led by Dimitŭr Trifonov. Musical phrases are squared off and
harmonic chord progressions typical of the socialist era are introduced.
Instead of improvisations, there are composed solo phrases with little en-
ergy; changes in timbre have also been eliminated; finally, electric bass
and guitar and drum set have been replaced by acoustic bass and guitar
and no drums.
Like Balkanton, the other official media channels of radio and television
permitted only censored versions of wedding music to air. The few times
in the late 1980s when famous wedding bands were allowed to play on

television without backup orchestras, the viewer turnout was enormous.
Fans were glued to their home television set, or they crowded around tele-
visions in hotel lobbies. One such event was the 1987 televised perfor-
mance of a concert of the winners of the 1986 Stambolovo festival (more
discussion on this in a moment). Video examples 7.3 and 7.4 show Trakiya
performing a pravo horo and a rŭchenitsa in this show. I viewed this video
with Ivo, Neshko, Yuri, and Salif in 2005 and asked them if someone in the
government spoke to them beforehand about omitting kyucheks. Ivo
answered: “They didn’t need to speak to me. I had just been in jail for play-
ing kyucheks. A few years earlier they made me change my name. It was
absurd to think of playing kyucheks. They would have hung me.”
This brings up the issue of self-censorship. Wedding musicians devel-
oped the ability to sense when they could push the limits of the state
and when they had to toe the party line. This may help to explain the
apparent puzzle of why musicians recorded these censored versions.
Economics, not lofty moral principles, was the main motive guiding
musicians. They reasoned that official versions would increase circula-
tion of their music and even enhance the value of their live perfor-
mances. In addition, they did not want to incite the government against
them by refusing to cooperate.
James Scott’s work on “everyday protest” (1985, 1990) suggests that an-
alyzing resistance always requires analyzing power and its effects on the
weak. The hegemony of the state depends not on brainwashing but on
how public discourse triggers shifts in consciousness. Both wedding mu-
sicians and the state may have perceived “the advantage of avoiding open
confrontation” (Sivaramakrishnan 2005:350). In addition, we can’t as-
sume that musicians had full agency; nor can we assume the state had
total hegemony: “On the contrary, at times social structures, roles, sta-
tuses . . . modify agency and its consequences. . . . Actors may engage in
everyday acts of resistance or desist from them under structural pres-
sures” (351). Wedding musicians, then, strategically alternated between
accommodation and resistance to the state.
In addition, the state itself was not monolithic, and indeed “different
levels of the state may work at cross-purposes” (2005:351). Aretxaga
reminds us that we need to “rethink the notion of the state in a new light
as a contradictory ensemble of practices and processes” (2003:395). The
state was ambivalent about a phenomenon that was fast becoming a mass
movement. Policy was contradictory, and at times the state even cashed in
on the popularity of wedding music, again illustrating Herzfeld’s point
about cultural intimacy and Verdery’s point about gray markets.
In the early 1970s, when wedding music was first becoming popular,
fans would record at events and then copy the tapes for friends or sell
them at exorbitant rates on the black market; young people prized these
unofficial recordings. In the 1980s, in an effort to undercut the black mar-
ket in wedding tapes, the state established studios for selling wedding
music and other cassette recordings made outside the auspices of Balkan-
ton. At a stereo zapis studio (literally a tape recording studio),28 one found

for sale a selection of rock, funk, disco, “authentic” folk music, and wed-
ding music. The largest seller was wedding music. The studios were, in
effect, sites where popular taste was paramount and where official prohi-
bitions were relaxed. When kyucheks were banned from records, they
could still be found at studios; in fact, they were the best sellers among
Roma. Similarly, when zurna music was banned it could still be found at
studios. Although a printed notice posted in one studio read, “This studio
is for copying tapes of Bulgarian music and music from other socialist
countries,” I regularly saw tapes of groups from Italy, Greece, and Serbia.
With the studios, the state simultaneously maintained its official folk
music policy and also catered to public taste. More important, the studios
were a means for the government to gain access to the inflated market of
wedding music. The price of a studio cassette was high, 15 leva for a sixty-
minute tape. Although this was equivalent to more than a day’s wages, the
demand was very high. Fans were willing to pay dearly for the music they
loved but couldn’t find on official Balkanton recordings, which cost a frac-
tion of the studio tapes (about 2.5 leva).29
Given the popularity of wedding music, it was perhaps inevitable that
the state would take a more direct hand. The form of state participation,
the Sambolovo festivals (1985–1988), involved both promotion and regu-
lation. Within a few years, scholars began lauding the talent of wedding
musicians while policies dictated what could be played at the festival.
Note the panoramic view of the huge 1988 Stambolovo audience, which
appeared on the cover of the scholarly journal Bŭlgarska Muzika (photo-
graph 7.9). See text supplement 7.2 for a discussion of this festival.
In sum, wedding music erupted as a mass youth phenomenon that even-
tually caused a fundamental shift in the official rhetoric of the state during
late socialism; this resonated with cracks in socialist doctrine in other
arenas of life, such as the emergence of limited private enterprise. The
significant role of Roma in contesting the state via wedding music cannot
be ignored, but we must also remember that non-Roma were jailed as well
for playing wedding music. The next chapter continues my analysis of the
role of the state, moving into the postsocialist period where the capitalist
market dominates.

8
ab
Cultural Politics of Postsocialist Markets
and Festivals
T urning to the postsocialist period, this chapter examines the chal-

lenges Bulgarian wedding musicians and other Balkan Romani per-
formers face vis-à-vis capitalism, changing state policies, and polarizing
world politics. As the state becomes weaker, private forces take its place.
For Roma, professional music has always been about business, but now it
is about big business, often with structural exclusions. How do Romani
musicians negotiate this complicated terrain between state and commer-
cial forces? Music may have touristic value as UNESCO-sponsored “world
heritage,” or musicians may be ignored by states. On the other hand,
music idol contests and Romani music festivals have emerged as sites of
negotiating national and transnational identity politics.
Bulgarian Wedding Music in the 1990 s
Ironically, in the 1990s wedding music garnered effusive praise interna-

tionally while at home in Bulgaria it faced severe economic woes. It was
“discovered” in the west by British impresario Joe Boyd of Hannibal
records, who visited Bulgaria in 1987. Asking his guide, the music pro-
ducer Rumyana Tsintsarska, to show him some contemporary folk music,
he recalled: “I was taken to hear the Plovdiv Folk Jazz Band,1 which I
found dull, except for a brilliant guest solo by Papazov. I took Ivo aside
and asked him if he had his own band. Ivo answered, ‘Of course!’ and in-
vited me to a Romani wedding.” Boyd was so taken with Trakiya that he
planned an album and a tour.
The tour fell through when the government withheld the visas. Boyd
arranged a tour of the village music group Balkana instead, and the gov-
ernment sent Trakiya to Moscow to perform. Boyd recalled, “The visas for
Trakiya were never denied, but they weren’t granted. The officers kept
asking for more documents.” Papazov bitterly remembers:
149
My career in music changed in 1987 when Joe Boyd came to Bulgaria.
He had heard of us. He was Pink Floyd’s first manager. He went
around with us for a whole week to Romani weddings. He listened to
our music. Then he proposed a tour to us. The government hassled
him for a year with contract problems but he made a CD of us in Bul-
garia. He was ready, the contract was sent to us, but the government
wouldn’t let us go, and they dragged it out for a year. It was a huge
mockery in 1988 when I was supposed to leave the country. I had to
go from bureau to bureau, to Todor Zhivkov’s adviser, and in Stara
Zagora to the administrative division for minorities. Three times a
day I had to go for interviews. I said, “I want to travel, I don’t want to
emigrate.” They said “You are this, you are that—a Turkish Rom—
America will easily assimilate you.” Joe Boyd had the tickets and
everything ready but at the last moment they wouldn’t let us go. Actu-
ally I had the right to apply for political asylum because of mistreat-
ment. If it hadn’t been for my two kids I might have thought about
emigrating. I can live anywhere. . . . How many years did those guys
from Internal Security follow me around? Now they all emigrated to
America and I still live in Bulgaria!
It is clear that the state did not want Roma representing Bulgaria abroad.
Indeed, many Bulgarians agreed with the sentiment that “we can’t have a
Gypsy or a Turk represent us internationally.”2 Most Bulgarians felt more
comfortable with the international success of groups like Balkana and Le
Mystère des Voix Bulgares, which played clearly sanctioned “folk music,”
even if it was highly arranged (Buchanan 1996:220–226).
Boyd persisted in his advocacy of Trakiya; as described earlier, he
released the album Orpheus Ascending (HNCD 1346, 1989) to interna-
tional acclaim (see publicity shot, photograph 8.1). But he was already
planning the next album. In 1988, in a taxi in New York City on the way
to hear Balkana, Boyd and I discussed whether including kyucheks on a
second album, Balkanology, would hurt Trakiya’s chances of receiving
visas. I stressed how important kyucheks were in its repertoire, and to
omit them would misrepresent its artistry. Boyd excluded Romani and
Turkish music on Orpheus Ascending because he was guided by state rep-
resentatives; he was reluctant to alienate the socialist authorities who
were his co-producers. His liner notes are vague about ethnicity: “Bul-
garia is sensitive to questions of racial or national origin, so accurate in-
formation is hard to come by, but Ivo and his group seem to be at least
partly gypsy and much of their music is related as much to gypsy styles as
to Bulgarian traditions” (1989).
Boyd decided to include Romani, Greek, Romanian, Macedonian, and
Turkish repertoire on Balkanology, and he asked me to write the liner
notes. They emphasize the Romani/Turkish ethnic dimension of Trakiya’s
music, but Boyd refused to label any tracks kyucheks and he did not want
me to write about politics. Despite my protests, Boyd insisted on employ-
ing euphemistic names that the Bulgarian state had used in the 1970s, e.g.

Mladeshki Tants (young person’s dance) for kyuchek. In fact, the marketing
for Boyd’s three American tours of Trakiya in 1989, 1990, and 1992 did not
emphasize a Romani connection. Remember, this occurred before the
craze for “Gypsy music” was initiated by the documentary film Latcho
Drom (see Chapter 13); however, it was precisely at the time when “world
music” became a viable marketing category, and in fact Joe Boyd was one
of the key people in Britain who coined the term. Balkanology appeared in
1991 (HNCD 1363) to rave international reviews.
Trakiya members were successful in receiving their visas in autumn
1989, right before the fall of the Berlin Wall, November 9. The musicians
heard about the fall of Bulgarian communism on November 10 from
abroad, where they were awash in media adoration. Ivo recalled: “We
started our tour in September 1989 in London at Ronnie’s Club, where the
Beatles started. The first shock was the opulence of London and the sec-
ond was New York—because at the time there was nothing in the stores in
Bulgaria.” In September 1989 Bulgarian Radio broadcast an interview
with Papazov from the United States in which he described the outpouring
of praise that wedding music was receiving (Buchanan 1991:554). Ironi-
cally, wedding musicians received the recognition they craved from the
West, not from their own government. From 1989 to 1994, Trakiya toured
frequently in Europe and also traveled to America and Australia. The mu-
sicians made their mark on the international folk and jazz scenes; on the
one hand, this increased their stature in Bulgaria, but on the other hand it
made them less available for local weddings and concerts.
The transition to capitalism in postsocialist Bulgaria affected wedding
musicians in contradictory ways: there were new freedoms, but the
economy suffered greatly. Socialist restrictions related to purity were to-
tally removed, allowing performance of kyucheks along with jazz, rock,
and foreign musics. In spring 1990, for example, I attended the first post-
socialist state-sponsored concert of Romani music, held in a Sofia theater
(photograph 8.2). The audience was 99 percent Roma, and the excitement
was palpable. Organized by Anzhelo Malikov, the musicians included
Sofia-based Romani wedding musicians and dancers, and the master of
ceremonies spoke both Romani and Bulgarian. The program, however,
featured orientalized versions of kyuchek with half-naked women in syn-
chronized choreographies, unlike what happened at Romani events, and
instead appropriating Turkish belly dance (see Chapter 6). The Bulgarian
public, meanwhile, enthusiastically embraced Serbian, Macedonian, and
Greek musics and pop/folk fusions, which became the rage in restaurants
and taverns. Wedding bands broadened their repertoire to include these
musics. The opening of the borders permitted musicians to travel, and the
best wedding bands went to Yugoslavia, Greece, and Western Europe.
Unfortunately, the euphoria of transition was short-lived and the reality
of unfettered capitalism soon soured the populace. Economic crisis
gripped Bulgaria in the early 1990s, negatively affecting work, health care,
education, and sociability (Engelbrecht 1993). State enterprises closed and
private companies struggled to operate, but they were poorly managed and
Cultural Politics of Postsocialist Markets and Festivals 151

heavily taxed. There were shortages of goods; thousands of people tried to
emigrate. Corruption flourished in everyday transactions and also in the
process of legal restitution of land and property. A tiny class of “new rich”
emerged, flaunting their cars and jewelry, while the middle class sank
closer to poverty and the rate of unemployment rose. Discrimination
against Roma increased, violent crimes against them rose, and their unem-
ployment reached 90 percent.
At first, wedding musicians embraced capitalism boldly, as most of them
had experience in the free-market realm and had never relied on the state
for security. Many bands released cassettes on newly formed private labels
(none run by musicians) such as Payner, Lazarov, and Unison Stars (Pey-
cheva and Dimov 1994). Folk ensemble musicians, on the other hand, suf-
fered as bread-and-butter government support for the arts diminished
(Buchanan 2006:426-478). Stereo zapis studios closed and Balkanton cur-
tailed most of its production. Everyone, including state ensembles, looked
for private sponsorship, either local or foreign.
The Stambolovo festivals of wedding music in 1990, 1992, 1994, and
1996 were financed mostly by private sponsors. Attendance dwindled
because people had less disposable cash.3 Wedding musicians, however,
remember Stambolovo with fondness, and they regret its cessation. When
a journalist asked Ivo Papazov in 2004 what bothered him most about the
current state of wedding music, he answered: “That there are no longer
gatherings of folk bands in Stambolovo. . . . Although abroad this is the
most venerated festival, they can’t find the finances. New talent was dis-
covered there. People felt at ease there. Even now foreigners ask me about
it” (Filipova 2004:17). Papazov stressed that it was a place for wedding
musicians to socialize. The sponsors treated musicians well, not only of-
fering prizes but hosting them with food and drink. In 1996 Ivo, cognizant
of the financial woes of the festival, refused to accept any money for his
performance. Despite the introduction of democracy, only Bulgarian
music was permitted at the festival, illustrating the lasting power of
socialist categories. Nevertheless, Ivo premiered his kyuchek composition
“Celeste”4 at the 1996 festival. Although the jury frowned on it, Ivo’s fans
went wild.
In April 1994, Payner sponsored a twelve-hour “megaconcert” in Sofia
with thirty soloists and nine bands, but it was very poorly attended. In
September 1994 Payner sponsored the first Trakiya Folk, a juried festival
of wedding music with huge prizes. Payner invited bands to compete in
two mutually exclusive categories: Thracian and Balkan, the latter
meaning Romani, Turkish, Greek, and Serbian (Buchanan 2007:235).
Payner produced cassettes and videotapes of the festival (video examples
7.2 and 7.9), and attendance was good. But the populace was too worried
about their declining incomes to be active wedding music fans. In addi-
tion, new musical genres such as chalga (pop/folk) and new events such
as the Stara Zagora Romfest were competing for listeners. In fact, in
1999 Payner changed the direction of Trakiya Folk toward chalga (see
Chapter 9).5

Two magazines, Folk Panair (Folk Gathering) and Folk Kalendar, in
the 1990s reported on folk music, wedding music, and Romani music.
Contributors were well-respected academics and journalists; adver-
tising and subscriptions supported the publications, but they faltered
and folded. New radio programs debuted, including Radio Signal Plyus
and Radio Veselina (founded by Veselina Kanaleva), offering a mixture
of Bulgarian village music; wedding music; and Romani, Greek, Ser-
bian, Turkish, and Macedonian music, funded by advertising and lis-
teners’ greetings and requests. These programs still exist today. A few
television shows attempted to present wedding music in the 1990s, but
they failed.
In the 1990s, weddings were a far cry from the three-day events of the
1980s. The economic crisis meant that Bulgarians could no longer afford
lavish affairs with live music. True, there was freedom of repertoire, but
few felt economically secure. A typical wedding lasted one afternoon or
one evening, often with a DJ rather than live music. Weddings were bar-
gained by the hour rather than the day. Moreover, rarely were musicians
hired for transporting the bride from her home to the groom’s home,
which used to be an important musical moment; if instrumentalists were
hired for this ritual, they tended to be lower-quality local musicians. All of
this is still true today.
In 1994, Ivo remarked: “Now the businessmen rule Bulgaria, then
[before 1989] the communists ruled. . . . Now there is no work for musi-
cians in Bulgaria” (Dimitrova, Panayotova, and Dimov 1994:23). When a
journalist asked him, “Has the great boom of wedding music passed?” he
answered:
Of course, such are the times. In the old days when I would play,
twenty to thirty sheep would be slaughtered, 1,000–1,500 people in-
vited under three to four huge tents. . . . Another 1,000 came to listen.
But today times are such that a person can’t relax. To make a wedding
you need at least 50,000–60,000 leva, plus money for music. Look at
the times—gasoline is 15–20 leva [per liter]. Sofia residents come and
beg me [to play for weddings] but I can’t take the soul of a person—
tomorrow he won’t have anything to eat. Categorically, I refuse them
[Dimitrova et al. 1994:26].
In the 1990s, the families who put on relatively large weddings tended
to be Roma and Turks, not because they were wealthier but because for
these groups live music and dance were a necessary part of celebratory
life (see Chapter 5). In 1994, an industrious Rom in the city of Septemvri
told me: “We find a way to earn money, we manage. Bulgarians sit and
complain. We still have big weddings, circumcisions, soldier send-off cel-
ebrations. Bulgarians don’t do this any more—they invite just a few
friends and family and use a disc jockey—that’s it. Only Roma are having
big events. We work and spend. Bulgarians are stingy. We spend money
on our families.”

In 1994 I attended a Turkish Romani wedding in the village of Tsar-
atsovo, Plovdiv district, as a guest of Trakiya, which at that time included
Yuri Yunakov’s son Ahmed on saxophone (at that time, Yuri was in the
United States). There were about 200 guests and the repertoire included
Bulgarian, Romani, and Turkish music; as dawn approached, kyucheks
dominated (video examples 7.5, 7.6, and 7.7). Trakiya played from about
9:00 P.M. to 3:00 A.M. and, in addition to Maria Karafezieva, who sang
Bulgarian songs, a Turkish singer was hired. Afterward the assembled
teenagers set up a disco and danced to rock music until dawn. Interest-
ingly, their rock dancing incorporated stylistic moves from kyucheks.
In terms of compensation, Trakiya bargained for 8,000 leva (1,000 leva
per hour) plus 8,000 leva in tips. Thus each performer received about $35,
at a time when the average monthly salary for a factory worker was $80.
Trakiya was therefore well paid; Ivo claimed he received 40,000 leva ($750)
for one concert (Dimitrova et al., 1994:22). Other wedding musicians
earned less and tried to supplement wedding work with additional jobs.
Bulgarian singer Dinka Ruseva from Radnevo, Stara Zagora district, for
example, explained that a well-paid five-to-six-hour wedding would gen-
erate 6,000 leva plus 5,000 leva in tips, which came to $24 a person. Dinka
also had a job singing in concerts for the House of Culture in Radnevo that
paid $35 a month. Other wedding musicians had to take nonmusical work:
they opened stores for car parts (Petŭr Ralchev), became administrators
(Yuri Yunakov’s brother was briefly a deputy major of Haskovo), or worked
in sales.
In 1994 I attended the blessing of a new Romani house in a Sofia neigh-
borhood (Hristo Botev district) as a guest of violinist Georgi Yanev; it was
a one-evening event (see video excerpt 6.1 for solo kyuchek dancing at this
event). Yanev’s band Orfei includes both Romani and Bulgarian members;
at this event the Romani members included Orlin Pamukov on clarinet
and Paicho on drums, and the Bulgarian members included Yanev and his
wife Pepa, accordionist Petŭr Ralchev, and guitarist Nikolai Georgiev.
Orfei is well liked among Roma, and their kyuchek repertoire is quite var-
ied. Several famous ensemble musicians came to hear the music, but the
crowd was significantly smaller than at events in the 1980s.
Yanev described Orfei’s typical weekly summer schedule in 1994:
Thursday, drive from Plovdiv to Sofia (two hours each way) to play for six
hours; Friday, drive to Vratsa (five hours each way) to play for seven hours;
Saturday, drive to Stara Zagora (ninety minutes each way) to play for six
hours; Sunday, drive to Dimitrovgrad (ninety minutes each way) to play
for seven hours; Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, no work. Note that in
comparison to the 1980, musicians played for shorter gigs, drove more,
and suffered from more unengaged days. Because weddings were only one
evening long, musicians had to play more weddings per week to make a
decent income. This was more stressful and involved more driving and
higher expenses. Even famous musicians could no longer earn enough to
support their families. Many secured other jobs; Yanev struggled to create
his own music studio. Yet, comparatively speaking, wedding musicians

were lucky because at least they had some work, clustered in the summer
months. Many Bulgarians and most Roma had no work at all.
A new genre of personal experience narrative arose in the 1990s among
wedding musicians, illustrating the insecure times: the crime story. Georgi
Janev and Orfei members, for example, were driving home from a large
Romani wedding. A car passed them, swerving close to make them stop.
Men emerged with guns and stockings over their heads and took all of
their money. Dinka Ruseva’s musician husband had a similar experience.
He bluffed the thieves by pretending he was reaching for a gun; another
time Dinka’s son pretended his clarinet was a gun. Obviously, thieves were
targeting wedding musicians. Also in the 1990s, Ivo Papazov and his
family were robbed at gunpoint inside their own home in the village of
Bogomilovo, Stara Zagora region. This happened in spite of his numerous
guard dogs and watchmen. Other singers were tied up by mafia bosses and
forced to perform in the back room of clubs. Indeed, the mafia emerged as
a force in Bulgaria in the 1990s and had its finger in music, especially
chalga (see Chapter 9).
An important concern of musicians during postsocialism became copy-
right and exploitation by record companies. For example, at the 1994 Tra-
kiya Folk festival Payner required participating bands to be taped for a
cassette release. Orfei refused to sign because they wanted to produce
their own cassette. According to Petŭr Ralchev, “weaker groups were glad
for the exposure.” Producing an independent cassette required Orfei to
overcome huge obstacles in financing, marketing, and distribution. Orfei’s
leader, Yanev, struggled to set up his own high-quality recording studio in
Plovdiv and was eventually successful. For years he produced his band’s
recordings, but in 2006 Orfei signed up with Payner.
Musicians were especially worried about the widespread practice of pi-
rating. Theoretically, a company like Payner would pay a royalty fee for
every album it sold; musicians, however, complained that companies de-
liberately underreported the number. Petŭr Ralchev asserted: “The com-
panies lie and say they sold 50,000 when they really sold 300,000. It’s a big
business.” In addition, in the 1990s every city boasted a huge open-air
market for pirated copies of albums, and Bulgaria was cited as one of the
worst-offending countries (Kurkela 1997; Buchanan 2007:245). Recently,
the situation has improved in terms of copyright laws; however, many
problems remain.
Bulgarian Wedding Music in the

Twenty-First Century
The current situation is challenging for wedding musicians, and some are
nostalgic for the socialist period. According to Ivo Papazov, “I had more
work back then. People were happier and had a lot of money. I don’t think
anything good has come of the new democratic Bulgaria. Now it is a place

of corruption and everyone is fighting to get into the ruling party” (Cart-
wright 2006c:38). Nostalgia, however, should be seen not only as longing
for socialism but also as a critique of capitalism and a desire for order and
security.6 It turns out that the free market is not so “free” after all; what-
ever sells receives the most media playtime, and in 2000 pop/folk was the
best selling genre, not wedding music (see Chapter 9).
Moreover, wedding musicians now configure themselves as cham-
pions of Bulgarian folk music (of course, they mean the Bulgarian
genres of wedding music). In some senses they are correct, if we con-
ceive of folk music outside the narrow authentic socialist box, and if we
see wedding music as opposed to chalga. When I asked Papazov what is
Bulgarian about his style, he answered, “The foundation of wedding
music is Bulgarian.” He remarked that today, when few people are inter-
ested in Bulgarian music, “we wedding musicians play it. Ironically, I
have preserved Bulgarian music. . . . We played pure Bulgarian folklore
in spite of the fact that is wasn’t really pure, but it was Bulgarian and it
was beautifully embellished!”
Papazov complained that ethnic Bulgarian patrons request mostly
kyucheks: “Recently I’ve played for several Bulgarian weddings, on pur-
pose . . . they pay well. I opened with a Bulgarian horo and from then on
it was all kyucheks” (Dimitrova et al. 1994:26). He and Yunakov have both
proclaimed on television that Bulgarians should be ashamed that Roma
are preserving their heritage: “Now we Roma are touring around playing
Bulgarian music, while in Bulgaria, Bulgarians are playing Romani
music.” Here Ivo and Yuri are alluding to the popularity of chalga among
Bulgarians, and the fact that wedding singers are collaborating with
Romani bands. For example, ethnic Bulgarian vocalist Radostina Kŭneva
appears on albums with the Romani band Kristal.
Wedding musicians blame chalga for the decline in popularity of wed-
ding music; they assert that chalga is more pop than folk and that it is
technically inferior to wedding music. Ivo exclaimed proudly: “Our music
is not pop!” But aside from stylistic differences between wedding music
and chalga, their respective positions vis-à-vis the state and capitalism
need to be examined. In the socialist period the competitors of wedding
music were the ensembles that were the purveyors of “authentic folk
music”; the latter were supported by the state but, for the most part,
rejected by the populace. Wedding music received some of its cachet by
being countercultural, that is, oppositional to the state. More specifically,
it represented capitalism in the midst of socialism. Now the competitor to
wedding music is chalga, supported by unbridled capitalism. The state has
withered and wedding music has lost its antistate oppositional posi-
tioning; it is emerging, however, as a force of nationalism (more on this
later).
Today, however, wedding musicians are not totally negative. Although
Ivo claimed that “it is sad to me that no one pays attention to wedding
music,” he also pointed out that wedding music still has many fans in
Bulgaria:

In 2004 in Plovdiv we celebrated the [thirtieth] anniversary of Nikola
Iliev and the Konushenska band. There was an audience of 6,000
people. . . . Wedding bands continue to exist and to have their fans. . . .
Twenty-eight bands appeared. . . . The audience booed the lip-synched
performers but the viewers stood up when we played live. That made
Professor Radev [classical clarinetist] repeat with teary eyes: “We won’t
perish, we won’t perish. If, from time to time, we, the elite of wedding
music don’t gather to play some kind of concert, the young generation
will forget us. And for the rich music companies, it is unpleasant for us
to appear in public because the people will realize they are being
cheated with these lip-synchings” [Filipova 2004:17].
Similarly, in 2005 hundreds of wedding musicians attended the commem-

oration of Bulgarian wedding singer Dinka Ruseva’s thirty-year career.
Wedding musicians have had to make compromises in the postsocial-
ist period; one is strategically incorporating chalga singers, and another
involves forgiving (but not forgetting) past detractors. Papazov recalled
the past criticism of Nikolai Kaufman but admitted, “Now I’m going to
play for his gala eightieth birthday. We will play some pieces he wrote
for Maria and me!” In 1994 he elaborated: “I make compromises. . . .
The other night . . . we were at Manol Todorov’s sixtieth birthday cele-
bration. Isn’t that a gesture? For when one makes gestures, one makes
money. After all, I have two children” (Dimitrova et al. 1994:26). Petŭ r
Ralchev bitterly criticized a televised birthday interview with Manol
Todorov where the latter claimed he was glad he had the opportunity to
help establish a place for wedding music. To the contrary, Ralchev
remembered all the times Todorov called wedding music kitsch and
impure.
Surveying the landscape of wedding music in 2010, immediately one
notices that many of the hundreds of groups that existed in the late
1980s and early 1990s have simply disbanded, but several new ones
have emerged. A solid group of bands have survived, including Vievska
Grupa, Trŭ stenik, Kanarite, Orfei, Konushenska Grupa, and Bre-
stovica.7 Vievska Grupa owes its popularity to its Rhodope regional
focus and its backing by Payner. Yet the Vievska Grupa has also incor-
porated chalga and Macedonian and Serbian music to cater to current
tastes.
The success of the Konushenska Grupa derives from its legendary clar-
inetist, Nikola Iliev, one of the founders of Bulgarian wedding style. Excel-
ling in the Bulgarian repertoire and not emphasizing Romani and jazz
elements, he has a regular following in the Plovdiv region, especially
among the older generation. Orfei, with mastery of both Romani and Bul-
garian repertoires, also has a steady output of albums and constant wed-
ding work. In 1994 Orfei’s singer Pepa Yaneva told me she would never
sing chalga, but a year later Orfei albums included chalga; obviously, the
market required it, and in 2006 Orfei signed with Payner, a company as-
sociated with chalga. In fact, Georgi and Pepa Yanev groomed their

daughter Tsvetelina to be a chalga star; in 2009 she made a successful
debut as the youngest singer with the Payner company.
Under the direction of ethnic Bulgarian Atanas Stoev, who arranges
much of their material, Kanarite has emerged as perhaps the most prolific
wedding band, producing an album every year with Payner. Their arrange-
ments are sweet-sounding and pleasant, and their instrumental improvi-
sations are short and do not veer toward jazz. Their sound is thus tamer
and less aggressive than other bands, and this has struck a chord with a
wide fan base; their 2003 album proclaims that it is “the tenth album in a
row with typical Kanarite sound—composed music and texts distin-
guished by tradition and new authorship.” Furthermore, they target a Bul-
garian audience rather than Roma and Turks. Although they established
their reputation in the 1980s with well-known Romani clarinetists Nesho
Neshev and Delcho Mitev, now they underplay Romani associations and
emphasize their Bulgarian affiliations.8
The trajectory of the Kanarite repertoire of the last fifteen years shows
that they have moved away from kyucheks and chalga toward Bulgarian
folk music. The Kanarite '98 album, for example, contains several 2/4 and
9/8 kyuchek songs. “Biznesmen” (Businessman) has a typical chalga text
(and Romani-style kaval solo): “I want to become a businessman, to drop
a million every day, to buy a villa and two cars. . . . Bars, taverns, modern
girlfriends.” By 2000, however, the band was releasing fewer kyucheks and
had veered away from texts about materialism, sex, and capitalism—
instead embracing texts about love, family, friends, and village life. As
early as 2000, they also cleverly converted chalga to something more eth-
nically Bulgarian and less Romani by inviting chalga singers to record
Bulgarian folk songs with them as guests. Stoev could accomplish this
because he is a good businessman; in addition, many chalga singers are
also folk singers who were pleased with the exposure.
The video Nie Bŭlgarite, Kanarite 25 Godini (We Bulgarians, the Ca-
naries, 25 years; 2000) illustrates this trend (video examples 8.1 and 8.2).
The show begins with the announcement, “On this album, the beauty of
Bulgaria has been collected.” Staged in the Plovdiv amphitheater (which
dates from Roman times), the video provides a visual spectacle that links
the band to antiquity (and also to high-placed officials who authorized use
of the site). Throughout the concert, the Smolyan Dance Ensemble,
dressed in folk costume, performs choreographies and comic skits of vil-
lage life. The dancers start the show with the propitious ritual of offering
bread and wine. These visuals emplace the band in the realm of village
and folklore.
The regular band is augmented by guest brass and string sections, but
the most important instrumental guest is Petko Radev, beloved by many
Bulgarians because, as a classical clarinetist with La Scala in Italy, he
championed Bulgarian folk music. Note that in addition to Kanarite’s
standard instruments, the gaida and kaval link the band to tradition. The
vocal guests on the video include eight chalga stars: Nelina, Gloria (video
example 8.29), Ekstra Nina, Toni Dacheva, Tsvetelina, Vesela, Desi Slava,

and Slavka Kalcheva (who started as a wedding singer but crossed over to
chalga), who all sing Thracian wedding songs. The crass sexuality of
chalga has been tamed; the outfits are subdued (gowns are cut low but
tasteful). In short, on this album Kanarite has assimilated chalga into
their more wholesome folk aesthetic.
The band Kanarite continued to develop its Bulgarian profile in the last
decade. Their standard formula includes songs (mostly sung in thirds) and
instrumentals in folk style (major keys predominate) with shorter impro-
visations, more Macedonian/Pirin songs in 7/8, more city songs, and fewer
and tamer kyucheks. Their 2001 album Ne Godini, A Dirya (Not Just Years,
But a Path), has one 9/8 kyuchek and one 2/4 kyuchek (a duet with Stoev
and chalga star Ivana); it also features the Eva Quartet in polyphonic a
cappella arrangements reminiscent of the socialist era. The 2003 album
Na Praznik i v Delnik (On Holiday and Weekday) has no 2/4 kyucheks and
only one 9/8 song, with no instrumental improvisation. The video visuals
feature a costumed folk ensemble in a village setting, and the singers wear
large Eastern Orthodox crosses on their necks.
The 2003–04 album S Ritŭma Na Vremeto (With the Rhythm of the
Times) epitomizes the band’s evocation of national pride, with emerging
themes of church, family, and patriotism. The religious theme surfaces in
the first piece, where the band is filmed playing in a monastery in front of
Byzantine icons. The title of the tune captures the theme: “Pravoslavno
Horo” (Eastern Orthodox dance). The song “Bŭlgarski Cheda” (Bulgarian
children) develops the themes of patriotism and family in a 7/8 Pirin
rhythm that evokes nostalgia by poignantly narrating the sacrifices of Bul-
garian soldiers and the suffering of the populace. Filmed in a church, with
band members in black clothing lighting candles in memory of Bulgarian
soldiers killed in Iraq, the somber atmosphere is interspersed with footage
of military training. This song links past sacrifices to contemporary Bul-
garian politics.10
Chalga singers (Emilia, Daniela, Gloria, and Ivana) are guests on this
video, and again they sing Bulgarian songs (all composed by Stoev). Iva-
na’s 7/8 Macedonian song, “Ah Lyubov, Lyubov,” (Oh love, love) narrates a
story about the pain of love that ends with separation and the birth of a
child.11 The accompanying visuals are close-ups of historical Bulgarian
paintings depicting peasant mothers holding and nursing children, and
Ivana relaxing with Stoev. Ivana’s chalga glitziness is thus assimilated into
the safe framework of the Bulgarian family and home.
These Kanarite albums position the band in opposition to the values of
chalga (money, alcohol, and sex), but they manage to recuperate the asso-
ciation of chalga with success, modernity, and technology. In recent per-
formances Atanas and his wife Nadya are featured together more
prominently (singing, and even touching), as a symbol of stable marriage.
On their 2005 video Traditsiya, Stil, Nastroeniye (Tradition, Style, and
Spirit), the opening song, “Nie Sme Kanarite” (We are the Canaries), in-
troduces them as successful and happy, content with their families and
friends; it implores the audience to “forget your woes.” The band has come

to stand for the Eastern Orthodox religion, family values, optimism, and
the nation (i.e., the Slavic majority). The band’s 2009 album Muzika s
Lyubov (Music with Love) featured neither kyucheks nor chalga guests; in
general, they have distanced themselves from Romani and Turkish mu-
sical motifs and cultural symbols. I do not think this is accidental. Espe-
cially at a time when anti-Romani and anti-Muslim sentiments are being
openly expressed by various political parties, Kanarite have tapped into a
nationalistic musical vein.
The musical trajectory of Trakiya, on the other hand, is starkly different
from Kanarite. Trakiya is perhaps the least recorded band, which is not
only surprising but also quite a loss, considering its quality and fame.
After Balkanology was released in 1991, the band did not make another
recording until 2003. Papazov claims he was waiting and hoping that
Boyd would record another project, but he never did (Cartwright 2006c:37).
Perhaps Papazov was also suspicious of the reputations of the new Bulgar-
ian companies, some of which allegedly had mafia ties. As mentioned ear-
lier, in the 1990s Trakiya found most of its work abroad. Their older guitar
and bass players were replaced by keyboardist Vasil Denev, adding the
possibility of varied textures. Some Trakiya members developed their own
paths; for example, Ivo collaborated with Hungarian Romani cimbalomist
Kalman Balogh on a pan-Romani project, accordionist Neshko Neshev
released an album with his own band, Yuri Yunakov emigrated to New
York in 1994 and formed his own wedding band (see Chapter 11), and
kaval player Matyo Dobrev often joined the band. For the most part, how-
ever, in Bulgaria Trakiya was ignored by the media.
All this changed in 2003 with the release of Fairground/Panair (Kuker
Music KM/R 07), produced in Bulgaria but distributed in Germany. The
album is a tour-de-force of Papazov’s newer style, which is more arranged,
more polished, more textured, more technically ambitious, and more var-
ied than his music of the 1990s. Because Fairground was made for West-
ern audiences, it features concertized versions of wedding compositions
that are not danceable. Added to Trakiya’s regular line-up are Bulgarian
Turkish musician Ateshhan Yuseinov on guitar, Stoyan Yankulov on tupan
and percussion, jazz pianist Vasil Parmakov, and two bass players. The
repertoire includes the standard Bulgarian slow songs and dance songs,
beautifully performed by Maria Karafezieva; and instrumental horos,
rŭchenitsas, and kyucheks. The solo improvisations by Ivo and Neshko
are longer, wilder, and much more inflected with a jazz sensibility than
earlier recordings. This album is clearly intended to present Trakiya to
Western jazz audiences.
The album’s visuals solidly evoke Bulgarian folklore by displaying band
members in folk clothing with folk motifs (men in red vests), Karafezieva
in a Stara Zagora costume (which she rarely wears in a live performance),
and six dancers in full village costume. I believe this image reflects the
general repositioning of wedding music during postsocialism as closer to
folk, in opposition to chalga. It also reflects Papazov’s genuine attachment
to folklore. Although the visuals eschew anything Romani or Muslim, the

repertoire includes a Turkish slow melody and three kyucheks, one of
which is titled “Gypsy Heart.”
The album received triumphant reviews and in 2005 Papazov won the
BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) Radio 3 audience award in the
category of World Music. Ivo was especially pleased because he was com-
peting with international stars and because this award is determined by
the BBC public, composed of 150 million listeners, not by a jury: “Other
prizes are decided by two or three people . . . but my prize depended on the
entire nation—on the voice of the audience, whether it is Bulgarian or
English. For me that is a real prize!” In an emotional ceremony, Joe Boyd
delivered the statue to his old friend. According to Boyd, although the BBC
did not let Trakiya perform at the actual ceremony Papazov sneaked his
instrument on stage and “brought down the house with a clarinet solo.”
As a result of the BBC award, Trakiya received dozens of invitations to
perform around the world, and the musicians captured the limelight once
again. Trakiya now has a busy European touring schedule, and magazine
articles have appeared about Ivo with titles such as “The King Returns”
(Cartwright 2006c). American audiences warmly received members of
Trakiya during their 2003 and 2005 reunion tours with Yuri Yunakov, and
Traditional Crossroads produced a reunion album, Together Again: Leg-
ends of Bulgarian Wedding Music (2005). This album, unlike Panair, con-
tains primarily dance music. In 2008 the British label World Village
released Dance of the Falcon, featuring Ivo accompanied by several jazz
and classical musicians.
What is perhaps most striking about the last few years is the official at-
tention and adoration Ivo is finally receiving in Bulgaria. Special concerts
have been organized for Trakiya in Sofia; Ivo was made an honorary cit-
izen of Stara Zagora in fall 2005; and he now appears in the “Alley of the
Stars” in Sofia. In 2004 Trakiya played for NATO leaders and in 2005 they
played for a meeting of the presidents of Balkan nations. Ivo narrated that
this concert brought up unpleasant memories:
It was very prestigious but I couldn’t perform in front of a row of

officers guarding the room. To this day I am afraid of the police, of
guards. I remember in the old days in Kŭrdzhali the whole neighbor-
hood would clear out as soon as the police arrived. We were all scared.
Everyone would go inside and wait. The police would let their dogs
run and those dogs could kill you. My heart starts beating fast when I
see those uniforms. So at the meeting, I took Georgi Pŭrvanov [the
Bulgarian president] aside and asked him if he could dispense with
the officers. So he asked them to wait outside. The fear of communist
police is inside me—I can’t get rid of it.
Ivo cannot help but notice the irony of receiving all these government ac-
colades after years of being harassed followed by years of being ignored.
He emphatically stated: “Only in 2005 did I start playing for large audi-
ences again in Bulgaria. At one of these concerts, I told them bitterly,

‘Now? Now you give me these honors? Now—when I’m getting old? Why
not in my younger years when I was at the top of my fame?’” Similarly,
Yuri Yunakov answered a Chicago reporter’s question: “How do we feel
about the press attention? Where was the press in the 1980s and 1990s?
Not one Bulgarian paper wrote about us even though we were household
names. Where was the press then?”
Recently, there are indications that wedding music is making a signifi-
cant comeback; it is attracting larger audiences in Bulgaria and it is being
marketed as a nationalistic genre. Payner has signed several wedding bands
such as Kanarite and Orfei, and in March 2007 it launched a new twenty-
four-hour television cable channel, Planeta Folk; cable channels Folklore
TV (2006) and Tyankov TV (2007) also feature wedding music. According
to Payner, Planeta Folk features “traditional and modern folklore, films
about notable events in Bulgaria and historical and cultural achievements.”
It is aimed at “Bulgarian viewers at home and in Europe . . . who love Bul-
garia and want to learn more about their natal culture and traditions”
(http://planetafolk.tv). For example, to coincide with the holiday St.
George’s Day, on May 6, 2007, the channel sponsored an inaugural concert
in London featuring Kanarite and Ivana (the combination I analyzed ear-
lier), and a week later it sponsored a gala concert in Sofia with Kanarite,
Vievska Grupa, and Orfei, as well as folk dance ensembles. Payner now
regularly sponsors concerts at home and in the Bulgarian diaspora fea-
turing a combination of chalga and wedding performers.
A typical day on the Planeta Folk cable channel includes not only
Payner-sponsored wedding bands but also programs on the history and
folklore of various regions and a bit of Eastern Orthodox liturgical music.
Songs predominate in wedding music clips while instrumental improvisa-
tions are rather short and tame; again, it is locating wedding music in the
realm of folk, rather than chalga or Romani music. No instrumental
kyucheks are played, but songs in kyuchek rhythms are performed, e.g.,
chalga star Poli Paskova’s Bulgarian language song “Moiite Pesni” (My
songs). Unlike in chalga videos, Poli is dressed demurely and does not
dance; rather, a folk dance ensemble wearing stylized costumes does line
choreographies to kyuchek in an outdoor village setting. This staging plus
the text (which extols how her songs express wholesome emotions)
distance it from Roma and chalga.
The 7/8 Macedonian/Pirin rhythm is very common on Planeta Folk; this
rhythm has a nostalgic symbolism for many Bulgarians, referencing a
cross-border sentimental remembrance of family and folklore. Virtually all
wedding music is depicted with a folk dance ensemble in costume per-
forming choreographed dances, often staged outdoors in a village. These
visual cues squarely define wedding music as rural and folk. Recently
Payner has recruited many of its chalga stars into wedding band perfor-
mances; for example, Nelina issued an entire folkloren album (folklore
album) in 2008, including several of Nedyalka Keranova’s signature songs.
In wedding music clips chalga singers wear revealing but not overtly sexual
clothing and sway to the music rather than dancing in sexually explicit

ways, as they do in chalga videos. This illustrates the trend of assimilating
the allure of chalga into a wholesome folk image of wedding music, and
simultaneously accomplishes the ideological work of nationalism.
The creation of Planeta Folk by Payner, a company that had previously
promoted chalga almost exclusively, is a clear sign that wedding music
audiences are growing. The Bulgarian public is starting to become fatigued
by the superficial glitz and the artificial formulas of chalga. Simulta-
neously, wedding music is becoming an ideological symbol of patriotism
in a period where the definition of Bulgarian identity seems precarious.
Chalga is criticized as too Romani, too eastern, but simultaneously too
western, too much like Europop. Ironically, wedding music received the
very same criticism in the socialist period, but now it is hailed as quintes-
sential folk music. Nationalist parties such as Attack rail against chalga as
corrupting the historical core values of Bulgaria; they encourage patriotic
Bulgarians to support folk music, and for Payner, folk music means wed-
ding music. Thus the popularity of wedding music today, just as in socialist
times, is informed by a highly politicized environment where the meaning
of Bulgarian identity is debated. The genre remains vital but must be seen
in relationship to competing genres such as chalga and to developments in
Bulgaria regarding Romani music, such as festivals and contests (dis-
cussed below).
Stara Zagora Romfest
Since 1993 the Natsionalen Festival Za Romska Muzika, Pesni i Tantsi

(National Festival of Romani Music, Songs, and Dances, known as Rom-
fest) has been held almost annually in Stara Zagora, Thrace, with growing
crowds and growing media attention. Awards are given in several cate-
gories, and many musicians start their careers as a result of exposure at
this festival (Peycheva and Dimov 2005). Playing a strong role in Romani
identity politics, the Romfest can be compared with other European
Romani festivals that are run by Roma, such as the Khamoro festival in
the Czech Republic (www.khamoro.cz), the Amala Festival in Ukraine
(Helbig 2007, 2008), and Šutkafest in Macedonia (see below); it can also
be distinguished from the more numerous festivals and tours that are run
by non-Roma, such as the American Gypsy Caravan tour and the New
York Gypsy Festival (see Chapter 12).12
According to festival director Aleksandŭr Karcholov, the motivation was
“to preserve the authentic and develop the music written [composed] by
different Gypsy authors [composers], which has to represent the image of
Bulgaria and with this music to reach Europe” (N. Georgieva 2006:13). The
festival program asserts that the aims are “to retrieve, get acquainted with,
proliferate and enrich Bulgarian Romani music and song; to elevate [it] to
a higher level. . . .; to turn it into a ‘bridge’ for reviving the self-confidence
of the Romani community. . . .” (Georgieva 2006:14; Peycheva and Dimov
2005:18). Note that these aims echo the rhetoric of the socialist period,

namely themes of authenticity and the elevation of art. Ironically, during
socialism the state used this ideology to exclude Romani music from the
rubric authentic, but now Romani leaders are using the same ideology to
shape Romani music in official settings. These goals also resonate with the
emerging nationalist ideology of Roma to declare themselves a distinct and
legitimate nation (see Chapter 3).
Anzhelo Malikov, who was a composer, arranger, cimbalom player, and
graduate of the Sofia Academy, regularly served as president of the jury for
the festival and was one of the founders. Before his death in 2009, he
strongly defended purification of Romani music: “Foreign elements
should be cleansed from Gypsy music, including the texts. Let’s create one
style called Bulgarian Romani music” (Peycheva and Dimov 2005:18).
Aside from the problem of what his uniform style would sound like,
Malikov’s statement comes dangerously close to advocating the same sort
of official control that the socialist state imposed on Muslims.
What Malikov and the festival directorship mean by purification is re-
moving Turkish and Bulgarian elements from Romani music. Songs in
Turkish and Bulgarian, for example, are prohibited; only songs in
Romani can compete, despite the fact that many Bulgarian Roma speak
only Turkish or Bulgarian. Purification of dance is also attempted. M.
Angelov states: “it is not correct to say Romani dance is kyuchek, because
it is a Turkism, imported into the country. Kyuchek is a type of Turkish
dance. In Romani dance there is more lyricism . . . and temperament”
(Peycheva 1999a:248).13 When I interviewed him in 1994, Malikov em-
phatically explained to me that Ivo Papazov plays not Gypsy music but
Turkish music. Sometimes Malikov uses Thracian as a euphemism for
Turkish, as in this statement: “Take Ivo Papazov, he plays, let’s say Gypsy
or Turkish music but it all is in Thracian style. . . . But it should not be
that way, however, it is loved by the wider public. Wherever you go in the
rural areas Gypsy music is played in a Thracian manner” (Peycheva
1994a:17).
These leaders are trying to privilege a supposedly “unique” Romani
music style with no neighboring influences. Malikov thinks that only in
the Balkans does pure Gypsy music exist; everywhere else Roma merely
play regional musics: “I believe in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Greece, Gypsy
music is the best preserved, as it was. No matter that in the west people
think that Gypsy music is Hungarian or Russian. That music is Russian
and Hungarian played in a Gypsy manner. The real Gypsy music is in the
Balkans. There is no influence” from Bulgarian folk music (17). Here he
falls prey to ethnocentrism, thinking his brand of Romani music is more
pure than other brands. Festival leaders are vague as to what constitutes
pure Romani style, and when asked how they judge pure Romani music
(e.g., for prizes) they employ general terms such as lyricism and beauty
(N. Georgieva 2006).14 They seem to devalue the hybrid quality of Bulgar-
ian Romani music. In spite of this official stance, audience members and
Romani musicians in general value Turkish influences, Bulgarian influ-
ences, and the concepts of innovation and hybridity.

One important aim of the festival is to mainstream Romani culture
“into Bulgarian national culture” (Peycheva and Dimov 2005:18). In
speeches at the 2007 festival, for example, audience members were con-
stantly reminded that Romani culture is part of Bulgarian culture. The
2007 festival also included a performance of a fourteen-year-old Romani
boy singing a Bulgarian folk song with accordion accompaniment; he was
introduced with the statement that Roma such as Boris Karlov and Ibro
Lolov have expertly played Bulgarian music. This performance may have
made a political point, but the audience was not appreciative.
Integration of Bulgarian music may be an admirable goal if it leads to
acceptance of Roma, but unfortunately the festival is sometimes used by
Bulgarian politicians for their own agendas. Indeed, politicians have reg-
ularly appeared at the festival to offer approval and recruit votes. One
such agenda was Bulgarian accession to the European Union in 2007. An
important criterion of membership in the EU was treatment of Roma,
who were identified as a vulnerable group. The EU closely watched not
only Romani unemployment statistics but also the visibility of Romani
culture. In spite of the fact that Bulgarian government has only irregularly
supported Romfest (through the Ministry of Culture and the National Ad-
visor for Ethnic and Demographic Questions), it has become an ideal site
for politicians to publicly affirm their commitment to Roma. In 2004, for
example, Bulgarian President Georgi Pŭrvanov attended the festival and
delivered this message: “Now, when Bulgaria is more intensively tying
itself to Europe, we can proudly show that one of our strong points is
peace and understanding between ethnic groups. Especially important
here is the role of art. It doesn’t know borders and restrictions” (Peycheva
and Dimov 2005:19). Aside from the obvious romanticization of art, what
is also glossed over is the real tension between ethnic groups in Bulgaria.
Unfortunately, photo opportunities and speeches do not readily translate
into tangible help for Roma. As I will discuss later in reference to pop
music contests, that the state recognizes Romani art does not automati-
cally mean progress in human rights; the state often recognizes a few tal-
ented Romani artists as tokens while ignoring the rest.
In addition to Bulgarian politicians, Romani activists also use the festi-
val for educational purposes in the service of building Romani nation-
alism (N. Georgieva 2006). I have already mentioned promotion of the
Romani language. For a few years, musical groups from India were in-
vited, enacting the “homeland” idea. Although audience members
appeared uninterested in the Indian groups, they serve as a visual and
aural symbol of legitimate origins (2006:26–27). Other international
Romani groups have been invited, and in 2005 the festival declared itself
to be officially international. The act of gathering Romani musicians from
disparate places gives legitimacy to the idea of a diasporic nation, with the
message: we are a real people and we exist in many states (see Chapter 3).
Related to the nationalistic theme of the festival organizers is rejection
of commercialism. According to Malikov, “As long as I have the strength, I
will try to preserve pure Gypsy texts and music. But now many people are

interested in Gypsy music for commercial reasons. It is very sad because
they only want to profit” (Peycheva 1994a:16). Malikov implies that the
profit motive of fusions taints them. On the other hand, virtually all Bul-
garian Romani music is and historically has been in the commercial
realm. However, Malikov is correct that not all commercial relations are
equivalent. Privatization has indeed led to appropriation of Romani music
into the pop/folk realm, with little financial benefit to most Roma. The few
Romani chalga stars who have benefited financially, such as Azis (who got
his start at the 1999 Romfest; see Chapter 9), do not compete in the official
part of the festival. In 2004 he performed as “a guest” in a gala concert that
was better attended than the official competition. Several Turkish groups
that also performed “as guests” were very well received (Peycheva and
Dimov 2005:20). And in 2007 the band Kristali, the Romani singer Sasho
Roman, and the keyboardist Amza from Macedonia all performed as
guests, to huge acclaim. In more recent years, other stars, such as clari-
netist Sali Okka, have performed as guests.
The festival hopes to capture the attention of the Bulgarian state in
order to interest it in cultural projects, and in some ways it is succeeding.
On the other hand, state funding has declined, prize amounts have re-
cently decreased, and Lozanka Peycheva and Ventsislav Dimov (Bulgarian
ethnomusicologists) have not taken their honoraria. In 2010 Romfest was
canceled because of insufficient funds. According to Malikov, the problem
“boils down to the fact that the state does not pay attention to Gypsy cul-
ture. . . . It is necessary to have very strong state interference for the pres-
ervation and development of Romani culture” (N. Georgieva 2006:20).
Malikov favored creation of state-supported Romani theaters and dance
ensembles; this may be a nostalgic view of the socialist welfare state as
paternalistic provider. Yet he is correct in that a crop of dance ensembles
composed of Romani youth has emerged since 2005, and these ensembles
are fostering pride (see Chapter 6). For example, in Sofia the Elit Center
for Romani Culture has successfully sponsored many programs.15
However, I do not foresee the state fully embracing Romani music in its
official categorization of folk music. Yes, Romani music may be embraced
at Romani festivals for the audience of the EU, but little has changed in
the realm of official folklore. Moreover, Romfest illustrates the problem-
atic relationship of Roma to the state. As Imre suggests, Roma occupy a
delicate position where they are suspect both because they can never be
true representatives of the nation and because they are too closely allied to
forces of commercialism and consumption (2006). For example, in 2008,
a controversy erupted about the party atmosphere at the festival. Eran
Livni reported that although the mayor of Stara Zagora opened the festi-
val with a laudatory speech and the Open Society Institute funded a pref-
estival conference, the national government reduced funding. The head of
the National Committee on Ethnic and Demographic Affairs announced
she would not support a celebration of “kyuchetsi and kebap” (minced
meat balls), symbolic of “boorish Gypsy music.” Some Romani activists
agreed with this sentiment, agreeing that it is shameful that the only

public event in which Roma participate involves “boorish” music, eating
kebap, and dancing kyuchetsi. Livni perceptively noted that the “stigmatic
image of Roma as self-indulgent creators and consumers of ‘boorish’
music is so powerful (among both Roma and non-Roma) that any event
that advances Roma recognition through music ends up marginalizing the
music, the performers, as well as the audience” (Livni, personal commu-
nication; also see Livni 2011).
Official Postsocialist Bulgarian Views of

Romani Music
Given the fundamental questioning of the past that has occurred in Bul-
garia, the postsocialist period might be expected to reveal a grand shift in
state folklore policy. Quite the opposite; little has changed.16 Neither
Romani music nor the music of other minorities is integrated into the
curricula of folk music schools at the high school and college level.17 No
zurla or tŭpan is taught, no kyucheks are included, and few Romani chil-
dren study at folk music schools. In fact no “modern” instruments (clar-
inet, saxophone, accordion) are taught.
Despite its current association of wedding music with folk music, it is
often ignored in the folk music high schools and the Plovdiv Academy.18
Only a few wedding musicians (including ethnic Bulgarians singer Ivan
Handzhiev, gaida player Maria Stoyanova, and a few kaval players) have
taught at the folk music high schools or the Plovdiv Academy. In the
1990s, Stoyanova invited Romani kaval player Matyo Dobrev to be a
guest teacher. Students reported that he seemed nervous and out of place,
and he was never invited back. Similarly, at folk festivals such as Koprivsh-
titsa, Pirin Pee, and Rozhen, wedding music and Romani music are not
found in the official program. As during socialism, Roma do participate
as individuals providing music for Bulgarian dance groups; zurna and
tŭpan players perform for Pirin village dancers and gaida players per-
form for village dance groups. However, no Romani groups perform spe-
cifically Romani music.19 Note that in the unofficial sphere of festivals,
Roma are very visible. Just as during socialism, Roma zurna and tŭpan
players and wedding musicians show up at folk festivals to play offstage
for tips from Bulgarians of various ethnicities. The repertoire in these
unofficial contexts includes wedding music, songs in the Romani
language, and kyucheks, all of which fall outside the categories of official
folk music.
Ditchev calls the Bulgarian situation “monoculturalism as prevailing
culture.” He points out that although there are numerous ethnographic
villages devoted to Bulgarian folklore, there are none devoted to Romani,
Pomak, and Turkish culture: “When travelling around the country, one
discovers that what is thought and presented as folklore is without excep-
tion ethnically Bulgarian” (2004). Multicultural support comes only from
NGOs, labeled “project culture” by Ditchev; “Any time you hear that a

minority culture is being supported here or there, it means that there is
project money behind it, with the backing of a Western donor. Take the
initiative to write an all-Balkan history textbook, take trans-border coop-
eration, take the deliberate enrolling of Bulgarian and Roma kids together
in school” (2004).20
Although the plight of Roma has received much attention from interna-
tional organizations, in the realm of culture Roma receive little support
from Bulgarian NGOs and even less support from the Bulgarian govern-
ment. Most NGO aid is funneled to projects to build civil society, train
leaders, and assist in social welfare. I am not criticizing these initiatives,
but I note that music is assumed to be an area where Roma excel and thus
need no help. For example, in the 1990s the Open Society Institute gave
large grants that supported Romani “high culture,” which they defined as
“history, art, oral or written literature, cultural anthropology, and musi-
cology.” Specifically excluded were proposals for “pop music or folkloric
music festivals.” Recently, however, the Open Society Institute (now Open
Society Foundation) began offering grants for East European Romani arts
and culture, including CD production and festivals (see http://www.soros.
org/initiatives/arts).
Since 1989 there have been several efforts by Bulgarian NGOs to intro-
duce Romani culture to school-age children. The Interethnic Initiative for
Human Rights Foundation (with money from the European Union)
funded publication of several supplemental textbooks on Romani music,
history, and folktales. The Romani history book for grades nine through
eleven, for example, is an introduction to basic folklore genres. The song
and folktale books feature collections illustrated with colorful designs and
photographs, and the music book for grades five through eight presents
contextual, regional, and historical material (Peycheva, Dimov, and
Krŭsteva 1996 and 1997). All of these books were prepared by scholars
and funded by NGOs. In addition, a few music textbooks issued for grades
one to nine feature ethnic groups other than Bulgarians.
In 2005, however, a scandal erupted regarding inclusion of Romani
music in elementary school curricula. A team of ethnomusicologists led
by Gencho Gaytandzhiev prepared an educational music text, Sharena
Muzika (Colorful music; Bulgarian), for preschool children in the town of
Stara Zagora that included one children’s song (among thirty-six songs)
sung half in Romani and half in Bulgarian by Romani vocalist Sofi Mari-
nova (discussed shortly; also see Chapter 9) and three photographs of
Romani performers. The anti-Roma public outcry against this textbook
was ferocious. Media headlines included “People . . . revolt against Roma
textbooks; parents . . . sent a petition to the Ministry of Education,” “What
are our children exposed to? A wave of protest” and “Who must be inte-
grated—us or them?” In addition, mothers from Stara Zagora were invited
to appear on a prominent national television show where they declared
“that they would never let their children listen to even a single Roma song”
(Gaytandzhiev 2008:206). It is clear that racism surfaces in debates about
music.

On the other hand, a successful project focusing on Romani folklore
was initiated by the NGO Center for Interethnic Dialogue and Tolerance
Amalipe (Friendship), based in Veliko Tŭrnovo, jointly funded by the Open
Society Institute and the Bulgarian Ministry of Education. Begun in 2002
in thirteen schools with a group of 500 students, by 2007 the program
attracted more than 5,500 children (53 percent of whom are Romani) in
230 schools, who were enrolled in classes on Romani folklore taught by
Bulgarian teachers who took a training course and received an hono-
rarium (http://amalipe.com).21 In 2003 the “Open Heart” children’s festival
was organized by Amalipe for the children enrolled in the school culture
program; and it has been held annually in Veliko Tŭrnovo and includes
stories, music, and dance. In 2007 it received patronage from the city of
Veliko Tŭrnovo, but no national funding. Ironically, this was the same year
that Bulgaria became the leading nation in the Decade of Roma Inclusion.
By 2009 the festival included 1,000 children and received some EU fund-
ing (http://amalipe.com/index.php?nav=news&id=332&lang=2); in 2010 it
attracted 700 children and received funding from the America for Bul-
garia Foundation.
Šutkafest
In postsocialist Macedonia, there are mixed signs of the legacy of Tito.

Macedonia still prides itself on its multicultural fabric; Roma are now a
“nationality” (Petrovski 2009). The Macedonian music school curriculum
tends to omit Romani music, as in Bulgaria; however, there is a great deal
of visibility of Romani music in the marketplace, and Romani political
events often feature music. The situation of Roma is becoming more
public as Macedonia lines up for European accession. Against this back-
ground, the first Macedonian Romani music festival that took place in
Skopje in 1993 held great cultural and political importance. Šutkafest
(named after the municipality of Šuto Orizari, outside Skopje) was spon-
sored by the NGO Union for Romani Culture, Macedonian National Radio
and Television, Aura (a tourist agency), and Esma Redžepova and Stevo
Teodosievski (see Chapter 10). It was a large event with several competi-
tions and a jury composed of Macedonian performers and composers plus
Romani clarinetist Medo Č un (see Chapter 2). Video example 3.2 features
Esma Redžepova at the gala concert singing “Dželem Dželem,” known as
the Romani anthem (see Chapter 3 for analysis and lyrics); this song ex-
presses the historical suffering of Roma (especially during the Holocaust)
and their desire to rise up and unite.
Video example 6.7 features the festival’s opening music and dance
sequence; note that the festival concert featured a full classical orchestra
(whose members used music stands and printed notation) with strings
and woodwinds (including Ferus Mustafov on clarinet; see Chapter 2),
plus a separate brass orchestra led by Stevo Teodosievski. The classical
orchestra served as a symbol of elite “high art,” which boldly legitimized

Romani culture. The dancers performed line and solo versions of the char-
acteristic Romani dance čoček (the line dance pattern is Bitolska gaida)
and were costumed with tasteful versions of šalvari. Note the omission of
exposed skin as in belly dancing. The men wore identical red or white
shirts, reminiscent of the Yugoslav KUDs that required folk costume. Sev-
eral generations were represented.
Esma and Stevo delivered opening speeches that emphasized the theme
of patriotism, lauding the fact that as far back as 1957 Esma sang publicly
in the Romani language (see Chapter 10), and that the country was
peaceful (this festival took place at the time of the Yugoslav wars). This
rhetoric positioned Roma as true defenders of the country. Several young
journalists spoke in Macedonian and Romani (symbolically equalizing the
two languages in public space), and Faik Abdi, the leader of the Party for
the Full Emancipation of Roma and the president of the festival orga-
nizing committee, greeted the European guests. The audience included
numerous Macedonian politicians. Like the Bulgarian Romfest, Šutkafest
featured Romani groups from other countries (Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and
Albania), legitimating the pan-Balkan public face of Roma.
Šutkafest continued successfully in 1994 and 1995 under the direction
of Esma and Stevo, but then their sponsorship ended; funds eventually
dried up and the last festival was held in 1999, when KUD Phralipe cele-
brated its fiftieth anniversary. Two commercial albums and a videotape
were made of the 1993 festival. In addition to Šutkafest, other platforms
and events in Macedonia have served as vehicles for Romani cultural visi-
bility. They include the newspaper Romano Sumnal, several television sta-
tions, commemoration of International Romani April 8, beauty contests
(see Chapter 6), and the very successful Golden Wheel Film Festival, held
annually since 2002 for documentaries, fictional films, and radio pro-
grams. The latter is sponsored by the Romani television station BTR,
which also sponsors the annual Miss Roma International contest. All these
events serve the functions of both political and cultural mobilization and
often feature Romani music.
Macedonia, World Heritage and UNESCO
The postsocialist state dramatically interacted with Romani music in the

context of Macedonia’s 2002 application to UNESCO to have a wedding
from the village of Galičnik declared a “Masterpiece of Oral and Intan-
gible Heritage of Humanity.”22 This UNESCO competition responds to the
1989 initiative titled Recommendations on the Safeguarding of Tradi-
tional Culture, which advocates “preserving cultural heritage which is in
danger of disappearing due to cultural standardization, armed conflicts,
tourism, industrialization, the rural exodus, migrations, and the degrada-
tion of the environment” (UNESCO 2001:3). Although I do not have the
space here to interrogate all the problematic notions underpinning this
UNESCO project and similar proclamations by the World Intellectual

Property Organization, I wish to point out that heritage is assumed to be
coterminous with bounded territorial groups, so-called communities, and
rural culture (see Chapter 7). Cultural heritage comes from “living com-
munities with a sense of continuity” (5). These agencies have resurrected
narratives of the impending loss or survival of selected items of authentic
folklore (M. Brown 2004; Kurin 2004; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2004) that
have rejected “unwanted hybridization” and “alien cultural forms.”
Note that only nation/states can submit applications in the competition
for Masterpieces. Thus the “humanity” designation elides into the nation/
state, which chooses selected aspects of its culture to be masterpieces.
Needless to say, minority cultures can be problematic. On the other hand,
UNESCO specifically advocates “the preservation of cultural diversity”
and “the tolerance and harmonious interaction between cultures,” so one
might expect cultural communication between ethnic groups to surface in
applications. Not so for Macedonia’s application for the Galičnik Wed-
ding. Although the entire wedding is too complicated to describe here, at
the turn of the twentieth century up to fifty weddings took place simulta-
neously on Petrovden, July 12, among the families of returning migrants.
What is relevant here is the fact that whereas Galičnik is an exclusively
ethnic Macedonian village with no Roma, all the musicians who provide
music for the weeklong ritual are Muslim Roma from the nearest city,
Debar.23 These zurla and tapan players (all from the Majovci clan based in
Debar) know the Slavic wedding rituals and dance repertoire intimately,
and they signal every important ritual moment with appropriate music.
There is even a proverb that says “no wedding will take place in Galičnik
unless the Majovtsi family plays” (Kličkova and Georgieva 1951/1996).
Thus not only are Roma integrated into the Galičnik wedding, but the
villagers are dependent on them for their ritual, dance, and processional
music.
Despite these facts, the UNESCO application from Macedonia hardly
mentions Roma and omits them in relation to the goals of affirming cul-
tural identity and preserving traditions. Roma are merely described in a
few sentences as musicians.24 The great potential in this project for recog-
nizing and promoting cultural exchange between Roma and Macedonians
is ignored.25 Similarly, Roma are omitted from the section on training the
next generation in folk practices. For example, one tangible way Roma
could benefit is by UNESCO facilitating the learning of the ritual reper-
toire by young Romani zurla and tapan players, many of whom have few
professional opportunities.
For the past few years the zurla and tapan players at the Galičnik wedding
have not been from the Majovci clan but rather have been Roma from the
capital city of Skopje who are employed by national dance ensembles. Fur-
thermore, since the village of Galičnik was depopulated in the 1970s (for
economic reasons), the ritual has been enacted in a two-day condensed ver-
sion by summer returnees to the village and by members of the Skopje-based
Kočo Racin dance ensemble in a specially built amphitheater. Thus the wed-
ding is a revival staged by ensemble members.26 The UNESCO application

was submitted by the Union of Macedonian Folklore Ensembles, whose
stated aim is “to preserve, protect, support and present Macedonian folklore
which reflect [sic] . . . the heritage and traditions of the Macedonian people
and the nationalities who live in the Republic of Macedonia.” The submitted
list of “custodians of the know how,” however, omits Roma and is dominated
by ensemble leaders and folklorists. The UNESCO application consists of
florid language lauding the Galičnik wedding as “a masterpiece of human
creative genius” embodying authentic folklore and national heritage. Refer-
encing the organic tropes of romantic nationalism, the application implies
that the wedding embodies the soul of the nation that finds expression in
rural folklore. All this is quite paradoxical considering that the wedding is a
re-creation. Ironically, Romani living traditions are excluded or minimized
by the state, but the folklore of the majority ethnic Macedonians is coded as
authentic even though it is staged. Finally, the UNESCO application needs to
be seen in the context of the postsocialist economic crisis, with the possible
motivation of increased tourism.
Popular Music Contests: Can Roma

Represent the Nation?
In the last decade, several controversies have arisen around “music idol”
contests in Eastern Europe over the role of Romani contestants; these con-
troversies have exposed discriminatory tendencies that underlie the reluc-
tance of states and majority citizens to accept Roma as representatives of
the nation/state. Sofi Marinova, one of the few female Romani stars in
mainstream Bulgarian pop/folk (see Chapter 9), was thrown into the
middle of a huge scandal regarding the finals for the Eurovision (European
popular music) contest in 2005 when Bulgaria participated for the first
time. Singer Slavi Trifonov, the host of the most popular Bulgarian televi-
sion show, produced a vocal duet, “Edinstveni” (The unique ones; Bulgar-
ian), for Marinova and himself, which became a hit. It is no accident that
Trifonov invited Marinova to collaborate with him. Trifonov was a seminal
figure in the mainstreaming of Romani music in the 1990s; with his Ku-Ku
(cuckoo) band he released an album of his show, Roma TV, that featured
Romani music and comedy skits. Trifonov is also an intensely political
figure who embraces biting political satire, often framed in music. For over
a decade he has produced “The Slavi Show,” broadcast on the BTV cable
channel every evening Monday through Friday and watched by more than
a million Bulgarians, combining live music, political comedy, and inter-
views with a variety of guests from Bulgaria and all over the world.27
Why did Slavi write a song for Sofi? Perhaps he wanted to highlight her
talents (he called the song “a present for Sofi”), or perhaps he was moti-
vated by politics. Remember that European Union conditions for Bulgar-
ian accession required visible efforts at Romani visibility and integration.
In any case, as soon as the song was nominated for Eurovision, immedi-
ately a virulent anti-Romani backlash was unleashed via the print media

and the internet. Many Bulgarians were outraged that a Gypsy would be
allowed to represent Bulgaria at Eurovision. Not referring to Sofi by name,
critics called her “the dark girl” or “the Gypsy” and brought up the issue of
the lower level of civilization of Roma.28
The song did not win in the audience voter call-in, and Slavi claimed
that the votes were fixed.29 In protest, the duo refused to sing in the final
performance and instead Slavi read a speech denouncing the “fixed vic-
tory.” He stated that it wasn’t fair to any of the contestants, and especially
to “the Gypsy woman Sofi Marinova” and to the country: “This is the
selling of the country. . . . The country is not for sale, even for $50,000 leva.
Bulgaria . . . is unique.” During this speech, the atmosphere was very se-
rious; Slavi wore a black suit and Sofi wore a black formal gown, and an
instrumental version of the song played quietly behind them; she held his
arm while he spoke.30 Instead of singing, they broadcast a video of the
national anthem, a symbol of their alignment with patriotism rather than
corruption. Slavi sometimes reenacts this incident of betrayal in his con-
certs (almost like a memorial). Thus a song that could have been a na-
tional symbol of Romani integration turned into an example of the failure
of multiculturalism.
Similar incidents with Roma in music contests have occurred in the
Czech Republic, Hungary, Turkey, and Serbia. In 2004 in the Czech Repub-
lic, a Romani singer, Magda Balgova, was expected to win the national
Česko Hleda Superstar (Pop Idol) vocal competition; when she was sud-
denly voted out in the final rounds, critics claimed it was due to racism.
One newspaper wrote: ”Did anyone . . . actually believe that the Superstar
contest would be won by a girl who, without a shadow of a doubt, most
deserved to win, but who is Romani?” Another Romani contestant was
attacked in her local newspaper, which labeled her “the shame of the
town” and claimed “people were surprised she reached the final forty
because she was a Gypsy.” In 2005, a male Romani singer fairly won the
same contest, but activists said that this did not signal real acceptance of
Roma in everyday life. The Romani organization Dženo pointed out that
“a Romani man who can sing beautifully fails to challenge stereotypes
[and] . . . actually reinforces the idea that Roma can do little else with
success.” This resonates with activist Ian Hancock’s comment that success
in music may actually harm the Romani rights movement by upholding
stereotypes (see Chapter 12). At the same time that the singer won the
Czech contest, a poll revealed that only 13 percent of Czechs consider
Roma capable of being good neighbors. Dženo’s web headline at the time
read “Czech Superstar Can Sing But Not Move In” (Dženo 2005; also see
Imre 2006:663).
A similar situation took place in Turkey in December 2006 regarding
the Popstar Alaturka contest that is broadcast on national television. A
Romani singer, Erkan, captured much of the audience vote, but one of
the members of the jury seemed to be prejudiced against him.31 In Ser-
bia’s first Pop Idol competition, in 2004, a similar pattern emerged.
Romani singer Tanja Savić was defeated by two Serbian male singers

despite her being by far the most talented artist. She told the Serbian
media it was obvious that she didn’t win the competition because she was
Romani.32
On the other hand, there are several signs that Romani artists are be-
coming more acceptable in mainstream media. In 2007, a Romani singer
was chosen to represent the Czech Republic in a project called the Euro-
pean Year of Equal Opportunities,33 and in 2009 the Romani rap group
Gipsy.cz was chosen to represent the Czech Republic at Eurovision. Most
notably, Marija Šerifović, a Romani singer, won the 2007 Eurovision con-
test for Serbia. Similarly, in Hungary, the first two seasons of Megasztar
(Hungarian Idol) in 2004 and 2005 featured Romani winners and run-
ners-up. Romani singer Ibolya Olah, who won second place in 2004, was
chosen to represent Hungary in her performance for the European Union
Parliament. In 2005, many political leaders attended the Megasztar finals,
when the Romani singer Caramel won, and three Romani finalists received
Roma Civil Rights Foundation Awards for their outstanding service to the
cause of Roma rights (Imre 2006:663).
As Roma begin to win a rightful place in pop music contests, it is ques-
tionable “whether the rise of Roma stars will elevate the status of the
entire minority” (Imre 2008:333). Imre notes that “embracing selected
Roma musicians has long been a strategy employed by the state . . . to
handpick and isolate from their communities ‘model’ representatives of
the minority, most of whom remain all the more excluded from the na-
tional community” (334). She reminds us that singers themselves are not
anxious to be seen as Romani activists; they are “eager to shed the burden
of representation” (333). For example, Hungarian Romani winners Olah
and Caramel reveal nothing of their ethnicity; in the eyes of the global
media world they are Hungarian. According to Imre, their images have
been “whitewashed and nationalized’ by their association with patriotic
songs and stagings (334). Romani performers are, then, sometimes
recruited for nationalistic projects of the state; Marija Šerifović has been
involved in nationalistic projects; and the Romani festivals discussed ear-
lier show this tendency. In Hungary, for example, Olah’s performance of a
patriotic song was used as a backdrop for fireworks on a national holiday.
On the other hand, Olah has simultaneously been used “to exemplify the
state’s programmatic multicultural outreach and Europe’s generosity
towards minorities” (334).
Thus Romani stars can fulfill contradictory ideological discursive func-
tions for the state: they can reinforce nationalism, or they can display the
nation’s commitment to diversity. But on the ground, they may do little to
solve the problems of Roma. Imre argues that pop contests offer “rich case
studies of the ambivalent relationship between Roma musicians and their
nation states. . . . They provide the best illustration of the minefields that
Roma entertainers have to negotiate, easily exploited as they are by both
commercial media and state politicians for the economic and political
capital they represent” (333). I further explore the relationship between
Romani artists and anti-Romani sentiment in the next chapter.

These examples, including Bulgarian wedding music, Romani festivals,
pop music contests, and the Galičnik wedding, all illustrate the dilemmas
of Roma in the postsocialist period. Balkan Roma are squeezed between a
weakening state and an expanding exploitative market. The state is not
tangibly interested in Romani culture or the well-being of Roma except
insofar as the state might reap certain rewards such as European Union
membership, acknowledgment of supposed multicultural goals, or the
stamp of UNESCO approval. Roma are disadvantaged in the realm of the
free market in that they are poor, are despised, and lack start-up resources
and connections to officials in high places. Commercial interests appro-
priate their music and their images, repackage them, and reap financial
gain. In spite of this bleak picture, Roma are managing to survive as mu-
sicians; they are finding limited government support and some recogni-
tion for their talents at Romani festivals and in pop music contests, and
outside of the Balkans in world music contexts, which I explore in the
chapters ahead.

Bear trainer, Bulgaria, 1980
Monkey trainer, Bulgaria, 1980

Ferus Mustafov plays at a celebration for the birth of
Muamet Čun’s granddaughter, Šutka, 1990
Esma Redžepova singing Dželem Dželem (Serbian text)

to American Kalderash Roma, private party sponsored by
Macedonian Roma, New York City, 1996
Women making stuffed grape leaves, Šutka wedding, 1994
Gifts on trays, Šutka wedding, 1990

Bride’s female relatives dance at henna ceremony, Šutka,
1990
Groom’s female relatives with a tray of henna with candle

for the second henna ceremony, Šutka, 1990
Grooms’ mother leads the dance line at double wedding,
New York, 1995
Solo dancer on top of a car, circumcision proces-

sion, Šutka, 1990
Solo dancer receives tips, Bulgaria, 1984
Tŭpan players, Pomak wedding, Avramovo, 1980
Mancho Kamburov, Pirin Pee, 1985

Yuri Yunakov (saxophone), Sunaj Saraçi (violin),
Severdžan Azirov (drums), Ilhan Rahmanovski (guitar),
Kujtim Ismaili (guitar), Trajče Džemaloski (keyboard),
wedding, New York, 1997
9
ab
Bulgarian Pop/Folk
Chalga
C halga arose in the early 1990s as a fusion of pan-Balkan folk styles

with pop Romani, Turkish, and wedding music; it has become a huge
phenomenon in Bulgaria, with thousands of fans.1 According to a socio-
logical study, between 44 and 70 percent of the Bulgarian populace listen
to chalga (Peev 2005:52), but the numbers may be higher because many
upper-class educated Bulgarians conceal their affinity given its controver-
sial status. On account of its low-class connotations and reputation as “un-
civilized,” the genre tends to be absent from national radio and television
and the elite media (Ranova 2006:33). Nevertheless, chalga is widely dis-
seminated via commercial CDs, radio programs (several twenty-four-
hour), concerts, videos (via DVDs and a number of cable television stations,
some twenty-four-hour; see www.fantv.bg and www.planeta.tv), and online
(see www.chalgatube.com, www.planetaplay.com, and YouTube.com).
Early influences on chalga were Greek folk music (laika, e.g., use of
bouzoukis), Turkish arabesk (use of Arabic melodic ornamentation, string
orchestras, and instrumental fillers at the end of vocal phrases2), Pirin
folk/pop (songs in 7/8, promulgated at the festivals Pirin Folk and Pirin
Fest3), and, most important, novokomponovana narodna muzika (newly
composed folk music). This last one is Serbian pop/folk that arose in the
1970s as an urban-based, “oriental identified,” Romani-influenced genre
and developed in the 1990s into turbofolk (Rasmussen 1995, 1996, 2002,
and 2007). The word chalga comes from the Turkish çalgı, instrumental
music or a musical instrument.4 After 1989, in Bulgarian the word took on
the designation of folk/pop or ethno-pop, vocal rather than instrumental,
heavily influenced by Romani styles.
Kyuchek is the predominant rhythm, in varieties of 2/4 and 4/4,
although there are some 7/8 and 9/8 pieces (see Figure 2.1); chalga also
uses standard 2/4 pop rhythms. Kyuchek, shared by Turks and Roma,
symbolically marks the genre as eastern or “oriental” (Said 1989; also see
Chapter 1 of this volume). I argue that this easternness is often visualized
177
as an oriental fantasy of sensuality, neither a real place nor a real eth-
nicity. As Kurkela pointed out, in chalga there are few specific references
to Turkey or the Middle East in text or place (2007:156); rather, there are
symbolic allusions in terms of rhythm, melody, texture, and imagery. As
discussed earlier, Roma are coded as free, sexual, and musical; all three
themes contribute to the “production of the oriental” (Kurkela 2007;
Buchanan 2007).5 For Bulgarians, kyuchek as a dance is a female Romani
solo genre involving sensuous movements of the hips, shoulders, torso,
and hands. In Chapter 6, I analyzed the diasporic manifestations of
kyuchek, but here again I note the contrast between the demure style of
dancing kyuchek at Romani family events with the sexualized, eroticized
belly dance of chalga videos. Roma, however, sometimes participate in
their own sterotypification, a point discussed throughout this book. Not
only do stereotypes sell, but also music videos are manufactured by private
music production companies, none of which are owned or operated by
Roma; thus Roma are usually not participating in decisions about their
representations. Romanian Roma, however, control their pop/folk industry.
Terminological Issues
Whereas most Bulgarians and scholars accept the designation pop/folk, I

suggest we interrogate it more closely. What exactly is “pop” about chalga?
Actually a great deal. Most texts have a pop or rock sensibility; they are
about the dilemmas and emotions of modern life: sex, love, and money.
Furthermore, chalga texts (which are usually in Bulgarian) rhyme, a char-
acteristic present in Western pop music but absent from Bulgarian folk
music. Much of the musical texture is pop, featuring synthesizers with a
rock, techno, or rap texture. Dance moves and choreographies are also
influenced by jazz dance and hip hop, and stagings reflect MTV aesthetics
(when the mood of a song is sad, for example, the setting is often the
beach). Finally chalga’s use of dramatically overt emotion in the voice is
characteristic of both pop music and Romani music, but not folk music or
wedding music.
Conversely, we need to ask, What is “folk” about chalga? First we need
to remember that folk in the Bulgarian language is not the same as nar-
odno, which is defined as traditional or authentic by Bulgarian official in-
stitutions. In Chapter 7, I described how Romani music is excluded from
the rubric narodno, and surely we can see why chalga is excluded. Very
few chalga texts are in traditional style (traditional texts deal with village
life and do not rhyme); traditional texts are sometimes featured in Pirin-
based 7/8 chalga songs with nostalgic themes, but very rarely in songs
with kyuchek rhythms. In addition, traditional instruments, such as gaida
and kaval, are rarely used in chalga. So why is chalga called pop/folk?
To answer this question, we must consider the history of the term folk in
Serbia, where, as in Bulgaria, it is distinguished from narodno. The term
pop/folk in Bulgaria was inspired by the parallel term turbofolk in Serbia

(which replaced the term novokomponovana narodna muzika). In Serbia
folk was used to connote newness, as contrasted to the connotation of
tradition for narodno; pairing turbo with folk insured its evocation of nov-
elty, modernity, and ties to rock music. But still the term does retain ties to
the local, something more homegrown than pop, which is obviously West-
ern. Thus the hybrid terms turbofolk and pop/folk can escape the rigidity
of tradition but keep a tie to the local while simultaneously locate them-
selves in a modern sensibility.
We may now ask, What elements of pop/folk are “folk” rather than
“pop”? I posit that the kyuchek rhythm is the quintessential folk element.
Remember, however, that kyuchek has always been excluded from the
category narodno by official Bulgarian institutions; thus what is currently
called folk/pop could be more accurately called Romani/pop. It is ironic
that folk has become a gloss for Romani. Romani is now appropriated
under the label folk in the world of commercial music, whereas it never
was allowed to be narodno in the realm of state-sponsored official music.
Chart 9.1 shows three intersecting circles: wedding music, Romani
music, and chalga. They all intersect with the genre kyuchek, underlining
its powerful influence.
Also note that chalga in Bulgaria has such a negative connotation that
many performers and marketers avoid it; for example, music companies
like Payner (www.payner.bg) and Ara/Diapason (www.ara-bg.com) and
various websites use the marketing categories pop/folk, folk/pop, new folk,
contemporary folk, but rarely chalga. In addition, singer Gloria said in a
2003 television interview that she sings pop/folk as opposed to chalga
because she has a more Western approach and her lyrics are not gross.
Similarly, Serbian singers Ceca Raznatović and Indira Radić and Macedo-
nian singer Tatjana Lazarevska deny they sing turbo folk, preferring to
emphasize that their music is “pop” or “European.”
wedding music kyuchek Romani music
kyuchek kyuchek
chalga
Chart 9.1. Intersecting Circles: Chalga, Wedding Music, Romani Music
Bulgarian Pop/Folk 179

Style, Text, and Imagery
The orient is evoked in chalga via symbolic Eastern instrumental styles

plus Eastern references in texts, such as sheiks and harems (Dimov 2001;
Buchanan 2007; Kurkela 1997; 2007); certain scales are sometimes used,
for example phrygian (similar to makam kurd) and hicaz; and synthesized
flutes and zurnas and arabesk-like instrumental fillers signal “eastern-
ness.” Most important is the taksim or mane, the improvised free-rhythm
solo, which is the hallmark of kyuchek. In videos a full range of eastern
images are added: women belly dance wearing skimpy šalvari (with much
exposed skin), sometimes in scenarios featuring palm readers, sultans,
gongs, and horses.
In the 1998 video Vsichko e Lyubov (All is Love), featuring songs in the
Bulgarian language by the pioneering chalga band Kristal (Crystal) with
Toni Dacheva, “Chudesen Sŭn” (Wonderful dream6) displays an oriental
fantasy. Female dancers wear veils and Arabic-style gold lamé and black
belly dance outfits (with their buttocks exposed through netting). Women
stroke a male sultan with an exposed chest; they fan him with a palm leaf
and feed him (see video example 9.1 with text supplement). Although
“Chudesen Sŭn” alludes to an eastern dream, other songs on the same
video specifically document local Roma. “Svatba” (Wedding), in hicaz,
includes footage of an actual Romani wedding where Roma modestly
dance kyuchek. The text extols the music and lavish gifts at a Romani
wedding. This ties the viewer to real Roma in the “ethnographic present”
(video example 9.2 with text supplement).
In the song “Karavana Chayka” (the name of an entertainment venue)
and other cuts on this album, the viewer sees the actual Romani musi-
cians.7 This video format, which Kurkela calls “concert documentation”
(2007:151) is nonnarrative; for example, the performers are filmed on the
beach at the Black Sea. Kurkela distinguishes the format from “music-
based” videos, which have more abstract visuals unrelated to the text,
and also from “narrative” videos, which depict a story (although the story
may not follow the text; 148–152). Note that all videos as well as most
concerts and club performances feature lip synching and instrument
synching—it is all “playback.” These video styles and techniques are drawn
from western MTV.8
Kristal’s 1998 video also includes “Zvezditse Moya” (My little star),
depicting guitarists and Spanish/Flamenco dancers wearing black and
red dresses with roses. There are no kyuchek moves, rather can-can type
dances with swirling skirts, referencing Spain and the Romani dias-
pora. Another song, “Bashtinata Kŭshta” (My father’s house), is a typ-
ical Pirin 7/8 melody whose text is about how the years have taken their
toll. Visuals include old black-and-white footage of a village house and
an elderly couple. Like most 7/8 songs, it evokes the nostalgic realm of
folklore. Another song, “Dobro Utro” (Good morning), features Greek
bouzouki playing in a 2/4 syrtos rhythm.

My final example from this album is a song with political commentary.
Many chalga songs in the 1990s offered pointed critiques of social condi-
tions, targeting local politicians, the mafia, and the banks (Kurkela 2007).
“Sladka Rabota” (Sweet work) chronicles the ills of contemporary life; it
incisively portrays how hard-working people are unemployed or poorly paid
while swindlers have an easy life (audio example 9.1 with text supplement).
Thus on this one album we see how Kristal interpreted the major fea-
tures of chalga of the 1990s (which is now known as “retro chalga”):
kyuchek, 7/8, oriental imagery, Greek and Macedonian style, and texts
about love, nostalgia, and politics. Note that Kristal (from Yambol and
headed by keyboardist Krasimir Hristov) was one of the pioneering 1990s
Romani bands that helped define the genre; in fact, the genre was briefly
known as Kristal in the early 1990s (Buchanan 2007). Kristal remains one
of the strongest bands today perhaps because it has become so adaptable
and is promoted by Payner. It currently records with different singers in
many languages and styles, among them Turkish, Romani, and Bulgarian
(including famous wedding singers).
Like pop music texts, chalga texts deal mostly with love and deception,
but many lyrics are graphically sexual. As discussed earlier, texts and
accompanying videos often depict the moneyed life filled with cigarettes,
cell phones, fancy clothing, gambling, cars (especially Mercedes-Benz),
sunglasses (Ray-Ban brand), alcohol, and sex. It is precisely these texts,
coupled with erotic dance moves and skimpy clothing, that engendered
a veritable backlash against chalga by both folk musicians and intellec-
tuals (discussed later in this chapter). Some specifically Balkan themes,
however, have emerged, such as emigration. Indeed, the “brain drain” of
thousands of Bulgarians was of concern to many. In “Bŭlgarina v Evropa”
(The Bulgarian in Europe; 2001), Mariana Kalcheva and Kristal satiri-
cally chronicle the journey of Bulgarians to Western Europe (audio ex-
ample 9.2 with text supplement). Note that the instruments include
gaida and kaval, referencing village life and provincialism as opposed to
urbanity and cosmopolitanism.
Another text dealing with emigration is “Belgiiskite Vecheri” (Belgian
evenings) sung by Amet. Aside from Azis (who is discussed extensively in
this chapter), Amet is one of a handful of Romani singers to enter the chalga
mainstream; most chalga stars are non-Romani women who capitalize on
sex.9 Male singers, unlike females, are not required to look sexy, or to dance.
In his videos, Amet simply stands, sways, or sits, often wearing his signa-
ture hat, gazing at the undulating women surrounding him. Amet is also
one of the few mainstream chalga stars to sing in many languages: Bulgar-
ian, Romani, Greek, Serbian, and Turkish. Dual- or multiple-language
songs are more often performed by those who are multilingual, that is,
Roma and Turks.10 “Belgiiskite Vecheri” is about the lure of Western mate-
rial goods and gambling (see video example 9.3 with text supplement). Note
that the text uses four languages (English, Bulgarian, French, and Romani)
and satirically captures the immigrant’s meager existence amidst plenty.

Post-2000 Trends in Chalga
Drawing from western videos by Madonna, Shakira, and Britney Spears,

most chalga videos feature the partially unclothed female body as an
object of male desire. As a Bulgarian musician in Chicago said to me, “The
chalga crowd listens with their eyes.” Sex was prohibited from the official
media during socialism, so it is easy to comprehend why it exploded after
1989. This trend can be linked to the sexualization of the female body, the
rise in pornography, and growing prostitution. After more than forty years
of images of women as socialist neutered peasant workers, today many
women have embraced femininity in its most commercial form: beauty
products, cosmetic surgery, and chalga videos (Ranova 2006; Daskalova
2000:348–350).11
Chalga always had an erotic thread, but by 2005 the female star had
eclipsed the musicians and all other elements. Now the female voice—and
even more, the star’s image—reigns. Stars are known by their first names
(as with Madonna), wear designer wardrobes, have bodyguards, pose for
pin-ups and men’s magazines, and endorse products such as beer and tele-
phones. Like movie stars, they have fan clubs and websites with interac-
tive chat rooms.12 Thousands of Bulgarians (mostly young) know their
songs by heart and sing along at megaconcerts. Young girls who see no
hope in the future cling to chalga not only as escape but also as a career
goal. After seeing chalga stars interviewed on television (and seeing that
some of them are not too well spoken), these girls think they too can make
it. On the other hand, some stars are very intelligent, and a few are shrewd
entrepreneurs, owning music clubs and hotels.
Note that although some chalga stars cannot sing well, others display a
high level of technique. Tsvetelina, for example, was a wedding singer who
switched to chalga for the income (Rice 2002), Ekstra Nina and Nelina are
graduates of the folk music high school in Shiroka Lŭka, Slavka Kalcheva
is a masterful wedding singer who also performs chalga, and Tsvetelina
Yaneva was trained by her mother, the wedding singer Pepa Yaneva. Even
when chalga began, Gloria, the oldest chalga star, sang wedding songs to
display her mastery and link herself to tradition. In studio recordings,
pitches are corrected electronically, and many singers never sing live. A
few years ago, the trend of singing live developed. Some singers wear tiny
monitors in their ears and can deactivate playback if they want to sing
live, or activate it if they become breathless or tired. Sometimes they sing
along with themselves. In the fan magazine Nov Folk, chalga star Maria
boasted in 2006 that she performed live for the fifth birthday concert of
the Payner television station. Ivana, on the other hand, is known to always
sing live in concert.
The media hype about chalga stars is carefully orchestrated by produc-
tion companies. In the last fifteen years, the Payner Company helped
shape (and now dominates) the industry, causing Ivo Papazov to comment
in 2005: “Payner is stronger than the government. They run the pop/folk
empire.” Since its debut in 2001, Payner’s cable station Planeta has set the

trends in chalga. Payner now records artists; produces and distributes
CDs and DVDs; orchestrates promotions; sponsors tours, festivals, and
contests; publishes calendars, pinups, and fan magazines; and runs a
radio station, two cable television stations, a cosmetic surgery business, a
party-planning service, an amusement park and hotel, and many music
stores and chalga clubs. Chalga has also received journalistic attention in
western travel magazines.13 Stars regularly tour to other Balkan countries
and to the West, especially where there are large Bulgarian émigré popula-
tions as in Spain and England; in the United States the tour circuit includes
Chicago, Las Vegas, New York, and Seattle.14
I argue that since the early 2000s we can observe the development of
“mainstream chalga,” defined by the female sex star and orchestration
of large media promotions by the companies. Events now tend to have
the same formula: high production values and a bevy of female stars in
skimpy outfits. In addition to the mainstream, other branches of chalga
exist, among them Romani, Turkish, and wedding music collaborations;
but they receive less media attention and sometimes the production
values are inferior. For example, Sunrise Marinov’s video Nay-Dobri
Kyuchetsi ot Mahalata (The Best Kyucheks from the Neighborhood;
Bulgarian) features excellent Romani musicians but amateurish stag-
ings, similar to the 1998 Kristal video. Musicians are depicted playing
in restaurants or on the street, and there is an absence of actors, chore-
ography, and narrative. This is a far cry from the slick, polished videos of
mainstream chalga.
Trends in mainstream chalga in the last five years include more sophis-
ticated computer simulations, animation, complicated narrative stagings,
better dancing, and a more pronounced pop aesthetic, specifically collab-
oration with DJs and the use of hip hop music, dance, and clothing styles.
Political texts have dropped out almost entirely (emphasizing its enter-
tainment function), though they are still found in other branches of
chalga.15 Recently more male singers have entered the scene, but women
still predominate. Another trend is collaboration with pop/folk singers
from other Balkan countries. For example, in the last few years, Emilia
released a duet with the Greek Sakis Coucos, and Andreya and Maria
recorded duets with Romanian manele singer Costi. Yanitsa also recorded
a song with the Romanian manele singer Vali; note that it is staged on the
Romanian-Bulgarian border, invoking Balkan connections.
In Chapter 8, I discussed how Bulgarian audiences have recently shown
signs of fatigue with mainstream chalga and how cable channels have
broadened their offerings. In 2007 Planeta (Payner’s twenty-four-hour
cable channel), for example, added to its previously all-chalga line up
some wedding music, more Pirin and starogradski pesni (old city songs),
Serbian music, and more western pop—in sum, more variety.16 Similarly,
the new cable channel K88 offers a large variety of genres, and Balkanika,
a cable channel offering pop/folk in ten Balkan languages across eleven
Balkan states, is gaining listeners. Thus variety is being introduced in the
pan-Balkanization of pop/folk.

Payner’s cable channel, Planeta Folk, which debuted in 2007, offers an
interesting window to see how chalga and wedding music are moving
closer to each other. In the last chapter I discussed how Payner now fea-
tures some of its chalga stars singing wedding songs with bands and folk
dance ensembles in village stagings. I described assimilation of the allure
of chalga into a more wholesome folk image of folk and how this is tied to
an emerging ideological strain of nationalism. It also reveals a conscious
marketing strategy; Payner is not only legitimating chalga by allying it
with wedding music but also putting glitz into folk and wedding music by
using chalga stars. In the process, Roma tend to be erased as identifiably
Romani.
The Romani elements are still visible and audible in mainstream chalga,
but they have become part of a more stylized and abstract “orient” and
absorbed into formulaic narratives enacted by larger casts of dancers and
actors. For example, Emilia’s 2005 song “Zabravi” (Forget! [Bulgarian])
features a text about failed love plus a bare-chested man striking a gong,
with a haremlike group of women in sheer veils dancing synchronous
steps that are closer to Hollywood or Bollywood than to belly dance. The
dancers are then transformed into hip hop performers with a DJ, and the
video concludes with the gong (video example 9.4 with text supplement).17
Kyuchek rhythms are still very common, but no longer are musicians
depicted in mainstream chalga; there are fewer and shorter solo taksims
and the synthesizer has taken over. Rather, as I have mentioned, the
emphasis is on the star: the typical female chalga star is a non-Romani
bombshell with fair skin and, often, blonde hair. Roma are now less visible
in mainstream chalga. However, there are several Romani female singers:
Boni, Yuliya Bikova, Ana-Maria, Toni Dacheva, and Sofi Marinova. In
2001 Payner’s compilation hit mix CD included Turkish and Romani
songs, but by 2004 the hit mix had only Bulgarian language songs sung by
predominantly female stars. Romani and Turkish music is certainly
released by Payner and other companies, but on separate CDs and videos,
and often labeled “oriental rhythms.” Mainstream chalga has become less
ethnic precisely at a time when nationalism is on the rise.
As I mentioned in Chapters 1, and 8, the xenophobic Attack party
achieved a stunning victory in 2005–06, when it captured 8 percent of
parliamentary votes. Its anti-Romani platform (i.e., Roma are dangerous)
and its anti-Turkish, anti-Muslim platform (Turks are fanatics) embrace
cultural issues such as supporting the Eastern Orthodox Church and pro-
testing construction of mosques (Ghodsee 2008); more recently, some of
its tenets have been adopted by other parties. I don’t think it is an accident
that some artists, like the singers in the wedding band Kanarite (Chapter
8), started wearing large crosses at about the same time (crosses are also
a symbol of wealth) and indentifying with nationalistic issues. For ex-
ample, the last song in the cut titled “Ballads MegaMix” by DJ Jerry on
Payner’s 2004 DVD Collection 5 depicts the finale from a megaconcert
(video example 9.5); after views of Bachkovo Monastery, we view the
chalga stars on stage holding hands and performing a song about the Virgin

Mary (Bogoroditsa) with the refrain “Thank God we have such a clean
and good land.” This text is not so much about religion as about patri-
otism. In this concert, children are brought on stage, emphasizing the
“family values” of chalga. There are several other recent chalga songs with
patriotic texts.
These trends may have exclusionary consequences for Roma. By con-
trast, chalga star Maria released a song in 2007 in the Romani language, a
news item so amazing it was announced in the fan magazine Nov Folk
with the headline “Maria Sang in Romani.”18 Chalga singers look for new
attention-getting motifs, and Romani language was a new frontier.
Desislava sang a few lines of Romani in her duet with Azis, “Kazvash che
me Obichash” (You tell me that you love me); however, many commenta-
tors criticized her for sullying herself by doing so. Maria’s song was
recorded with the Romani band Kristali (from the city of Montana, a dif-
ferent band from Kristal of Yambol) and is a remake/remix of “Telefoni”
(Telephones), one of their hits. A question we may raise is, What happens
when Maria collaborates with Kristali? Can Kristali now enter main-
stream chalga because of Maria, or does she displace Roma? Indeed,
Kristali’s 2010 song “Ne Smenyai Kanala” (Don’t change the channel) is a
tribute to Payner’s channel and lists its stars by name. Payner seems to
have appropriated Kristali into its marketing program. The issue of appro-
priation is discussed in Chapter 13, but here I note that although Maria is
clearly the star in Telefoni both of Kristali’s singers still sing and get some
screen time. On the other hand, a critical reading posits that once their
music has been appropriated, Roma are not needed anymore. Chalga
sometimes appropriates the exotic image and the oriental rhythm without
Romani participation. In fact, with Roma being depicted as “dangerous”
by some political parties, it is safer to take their music and exclude them.
This presents special challenges for Romani chalga singers such as Sofi
Marinova.
Sofi Marinova
Sofi Marinova is one of the most talented chalga vocalists, but being
Romani she does not fall into the category of the standard bombshell, and
thus her career has not been standard. She was born in 1975 in Sofia,
speaks Romani, is self-taught, and has performed since she was seventeen
years old in bars and at Romani weddings (Cartwright 2005c:42–43).
Called the “Romska Perla” (Gypsy Pearl), she recorded for several years
with the Romani band Super Ekspres, and in 1996 they won the grand
prize at the Stara Zagora Romfest. Sofi’s masterful technique can be heard
in her Romani songs, where she executes exquisite descending runs and
repeated mordents. It is also showcased in “Danyova Mama,” a Bulgarian
wedding song. Chalga singers usually do not attempt to sing slow wedding
songs since they require such a high level of technical mastery (see Chap-
ter 7). Audio example 9.3 with text supplement features the last verse of

“Danyova Mama,” whose text depicts a mother speaking to her sons who
have come home from the mountains, where they were haidutsi (guerrilla
fighters).
Sofi adds a Romani sensibility to this standard wedding hit song: she
includes more emotional phrasing, more dynamic contrasts (soft and
loud), more exaggerated ornamentation (many repetitions), ascending
slides, notes held for a long period, and glottals or breathy “ahs” at the
ends of phrases. Note also how she ends the song by jumping up an octave
(not typical of wedding songs). Some music journalists compared her
emotional style to Esma Redžepova (see Chapter 10), but Marinova
claimed she was more indebted to Džansever (see Chapter 2; Lozanova
2006).
In the past Sofi had many fans, but she never achieved the visibility of
mainstream chalga, probably because of her ethnicity. In 2005, however,
she became part of a huge public scandal involving television host Slavi
Trifonov and the Eurovision pop music contest (see Chapter 8). As I
described, she was the butt of cruel comments and racist remarks, and the
polarization of audience members surfaced. A virulent anti-Romani cam-
paign, focused on whether a Romani artist could properly represent Bul-
garia in a Europe-wide contest. Sofi’s song, which was derailed from
Eurovision in 2005, has extremely subtle Romani elements. The rhythm of
“Edinstveni” is the type of kyuchek typically used to invoke India (see
Chapter 3 and number 4 in Figure 2.1); it is accented by darabuka (hand
drum) and dajre, two typically “eastern” instruments. There are also
strong pop elements in the song: the rhymed text is about love, the melody
is in minor key, and the accompaniment consists primarily of strings,
swelling in dynamics in the emotional parts. There is a guitar solo, neither
flashy nor improvised; and a short emotional vocal solo by Sofi on the
syllable “ah” that is not improvised and stays within pop style.19
After the Eurovision scandal, Sofi’s career mushroomed; she has toured
in the west and transformed her image form Middle Eastern playgirl to
elegant star. On her 2004 album, titled 5 Oktava Lyubov (5 Octaves of
Love) referring to her five-octave range, she displays her versatility: two
songs are in Serbian, two in Greek, and two in Turkish, in addition to sev-
eral songs in her native Bulgarian and Romani languages. She explained:
“I’ve been traveling to Turkey, Greece, and Serbia . . . so I wanted to learn
some songs in their language. . . . In the recording studio I had musicians
from those nations and tutors to make sure I got the phrasing” (Cartwright
2005c:42–43). On this album Sofi shows her mastery of multiple Balkan
vocal styles as well as languages. For example, she sings “Ušest” (Serbian
line dance) with regional ornamentation in a Serbian dialect of Romani.
She also sings a duet with the popular Serbian Romani singer Zvonko
Demirović. Finally, she uses talented guest musicians on this album rather
than the bland synthesized arrangements of most chalga singers.
For the past five years, Marinova has collaborated with rap star Ustata
on several songs, among them “Moy si Dyavole” (You are my devil),
“Tochno Ti” (Exactly you), “Buryata v Sŭrtseto Mi” (The storm in my

heart), “Bate Shefe” (Boss), and “Lyubov li Be” (Was it love?).20 Some of
these rap songs appeared on her 2006 album, Ostani (Stay) on Sunny
Music, which also features “Vyatŭr” (Wind), a remake of pop diva Lili Iva-
nova’s hit song resung in the Romani language with brass band participa-
tion. In an interview in Nov Fok, Sofi stated it was her manager’s idea to
rerecord Lili’s song, and he secured permission from Lili. Indeed, Sofi used
to be called the Romani Lili Ivanova, and in some of her songs she imitates
Lili’s style. Sofi explained that the wind metaphor in “Vyatŭr” is related to
Roma via “the theme of travel, like in the hymn Dželem Dželem. . . . We live
for our children . . . we want to make them big weddings” (Lozanova
2006:17). She also described her affinity for Indian films and claimed the
timbre of her voice “resembles a bit an Indian voice” when she sings in
Romani (Lozanova 2006:18). To the point, in her song “V Drug Svyat
Zhiveya” (I live in another world) on the album Studen Plamŭk (Cold
Flame) she uses a high-pitched Indian voice timbre and sings one verse in
Hindi. The song also features a kyuchek rhythm associated with India
(number 3 in Figure 2.1), synthesized drums (dhol), and string and flute
fillers reminiscent of Indian film music.
Ostani also features a second duet with Slavi, “Lyubovta e Otrova” (Love
is poison) that has an overtly political theme: war between Muslims and
Eastern Orthodox people.21 The black-and-white video opens with scenes
of a snowy Balkan village, shots of a church and a mosque, and the text:
“This is the Balkans. Over 300 wars have begun here. Here it is as if every
wind brings sadness and the land smells of blood. But sometimes love is
born from blood.” The video depicts (somewhat abstractly) Muslim versus
Slavic soldiers, with Slavi as a Slavic soldier and with Sofi, a conservative
Muslim woman, as his love. She wears no makeup and is dressed in a long
Muslim black coat and a white headscarf (covering her forehead and
neck). The style of the song and its lyrics are squarely pop;22 the visuals,
however, clearly link the song to the Balkans. The text refers to ill-fated
love between two people of warring religions, but the video ends on a
hopeful note. Slavi is no longer in soldier’s clothes, and the pair walk off
holding hands.
I think it is interesting that although Sofi is not Muslim she is willing to
portray a veiled Muslim in the clip. It is hard to picture another chalga star
in this role; images of mainstream chalga stars are fixed in sexuality,
whereas Marinova is a more adventurous and flexible artist. However,
being a practical artist she does not avoid sexuality in her more main-
stream videos. In 2008 Slavi wrote another song for Sofi, “Vinovni Sme”
(We are guilty) that became an instant hit. He sang it with her on his show
in a moving performance where they held hands; this was reminiscent of
their defiant duet performing “Edinstveni” during the Eurovision scandal
in 2005. Illustrating their commitment to social justice, Sofi and Ustata
released “Lyubov li Be” (Was it love) in 2010, including a bold message
against (and statistics about) sex trafficking.
The fact that Sofi clearly identifies as a Romani pop/folk singer was nar-
rated by Nick Nasev, an astute fan:

Sofi performed at a concert in Gotse Delchev to a sold-out crowd of
non-Romani elite businessmen and middle-class Roma; poor Roma
who couldn’t afford the tickets gathered outside and climbed on an
adjacent building to see and hear her; they knew every word of her
songs. When Sofi realized this, she went outside to sing directly to
them. She said to them (in Romani): “This is where I was as a little
girl.” The management was annoyed but they knew the huge Romani
crowd was a tribute to her, so they gave out free Cokes to the Roma.
In the last five years, Sofi has reemphasized her personal brand of pop/
folk with many songs in Romani. In 2005 she released “Vasilica” (St.
Basil’s day), which describes the Romani customs of this winter holiday,
and “Ah Lele” (Oh dear), a Bulgarian-language remake of a talava-style
song (see Chapter 2) by Muharem Ahmeti, a masterful Albanian Romani
singer from Tetovo, Macedonia. On her 2008 album Vreme Spri (Time
stops), she sings the Romani anthem “Dželem Dželem” (Chapter 3), “Mik
Mik” (Wink, wink; a remake of a popular older Romani song), and “Buba-
mara” (Ladybug), taken from the Serbian Romani singer Šaban
Bajramović. Her ties to Romani music have been further cemented
through collaboration with the Serbian brass band of Boban Marković (on
the CD Devla, God [Romani], Piranha 2009) and with Azis.
Azis
A notable exception to my earlier observation about tame male chalga

singers is Azis, who has emerged in the last decade as a megastar. Indeed,
Azis is an exception to many of the rules of chalga. A Romani male who is
ambiguous sexually, transgendered, and transvestite, he breaks every Bal-
kan gender code of behavior. In his videos, he dances erotic kyucheks;
loves fancy gowns, makeup, feathers, sequins, and high-heeled boots; and
has sex with men, women, himself, or several people at once or watches
others engage in sexual acts. He can be supermacho or superfeminine, or
both simultaneously. The public fascination with him draws on his trans-
gressive behavior, which is tolerable and even expected because he is
Romani; if he were a Bulgarian man he would be despised.
Azis is by far the most radical Romani performer in Bulgaria today. He
even has an extensive write-up in Wikipedia: “Azis has caused some con-
troversy in Bulgaria with his queer-like ways and his campaigning on
behalf of the somewhat downtrodden Roma gypsy minority.” He is one of
the “most famous people in Bulgaria,” according to Wikipedia. In 2005, he
was a candidate for a parliamentary position in the Evroroma political
party but did not win the election; he did, however, serve as honorary
party president. Bulgarians either love him or hate him, and consequently
he has amplified the debate about the crassness of chalga. In 2006 his
production company, Sunny Records, published his autobiography (with
pin-up photographs), basically a guide to his sex life, including genital

cosmetic surgeries (Azis 2006). Music journalist Garth Cartwright, who
did an extensive interview with him, wrote: “You don’t count Azis’s press
cuttings, you weigh them. . . .23 His metamorphosis into the most contro-
versial entertainer in Bulgarian history involved a demonic appearance-
shift and videos so lurid, so hallucinated with desire, they leave efforts by
The Prodigy and Marilyn Manson gathering MTV dust” (2005b:262–263).
A Kalderash Rom, Azis was born Vasil Boyanov in 1978 in Sliven and
started singing at an early age. He said: “Although my father was a profes-
sional accordion player, he didn’t like the idea of me being a musician. . . .
I started singing in the church choir in Romani. . . . We . . . formed a family
ensemble and . . . I would perform every night impersonating Michael
Jackson” (266). His family is Pentecostal, and his first recordings were of
Christian Romani songs with his family. His family lived in Germany and
Spain, but he returned to Bulgaria to sing (270). He performed in a bar
where he worked as a waiter, and sang at weddings, eventually winning
the best singer award at the 1999 Stara Zagora Romfest. “I’m for the big
stage with professional sound and lighting,” he says. “The small party, the
small business, it doesn’t interest me. So in a way I’m not the typical
Romani performer. My parents did not make a big deal about being Gypsy
and while I don’t hide my Gypsy heritage I wouldn’t say I was very proud
of it” (268).
Azis realized from a young age that he was an outsider in multiple ways
(in terms of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality) and that he could either suffer
from this situation or capitalize on it. When British journalist Michael
Palin interviewed him in 2008, Azis said “Because of my Gypsy ancestry,
everywhere doors closed on me. . . . My mother took me to film castings
but no one chose me because of the color of my skin.”24 His autobiography
begins by describing the 1996 Bulgarian National Television pop music
contest for young talent, which he says he deserved to win. He wore blue
contact lenses and a great deal of hair gel:
They stopped me in the middle [of my song]. They told me thank you.
By their tone I realized that I lost. And I knew why. Because I am a
Gypsy. I was ashamed of this. That’s how they lost a male pop singer.
But Azis was born. Even Gypsies hate me. . . . Because I am fair and
blue-eyed. They believe that I look like that, like in my photographs.
They don’t know about the existence of Photoshop. I wear a lot of
make-up. This scares people. And no matter how good I am, for those
close to me I’ll never be good [enough]” [Azis 2006:12–13].
As a child Azis played with dolls and dressed in his mother’s clothes. As
a teenager he cleaned offices, walked dogs for rich people, and performed
as a transvestite (Cartwright 2005b:260, 266). When he was interviewed
on Slavi Trifonov’s TV show in 2005, he admitted that as a young man he
couldn’t make a living as a wedding singer, so he and his agent invented
the persona Azis. On the show he refused to define his sexuality; part of his
mystique comes from audiences guessing. In October 2006, he married a

man at a huge wedding in a Sofia nightclub in front of an audience of
chalga stars and 200 journalists. Still, he wouldn’t pigeonhole his sexu-
ality.25 He explained, “If I marry a woman, they will say it’s only for show—
he is homosexual. If I marry a man, they’ll say it’s only for show, he’s a
man!” (Nov Folk 2007:15). His wedding was the first public homosexual
union in Bulgaria, a country with very traditional values. He and his part-
ner now are raising their daughter, Raya, whose biological mother is a
friend of Azis’s. Although he is not overtly political, Azis underscores that
part of being in the European Union is being tolerant toward homosex-
uals. He is now embraced by international gay artists and will be docu-
mented in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Gay Folklife, to be published
by M. E. Sharpe.
Like Madonna and Lady Gaga, Azis capitalizes on shock value in his
shows. At a concert with Desislava in 2005 (where she was carried out on
a palanquin, like a goddess, and where she referred to him as “her”), Azis
was in makeup, a blue sequined leotard, and a feathered skirt. On stage he
reenacted an incident that happened in Sofia regarding a billboard with
his image on it. The billboard was sexual in nature and was met with pro-
testors who complained not only about the image but also about the loca-
tion (it was in front of Vasil Levski’s monument, a sacred spot for many
Bulgarians, as Levski was a nineteenth-century fighter for freedom). How-
ever, Azis claims he is also a fighter for freedom. On stage, actors displayed
the billboard that replaced the controversial one. The audience heard the
sound of police cars arriving and sirens screeching, and then a nearly
nude dancer burst through the billboard—with Azis’s name painted on her
nude back and buttocks. The music for this sequence was the Bulgarian
national anthem. This scene was followed by one in which two women
kiss and simulate sex on a bed in the center of the stage, breaking the
taboo against lesbianism.
Azis has thus breached numerous social codes, and the list is growing.
Not only does he refuse to be categorized by sex (male, female), gender
(masculine, feminine), or sexuality (homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual),
but his clothing and image shift constantly. In 2001 there was a hysterical
reaction when he released “Hvani Me” (Catch me), where he is dressed in
Bollywood drag, toys with a python, and licks milk from the chest of two
almost naked black men (Cartwright 2005b:271). He has also included the
theme of Christianity in several videos. In “Obicham Te” (I love you, a
Bulgarian cover of Sotis Volanis’s Greek song Poso Mou Lipis, How much
I miss you), he is in a white billowing suit and scarf on a rocky cliff, caress-
ing himself; the video ends with lightning coming out of his outstretched
arms, perhaps a reference to Jesus on the cross.26 “Hajde Pochvay Me”
(Come on, let’s begin) takes place in a Catholic church and has scenes
referencing sex by the clergy, flogging, and crucifixion.
Musically, Azis is a versatile and talented vocalist. He was invited by the
world-renowned classical flautist Kristian Koev to sing “Ave Maria” at a clas-
sical Christmas concert in 2006; Koev claimed that Azis has an angelic voice.
In 2005, he sang a slow Bulgarian wedding song live on Slavi Trifonov’s TV

show, which is a mark of a masterful singer; Azis recorded the song “Ne
Kazvai Ljube Leka Nosht” (Don’t tell me good night, love) on his 2004 album
Kralyat (The King).27 Ironically, this same album includes a poster-sized pin-
up that exaggerates the contrast between his brown skin and bleached white
hair. The album also includes a Bollywood song, and its inside cover shows
Azis masturbating; in another shot he wears red thigh-high platform boots
and a pink fur hat. Thus the traditional, the erotic, the exotic, and the trans-
gressive are all juxtaposed.
Azis took his name from a Turkish movie, and indeed he can be fruit-
fully compared to two transgressive Turkish (non-Romani) singers: Zeki
Müren and Bülent Ersoy. Müren had multiple gendered personas, some-
times wore female clothing, and played with a Liberace-type flamboyant
male style. Ersoy is a transsexual, that is, he declared himself a woman
after surgery, but she keeps much about her personal life hidden.28 Both
artists were influenced by the female singer Müzeyyen Senaras (Stokes
2003:319). Azis has similarly drawn one of his primary personas from the
hypersexuality of mainstream chalga singers; the trick is that he is a man
enacting the hypersexualized female role. Azis can also be compared to
male Romani singers in Kosovo in the 1980s whose sexuality was assumed
to be homosexual; they were respected for their mastery of the talava
genre (see Chapter 2 and Pettan 2003). In historical perspective, Azis
evokes professional Ottoman dancers who staged elaborate pageants and
assumed various sexualities (Chapter 6).
Indeed, the comic and the playful have an important place in Azis’s
style. In 2007 Azis’s Night Show, a television talk and music show, pre-
miered on a cable channel, to mixed reviews. The program features musi-
cians, actors, and media stars who perform and are interviewed by Azis,
plus comedy skits and parodies of the evening news. Most viewers agree
he is less adept as an interviewer than he is in presenting multiple per-
sonas via clothing and performative modes.
Azis has found affinities in the Romani homeland, India. He told Cart-
wright that when he was a child “a friend . . . gave me a cassette of Indian
music and . . . I listened to it day and night. . . . Whenever they showed
Bollywood movies . . . hundreds of Gypsies would be waiting and when the
movie started we would all begin to cry” (2005b:266). Embracing India,
“Antigeroi” (Antihero; video example 9.6), is filmed in grainy black and
white and depicts kaleidoscopes of Azis wearing animalistic claws and
green, yellow, and orange body paint while dancing in front of a Hindu
temple that has erotic sculptures.29 This is obviously not a typical main-
stream chalga video. The song is taken from the popular 1993 Bollywood
movie Khalnayak (released in Bulgaria as Antigeroi). Azis sings the orig-
inal song (in mangled Hindi), and then we hear the original female film
singer. The lyrics caused a scandal in India because the Hindi refrain Choli
ke peeche kya hai (asking a woman “What is behind your shirt?”) could be
interpreted sexually instead of inviting the more acceptable answer, “my
heart.”30 The music, in a rag similar to hicaz, features synthesized Indian
instruments; the song opens with pungi, an instrument with two single

reeds, associated with snake charming, followed by shahnai, similar to a
zurna, and dhol (drums). Finally there is a short Bulgarian women’s uni-
son vocal section with glottals and yelps, characteristic of folk music.
Azis’s song “Nyama” (I won’t) illustrates the principle that many chalga
videos are more sexual than their texts. Chalga songs are played on the
radio for general audiences, while videos are watched by a more special-
ized group of fans. Nyama is a 2002 Bulgarian cover of the Serbian song
“Sama” (Alone), by turbofolk star Dragana Mirković, a cover of a song by
the Greek band Zig Zag. It has a harmless poetic text about failed (hetero-
sexual, monogamous) love (video example 9.7 with text supplement).
The video, unlike the text, is extremely explicit. It opens with the sound
of a heartbeat at night on a sleazy street; Azis is in the middle of a male
pick-up scene, young men with their shirts off looking for customers. A
transvestite walks by and Azis baits her. A limousine pulls up, the window
rolls down, and a beautiful woman motions to him. The song begins when
the chauffeur lets him into the back of the car and Azis and the woman
start having sex. She winks at the chauffeur and he joins them in the back
of the car for a threesome. The scene shifts to the woman’s apartment,
where the threesome continues, but the woman withdraws to facilitate the
men kissing (blindfolded) as she watches and drugs them. The scene shifts
again and the threesome are in a bed with black satin sheets located out-
side on a busy street corner in Sofia known as “five crossings.” The woman
is in the middle, but again she retreats and the two men are left embracing,
finally sleeping in the bed as she grabs her coat and walks away, leaving
them a generous tip.
This video, and other videos of Azis, can be analyzed via Judith Butler’s
theories of performativity, which remind us that we are dealing with dis-
cursive formations (in word and image) of gender, not immutable biolog-
ical realities.31 In her discussion of drag, Butler admits that drag may
rework, mime, and resignify heteronormative gender categories (to which
they always refer) but underscores that “there is no necessary relation
between drag and subversion”; she “calls into question whether parodying
the dominant norms is enough to displace them” (1993:125). Some have
argued that drag is related to misogyny;32 some have claimed that it rein-
scribes gender norms, and others have claimed it destabilizes norms. But-
ler states that drag both “appropriates gender norms and subverts them”;
“it remains caught in an irresolvable tension” (128). Azis’s drag shows are
staged precisely as performances; the viewer is always reminded of the
conscious display. In addition, he juxtaposes his drag persona with quite a
number of heterosexual personas, so we are never really sure of his “true
identity.” He does not perform “classic” drag but rather combines mascu-
line and feminine (for example, his bleached white beard is often juxta-
posed to his makeup). His point, and Butler’s, however, is that there is no
stable core identity, neither for transgenders nor for heterosexuals.
Returning to “Nyama,” I note that the viewer is led through a number of
gazes or points of view.33 When the video opens we think we are watching
gay men waiting for other gay men to hire them; we are led to believe we

are in a “gay low-class world.” But the arrival of the limousine with the
woman destabilizes the category and the label under which we assign her
and Azis’s sexuality. The tableau becomes more complicated when the
chauffer joins them. The viewer then begins to identify with the woman,
and we become the voyeur watching the two men. “The female gaze” over-
takes the male gaze, but it is not simply the gaze of a female heterosexual
desiring one male; rather she blindfolds the men (literally blocking their
gaze) and watches male-male relations. Note the class transgression here
as well as the gender transgression, as the chauffeur and Azis are mark-
edly working-class while the woman is rich. The closing image of her
leaving money for the two men underlines the transactional quality of the
sex depicted.
Azis portrays the fluidity of categories not only through his sexual
encounters but also through his musical voicings and the shifts in audi-
ence point of view in his videos. In “Dnevnik I Praznik” (Weekday and
holiday), for example, he is without makeup and hair dye; in fact, he is a
rather ordinary looking photographer, who embodies the heteronormative
male gaze. He photographs beautiful models, making them into sexual
objects; but he also inverts this gaze in the same video by singing as the
persona of one of the models. In “Kak Boli” (How it hurts), Azis is a man
rejected by his lover, a sexy transgendered male-to-female singer; at the
same time, however, he sings her part as well as his own. In “No Kazvam
Ti, Stiga” (But I’m telling you, enough), he is first pictured as a busi-
nessman/intellectual at his desk with his gaze on male bodybuilders; the
latter become construction workers as Azis is morphed into a veiled,
sequined, crowned apparition at the construction site. The video ends
back at the desk but with a whole world of ambiguity introduced.
In the 2008 clip “Nakarai Me” (Force me), Azis introduces (by name)
three buff men (sometimes wearing women’s accessories, one noticeably
dark-skinned) and one practically nude female, and suggestively offers
variable sexual combinations of the assembled five actors. Finally, in “Teb
Obicham” (I love you, 2008), he appears in a dress, earrings, and makeup
and presents shifting sexualities in a black-and-white pageant; he also
sings a vocal mane on the syllable ah, reminiscent of Romani instrumental
improvisations.
Finally, let us turn to the duet “Edin Zhivot Ne Stiga” (One life isn’t
enough) because it pairs the two most prominent Romani chalga stars,
Azis and Sofi Marinova. The vocal style is typically Romani, with florid
ornamentation and emotional cries, glottals, and gasps. In a dramatic mo-
ment, Azis even switches to falsetto briefly at the end. The text is a love
poem in Bulgarian, but it switches to Romani for the last two lines (see
video example 9.8 with text supplement). The video depicts a male patron
(Azis) watching Azis and Sofi belly-dance on stage (with a reference to
pole dancing). The client snorts cocaine. Sofi and Azis are both wearing
makeup and are similarly dressed in belly dance outfits. Sofi shows her
midriff and Azis wears a skirt over pants, but the pants are cut off ex-
posing one buttock cheek. This video equalizes males and females as sex

objects, and the patron seems equally interested in Azis and Sofi. For their
part, they seem to vie for his attention; they hardly sing to each other but
rather each sings to the patron. The males seem interested in one another
just as much as they are in Sofi, if not more. Thus instead of the standard
heterosexual triangle (two males fighting over one woman), the video sug-
gests other permutations.
I suggest that Azis is playing with stereotypes; sometimes he even gets
other heterosexual singers to break heteronormative rules with him. For
example, DJ Ustata appears in a homoerotic sequence with Azis in “Tochno
Sega” (Exactly now; see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Infm8wIJRA).
I argue that Azis also paved the way for other chalga stars to explore non-
heteronormative permutations of sexuality. For example, in the 2008 video
“Ne Se Sramuvam” (I am not ashamed) Malina suggests she is not
ashamed of lesbianism; in the 2008 video “Gubya Kontrol Kogato” (I lose
control when), Miro and his cast display lesbianism, homosexuality, and
heterosexuality via bondage and Goth costumes.
Azis often adopts the standard oriental stereotype but overlays it with a
gendered stereotype of the superfeminine. In many of his videos, however,
he is the superfeminine, which exposes the stereotype as constructed (in
Butler’s terms, as “performative”). I am not suggesting that he is critical of
eastern stereotypes; rather, he loves play acting; the oriental is a fantasy
world for him. But the oriental is a different type of fantasy for a Romani
transvestite man than for a mainstream chalga star. To phrase it differ-
ently, if he can be as oriental as any chalga star, he can also be as feminine;
and if he can be as feminine, he has destabilized the categories. Despite
his elaborate stagings, Azis is actually much more grounded in Romani
music than most mainstream chalga stars; he frequently sings live, he con-
sistently uses real guest musicians and gives them solos, and he even has
instrumental kyucheks on his albums—quite unheard of on the albums of
the female mainstream stars.
Chalga, Morality, and Ethnic Politics
We may now return to an analysis of the culture wars over chalga, which
have polarized Bulgarian society. Critics, composed of the intelligentsia,
nationalists, and some folk musicians, accuse chalga of being crass, low-
class, pornographic, banal, and kitsch, and of using bad or formulaic
music and too many eastern elements. The debates have become so viru-
lent that proposals to ban chalga have been suggested, and hundreds of
articles and books such as Chalga: Za ili Protiv (Chalga: Pro and Cons;
Bulgarian; Kraev 1999) and The Seven Sins of Chalga (Statelova 2005)
have appeared.34
Defenders of chalga come from all social groups but are clustered in the
working classes and in the under-thirty population. They often see chalga
as a bridge between East and West, or as pan-Balkan feel-good entertain-
ment, and they emphasize musical unity with Balkan neighbors. Indeed,

chalga has both drawn from pan-Balkan styles and been exported to many
countries, most notably Romania in the form of manele (see Chapter 12
and Beissinger 2007); pop/folk is now the most widely shared music in the
Balkans. In fact, since 2005 the cable television channel Balkanika has
broadcast pop/folk twenty-four hours a day in eleven countries. The
channel emphasizes the unity of this new style despite the ten languages
used in the songs.35 Among scholars, chalga’s Ottoman legacy in the form
of inclusiveness, “symbiosis,” or “cosmopolitanism” has been discussed as
a strength and possibly as a counteraction to ethnic nationalism (Rice
2002:41; Buchanan 2007:260; Dimov 2001). I realize the idealistic poten-
tial of this sentiment, but I think the situation on the ground is more com-
plicated.
I concur with Jane Sugarman’s observation that the various recent man-
ifestations of pop/folk across the Balkans are actually quite different from
each other stylistically (2007:270). More important, each version of pop/
folk does specific ideological work in its own locality, some of it even na-
tionalist in nature.36 For example, earlier I suggested that despite the ori-
ental style of chalga, one recent strain emphasizes patriotism to the
majority Eastern-Orthodox Bulgarian culture. Not surprisingly, debates
about pop/folk in various countries have centered on what it means to be
Balkan, often contrasted to what it means to be European.37 Historian
Maria Todorova, for example, has written eloquently on the ambivalent
attitude of Bulgarians toward the Ottoman past (1997), and Kiossev
reminds us that for Bulgarians Balkan can be coded as either positive or
negative. It can mean uncivilized, oriental, and backward, or familiar and
intimate,38 or “tricksterlike” (2002:183). For Muslims, on the other hand,
the Turkish legacy is often coded as positive in reference to the high Otto-
man culture of urban Muslims (Ellis 2003).
Note that the figure of the Gypsy looms rather prominently in the im-
agery of the backward/oriental Balkans, or in Kiossev’s terms “the stigma”
(2002:189). In all Balkan languages (in fact in most European languages),
Gypsy is used as a slur, meaning thief, and in Bulgarian tsiganska rabota
(Gypsy work) means a job poorly done or a deceitful business move. The
concept of “nesting orientalisms” (Bakić-Hayden 1995) can be helpful in
teasing out who is perceived as more Balkan than whom. Bulgarians may
be Balkan/oriental to Western Europeans (or Croatians) but Gypsies are
Balkan/oriental to Bulgarians. Sugarman reminds us that not only are
Roma the most marginalized group but they are precisely the group from
which pop/folk appropriated its style: “Within this dynamic of musical
‘nesting Orientalisms,’ Roma are of course in a class by themselves, both
as the group which all others have stigmatized and as the musicians who
once dominated the spheres in which the majority of the new regional
genres arose” (2007:303).
In the debate about chalga in Bulgaria, it is, then, not surprising that the
criticism about eastern elements is often phrased specifically against
Roma; I frequently heard the phrase “It is a shame that now Bulgarians
only want to hear Gypsy music.” Levy cites slogans from newspapers such

as “Down with kyuchek” and “It wouldn’t be surprising if soon the na-
tional anthem sounded oriental,” and she describes a 1999 petition to par-
liament signed by prominent cultural figures that pleaded for a “cleansing”
of the national soundscape, where the petitioners referred to chalga as
“bad,” “vulgar,” and “strange” sounds coming from the “uncivilized expe-
riences of the local Gypsies and Turks.” The petition expressed concern
“about an invasion by their music which might result in the ‘gypsification’
and ‘turkification’ of the nation” (2002:224). Note that chalga, and thus
Roma, are associated with low morals and lack of civilization. For some
opponents, then, chalga has become the enemy of the nation, and the
Roma are to blame. Levy points out that these nationalists see heritage as
threatened, and they personify the threat in Roma.
Imre uses the phrase “double cooptation” (2008:335) to refer to the un-
tenable position Roma artists occupy as they are caught between the state
and the market:
The Roma are twice rendered abject in the negotiation between

nation-states and corporate agents of globalization and Europeaniza-
tion. First because they are perceived as unable and unwilling to as-
similate to the national project, and thus are universally judged to be
an impediment to full and furious EU accession. . . . Second, the
Roma are also demonized because of their inherently transnational
identity affiliations which in turn turns them into convenient suspects
for allying themselves with the dreaded forces of globalization
[2006:661].
Ditchev points out that chalga, as “low class music,” is totally excluded
from the rubric of culture; this is reserved for the high arts and folklore,
which “instill love for the homeland.” Bulgaria is not conceived of as a
place where different ethnicities live together but rather a “form of kin-
ship, based upon pure and direct (imagined, of course) filiation.” Roma
are, of course left out of this equation of place with monoethnicity. Fur-
thermore, culture is opposed to pleasure and consumption (2004). Thus
Roma are twice erased, first in terms of being outside the nation and sec-
ond in terms of being too tied to consumption.
Ideological statements about music need to be placed in a larger political
framework, specifically the rise in nationalism. Consider a 2005 Gallup poll
on interethnic relations conduced by the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee.
The results show that one-fifth of Bulgarians are so anti-Romani (and also
anti-Turk, and to a slightly lesser extent anti-Semitic) that they do not rec-
ognize the right of these minorities to live in the same country as “pure
Bulgarians.” Twenty-seven percent of Bulgarians would not want to live in
the same country as Roma. In answering the question, “Would you person-
ally accept a Roma as a local police chief?” 82 percent said no; similar fig-
ures were obtained when the question asked about a government minister
or an army officer. With the statement that Roma are lazy, irresponsible,
and untrustworthy, 85–86 percent of respondents agreed (57 percent agreed

that “Turks are religious fanatics,” and 29 percent agreed that “Jews are
taking up many leadership positions”—in spite of their total absence from
state leadership; Cohen 2005). The poll found that these attitudes are clus-
tered neither by age nor region, nor educational level, nor income level, but
rather are spread out among all Bulgarians, indicating “deeply rooted prej-
udices, carried over . . . from the entire child-rearing and educational
system” (Cohen 2005; also see Ghodsee 2008).
It is not surprising, then, that the racist themes of parties such as Attack
are attractive to some Bulgarians. In the 2005 parliamentary elections,
Attack received 8.14 percent of the vote and became the fourth largest
party in parliament. In October 2006, Volen Siderov, head of Attack,
received 21 percent of the votes for president. Since 2009 the party has
held two of Bulgaria’s seventeen seats in the European Parliament. Attack
is against the European Union membership of Turkey, and one of Attack’s
campaign mottos was precisely the phrase used in the petition discussed
above: “No to Gypsification! No to Turkification!” In 2006, on its cable
channel SKAT, Ataka broadcast seven programs on criminality and “Gypsy
terror” in which Siderov suggested that Bulgarians “were being murdered,
robbed, beaten, and raped daily by an alien minority, and were not getting
any protection from the law enforcement authorities who had united with
the Roma against the Bulgarians because they are the employees of a cor-
rupt ruling class” (Kanev 2005).
Attack claims that there is reverse discrimination and that Bulgarians
are now the victims and Roma are the perpetrators. They have managed
to take Roma, the most vulnerable citizens of Bulgaria, and constructed
them as a criminal race that “sows terror against Bulgarians unhindered
by the state.” In fact, in one TV broadcast Roma were called cockroaches
(Kanev 2005). Attack supporters use the slogan “Gypsies into soap,” and a
rap song with this phrase is being circulated on private channels.39 Attack
is currently finding allies in the European parliament and is part of an
anti-immigration group called Identity, Tradition, and Sovereignty, The
leader of the group was fined by the French Court for remarks made in
2004 questioning the Holocaust.
Thus—returning to the topic of music—we can see that as Romani music
has been appropriated into chalga, Roma themselves have not become
more integrated socially, economically, and politically into Bulgarian so-
ciety. True, Romani musicians found work as chalga musicians in the
1990s, yet more recently the Romani presence is declining in mainstream
chalga. But how can we explain the growing popularity of Azis, a Rom?
Azis breaks taboos and gets away with it, and he is even admired by
some. His Romani ethnicity is the key, because a minority can function as
the clown, the trickster, as society’s other. He proves he is “other” by being
Romani and gay, reinforcing society’s opinion that Roma are doubly mar-
ginal. For a Bulgarian man to do what he does would be considered
unthinkable by most Bulgarians. His minority status gives him the free-
dom of marginality; Azis can transgress more easily because he is already
marginal by virtue of his being Romani.

PART I V
M US I C I AN S I N T R A N SI T
10
ab
Esma Redžepova
“Queen of Gypsy Music”
A ll over the Balkans, Romani men are known as expert musicians;

Romani women and their participation in musical arts have only re-
cently been the focus of scholarly attention (Seeman 2002, 2007; Sugar-
man 2003; Pettan 1996a, b, and c, and 2003; Potuoǧlu-Cook 2007;
Silverman 1996b, 2000b, 2003). Building on Chapter 6, which examined
dance in terms of gender and sexuality, this chapter looks at the history of
Romani female singers and concretizes one performer’s strategy. Esma
Redžepova is perhaps the most famous Romani singer in the world.
Though atypical, Esma’s life illuminates how and why she resisted norms
and became a star.1 Esma was proclaimed “Queen of Romani Music” in
India in 1976, European Primadonna in 1995, and Romani Millennium
Singer in 2000; she has toured internationally for more than fifty years,
has given some 10,000 concerts, and has recorded hundreds of albums
(www.esma.com.mk).
I argue that Esma’s success was built on a number of paradoxes: she
succeeded in part because of her non-Romani mentor/husband’s mar-
keting ability; her image drew on sanitized stereotypes of Romani
women as exotic, nubile, emotional, and musical on the one hand, yet
rooted in families on the other; and finally, she bridged the ambivalent
Romani attitude of requiring, aestheticizing, and respecting female mu-
sical performances in nonprofessional realms while stigmatizing them
in professional settings. Professional music has been an important me-
dium of exchange between Roma and non-Roma, and the musical mar-
ketplace has been the site where gendered images are exchanged. As I
emphasized in Chapter 6, the association of women with sexuality is
symbolic capital to use in the marketplace and negotiate in Romani
contexts.
201
Romani Female Music Making in
Historical Perspective
The history of Romani female musicians and the relationship between

singing and sexuality are discussed in text supplement 10.1. Given the
stigma of loss of modesty and reputation associated with singing in public
for strangers, it is not surprising that among Balkan Muslim Roma there
are very few female professional vocalists in comparison with male profes-
sional vocalists. A cursory review of Šutkafest 1993 (see Chapter 8) reveals
that out of some seventeen Romani groups, only four or five singers were
females, and of those, two had husbands also performing. Similarly, at the
1998 Romska Vasilica singing contest held in Macedonia, out of nine
singers there was only one woman, Esma Redžepova. According to the
1997 Albanian Romani CD Rromano Dives (Romani Day), in the past
women did not sing professionally at weddings. This situation also seems
to be true for non-Romani Balkan Muslims and for Roma from other
areas of Europe.2
Those women who defy convention are subject to ridicule and charges
of immorality.3 Salif Ali, a Bulgarian Romani drummer, explained that it
was totally unacceptable for his daughter to become a singer. When the
rare set of parents do agree to a daughter’s singing, the career often ends
with marriage if the husband is not a musician. Pettan writes of a young
Kosovo Romani woman who was a wedding singer and became a re-
cording artist: “After she married, her husband strongly opposed the con-
tinuation of her musical career, so now she sings only in a private setting
for family and friends” (1996a:316–317).4 One way to circumvent public
disapproval is to marry a musician. This mitigates the professional’s im-
modesty because one’s husband (or father or brother) serves as the pro-
tector of the wife’s honor. Indeed, many female Balkan Romani vocalists
today perform with family members.5 Given these restrictions, Esma
Redžepova’s life is quite extraordinary.
Esma Redžepova: Early Years
Esma was born in 1943 in Skopje, Macedonia, to a poor Muslim family.

Her mother, Č anija, was from a village near Skopje and a seamstress
who sewed šalvari for Romani patrons. Her father, Ibrahim, was a boot-
black; as a child, Esma carried his shoe shining supplies for him. He lost
a leg during World War II, was too poor to buy a prosthesis, and used
crutches. In 1941 Ibrahim was wounded in a Nazi bombardment of Sko-
pje; of about 400 people injured, only four survived. Esma recalled: “I
was also a hardworking child. I delivered milk to households, and I
cleaned windows in a four-story house for pocket money. I liked to go to
the movies, the puppet theater; I was in love with all the arts. We all went
to school and learned to read and write; one of my brothers went on to
higher education.”
202 Musicians in Transit

Esma’s father had a good voice and knew many songs but never per-
formed professionally, and her older brother was a founding member of
the Phralipe KUD (see Chapter 6). As a child, Esma sang and danced in
school productions, and her talent was noticed by Pece Atanasovski, who
worked for Radio Skopje; he invited her to sing for an amateur program
called “The Microphone Is Yours.” She feared her parents’ wrath when
they found out that she had sung over the radio:
This was in 1956. We were all sitting at home—we would listen to this
program every Sunday. I knew I was going to be on the radio . . . so I
suggested we take a nap, and I covered my head! On the radio [we
heard]: “What’s your name?” “Esma Redžepova.” “How old are you?”
“Eleven years old.” “What will you sing?” “A bre babi so kerdžan [What
did you do, father?].” I sang, and everybody hid their heads under the
covers. Father said: “Is that our Esma? No it can’t be, because our
Esma is asleep under the covers . . . it must be another Esma. There
are many Esma Redžepovas in Skopje. . . .” The next day when father
went to work shining shoes, all his friends gathered around him and
congratulated him for my performance. But he said, “No that was
someone else, it wasn’t my Esma. She was at home sleeping.” His
friends responded, “Don’t you understand? That [program] was
recorded earlier. It was Esma.” I got a big slap when he got home!
Esma explained how her community was suspicious of a female singing

in public: “A Gypsy girl, beautiful, who also sang—that would have been
really dangerous. The family decided that I, like all other girls, I should
marry early, and have children, and obey my husband without question,
and work” (Teodosievski and Redžepova 1984:89).6 Esma remembers, “I
was a girl at the time, I wasn’t yet married. . . . According to our tradition
it was a shame to sing publicly.” Singing was an especially sensitive topic
in the Redžepova household because of the disgrace Esma’s sister Sajka
had brought on the family:
For Ibrahim, my father, himself a wonderful singer, really hated singing!

Or at least singing in public. For him singing in public meant singing in
low grade restaurants (kafanas), it meant drinking and carousing. And
he had every reason to think that way. My sister Sajka, a pretty talented
girl had brought disgrace on the family and become a singer in a kaf-
ana. Ibrahim couldn’t get over it: his lovely Sajka singing to drunks who
smashed glasses for kicks. For him, Sajka was “dead. . . .” I believe that
had she kept on and had more luck, she would have become a great
singer. . . . How beautifully she sang! I listened to her in wonder. My
father and mother cursed her. If only Sajka had someone to lead her, to
show her the way. But the kafana “ate her up. . . .” I remembered Sajka’s
fate, because something similar awaited me too. And it also helped me
to understand why my parents would so bitterly resent me even
thinking of becoming a singer [90–91].
Esma Redžepova 203

Despite parental disapproval, Esma’s brothers supported her first steps
toward a singing career: “My brothers . . . never mentioned in front of my
parents where and when they had seen me in town. . . . My brothers would
say to our parents: ‘Why do you worry so much about Esma, she is not
Sajka! She has a will of her own and if she decides to sing she will sing!
But she will be a real singer, an artist!’” (91). Similarly, Esma’s teacher told
her father: “Don’t spoil your daughter’s chances, Ibrahim! She is a great
talent. Singing does not necessarily mean singing in a kafana” (93).
Esma was indeed strong-willed: “I became emancipated and stopped
wearing dimije, which I thought clumsy and impractical, so I wore my
shabby flowered dresses, handed down from my sister, but still, ‘city-style’”
(89). Esma also resisted her parents’ marrying her off in her teens. When
her mother mentioned marriage, Esma replied, “I tell you, I’ll hang myself
in the little square in front of the school, on the monument. . . . I don’t
know if my mother really believed my threats, but any way, they didn’t
manage to marry me off at the age of thirteen!” (92). She even had to fight
off taunts from relatives. Her sister-in-law Veba often taunted her: “Ha!
You want to be singer, do you? You’ll wash windows and scrub floors as a
married woman.” “Hey, I will not, you know. I don’t want to be a servant,
I want to be an artist.” “You can want all you want when your parents
marry you off. They’ve already had offers” (91–92).
When she was eleven years old, Esma was brought to the attention of
Stevo Teodosievski (1934–1997), an Eastern Orthodox ethnic Macedonian
accordionist and folk music arranger who worked for Radio Skopje and
later became her husband and mentor. The introduction was made by
Medo Č un, a Romani clarinet player in Stevo’s orchestra and a friend of
Esma’s brother’s (see Chapter 2). According to Esma, Medo said to Stevo:
“I have to show you this little girl because she is incredible when she sings
and dances at weddings.” Stevo was a self-taught musician from a poor
Koč ani family.
Esma was very intimidated during her first meeting with Stevo. His ini-
tial question to her was, “Do you smoke?” She answered negatively. He
was struck by her talent and sparkle, and remarked: “You have some
talent, but you really will have to work.” Stevo wanted to take her on as a
pupil and train her, but Esma’s parents said no: “My father said, ‘What? A
singer? No, she’s ready for marriage; people are already asking; she’ll be
married in a year or two. Why should singing break up my family?’” Her
parents strongly opposed her singing career. They said: “She will not sing.
She will listen to her mother and father.” But Stevo managed to convince
them that he would make her into an artist, not a cafe singer, if they would
not marry her off until she was eighteen years old. “When Stevo promised
him faithfully that he would help me to become a good and famous
singer—not a singer in any old nightclub—when my father had reassured
himself that Stevo’s intentions were honest, that he would look after me,
he finally agreed” (95).
However, the stigma of singing in public subtly undermined Esma’s mo-
rality, and her parents faced many challenges. Esma asserted: “At that

time it was the easiest thing to offend my girlish pride, my purity. Espe-
cially as we Skopje Roma were very sensitive about such things. Some
busybody would go up to my father . . . and tell him there was ‘something
going on’ between me and Stevo, always together on trips, in hotels. ‘Poor
Ibrahim’ they would say and my father would wish the ground could
swallow him” (96–97). The couple eventually decided to marry, but because
Esma’s father had passed away they had to wait a respectable mourning
period.
At that time, it was virtually unknown for Roma and Macedonians to
intermarry; neither group desired it. Esma narrated: “We were the first
mixed marriage! That was a big deal! Can you imagine how many people
were at our wedding in 1968. Ten to fifteen thousand people came to see if
it were true that the two of us were getting married.” They first celebrated
in Drač evo, a suburb of Skopje, and then provided free buses to transport
people to the celebration in Belgrade (Cartwright 2005b:105–106). She
recalled:
Even though Stevo was poor, the wedding arrangement was that he
should provide new clothing for my mother and every single aunt—
this was a great expense. We did all the Romani customs—henna, etc.
Since my father had passed away, my brother defended me when
Stevo came to get me. My brother demanded 10,000 dinars ($10) for
me. Stevo said, “I can’t possibly pay that much—I have to drive Esma
around to perform, and pay for gas, food, lodging. I can only give
1,000.” So I was bought for $1!
Esma’s early career soared among Macedonian fans, but her relation-
ship to Romani audiences was more ambivalent. According to Esma’s
cousin Šani Rifati, Roma at first rejected Esma not so much because she
was a professional singer but because she spent time with, and married, a
non-Romani man. For Roma, Stevo’s Macedonian ancestry was even more
important than any alleged indecent relationship. Eventually, after mar-
riage and international stardom, Esma was accepted and embraced by her
own Romani community.
Esma’s Style and Image
Under the banner Esma—Ansambl Teodosievski, Esma and Stevo launched

a career in the 1960s characterized by instantaneous success and daring
innovations. Esma was the first Balkan Romani musician (male or female)
to achieve commercial success in the non-Romani world; she was the first
openly identified Romani singer to perform in the Romani and Macedo-
nian languages for non-Roma; she was the first female Romani artist to
record in Yugoslavia; and she was the first Macedonian woman (Romani
or non-Romani) to perform on television. Esma claims her success is due
to Stevo: “What I am singing is only what Stevo taught me. He was wise,
Esma Redžepova 205

about twenty years ahead of his time; He taught me how to understand
music. . . . Whatever he promised to me came true.”
Modesty aside, Esma herself composed many of her songs, choreo-
graphed her performances, and provided the talent propelling her success.
On the other hand, Stevo planned Esma’s career very carefully. One early
strategy was not to allow Esma to perform at kafanas and weddings, but
only at concerts and for radio and television recordings. In effect, Stevo
created a new category of female concert artist that didn’t have the stigma
of cafe or wedding singer.7 Today, Esma is very proud of the fact that she
has not engaged in restaurant work and only sings at weddings of friends,
for free.
Even before meeting Esma, Stevo was promoting Romani music at
Radio Skopje, a radical move for which he was severely criticized. In 1956
he taught two Macedonian singers, Dragica and Dafinka Mavrovska, songs
in the Romani language and arranged a performance in Belgrade (for
which they wore dimije); later the songs were broadcast on Radio Skopje
and recorded on Jugoton. Audiences were fascinated, and according to
Stevo: “I knew that we had broken through a barrier” (Teodosievski and
Redžepova 1984:30). Stevo remarked: “At that time it would have been
impossible for a Romani woman to perform due to the racism.” Esma, a
child at the time, remembers thinking, “I can do better than that—Why
don’t I sing?” When Radio Skopje decided to make its first Romani records,
director Blago Ivanovski substituted his girlfriend Anka Gieva for Dafinka.
Thus the 1957 recording of Stevo’s song “Bašal Seljadin” (Play Seljadin;
Jugoton SY 1090) was sung by Anka Gieva and Dragica Mavrovska. This
version seems tame and mild-mannered, hardly like a čoček, with a bland
2/4 rhythm and no syncopation (audio example 10.1 with text supple-
ment). By contrast, Esma’s version, recorded several years later, has a
driving rhythm and gutsy vocals. The visuals in video example 10.1 with
text supplement were filmed in 1988 (MP 31005), but the audio is Esma’s
recording from the 1960s (RTB SF 13085; I analyze the staging later in this
chapter). The Romani text reflects the importance of music in the life of
Roma.
Singing in the Romani language was Esma’s statement of pride in her
heritage: “I was the first Rom to sing in the Romani language. It was ac-
tually historical, that Yugoslavia was the first place to broadcast Romani
songs on radio. It was kind of a shame to sing in Romani in my time;
many singers hid the fact that they were Romani. When I came out
singing my own songs in Romani, many came out after me.” Note that
Esma uses the phrase come out, to characterize the bravery a Romani
artist needed to confront the prejudicial attitude of Yugoslav music pro-
duction. For example, around 1967 two sisters, Živka and Jordana Run-
jaić, recorded singles in the Romani language. They said they were Serbs,
but it was revealed they were Roma. According to Esma “many singers
passed [as other ethnic groups] because there was an embargo on Romani
singers. There was discrimination against them as performers. I risked a
great deal when I said I was Romani and I want to sing in my own

language.” She continued: “Our Romani women were afraid at the time to
say they were Roma—they said they were Turkish, Macedonian, Alba-
nian, anything but Roma. . . . After the cleansings of World War II, Roma
were afraid for their lives and at no time would admit they were Roma.”
Stevo commented: “Esma was the first leader with the flag! All the other
people looked at her to see if she was accepted. . . . On her first record . . .
‘Gypsy music’ was written. It was very clear! For the first time ‘Gypsy
Music’ was written on a label.” Esma: “I opened the way for Roma, in the
first place, to admit that they are Roma, and not to be ashamed they are
Roma.”
Esma and Stevo endured the racism of Macedonian institutions and the
gossip of the public. At Radio Skopje, Stevo was repeatedly told: “Take
Vaska Ilieva, take other singers—why a Gypsy?” His colleagues said cru-
elly, “Stevo why have you brought this Gypsy to disgrace us?” (Teodosievski
and Redžepova 1984:95). In the beginning of her career, they deliberately
denied Esma opportunities. Stevo recalled: “They took from her the song
she knew and did best and gave it to another girl” (38); later, one of their
films, Zapej Makedonijo (1968), won prizes, but it was rarely shown in
Macedonia (54).
Stevo commented: “Some of the top officials from Radio Skopje’s
communist party leadership thought they needed to let me know that it
would be better for the show to have a participant of Macedonian na-
tionality. I was then, just like now, devoid of any nationalistic precon-
ceptions. I consider myself a cosmopolitan” (Mamut 1993:3). Stevo
recalled: “They chased me out of Macedonia because of Esma—we had
to move to Belgrade. They said ‘Why do you play that Romani music?
Let it go—you are not Romani.’ I was a member of the communist party
through Radio Skopje. The party objected, they threw me out. . . . The
secretary of the party said, ‘Why do you bother with Esma? Vaska Ilieva,
Anka Gieva, they are Macedonians, Esma isn’t!’ From then on I had
nothing to do with the party—it didn’t interest me any more. I played
what they told me at work, period.” The taunts became so stifling that in
the 1960s Stevo and Esma decided to move to Belgrade, the capital of
Yugoslavia, where they would have more opportunities. Esma said:
“People knew me too well, they were talking too much about us in Skopje,
and we had to get out of that environment.”
Stevo was very conscious about creating a specific Romani niche for
Esma in the commercial world. Part of his genius was to craft a trademark
image and staging for Esma that evoked the historical stereotypes of
Gypsy women as sensual and fiery but that kept the pageant tasteful (see
photographs 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3). A survey of Yugoslav press reviews
during Esma’s early years reveals that critics focused on her Romani heri-
tage in stereotypical prose: she was described as dark-skinned, hot-blooded,
happy-go-lucky, and genetically talented; she was even hailed as the new
“Koštana,” referring to the Serbian 1902 opera about a seductive Romani
songstress.8 Stevo and Esma cultivated these stereotypes as long as they
were positive. This resonates with a point I make throughout this book:
Esma Redžepova 207

that Roma orientalize themselves when necessary for marketing purposes.
Furthermore, historically Roma have had few opportunities to alter their
imagery and discourse because they have never been in control of their
representations.9
The 1988 staging of the song “Bašal Seljadin” (from 1957, discussed
earlier, video example 10.1 with text supplement) includes several stereo-
typic elements: a barefoot man in a Hungarian Gypsy costume strutting,
female dancers in belly dance outfits with flimsy veils doing modern
dance choreographies, and a background of tents. Other songs in this
video series are set in a pseudo-Gypsy camp near a “stream” (actually a
swimming pool) with a fire, a setting sun, and pseudo-Russian Gypsy
dancers. These videos feature the ballet troupe of Macedonian National
Television. When I asked Esma what she thought of these stagings, she
said she thought they were artistic. I discuss this point again in Chapters
12 and 13.
Romantic stereotypes do sometimes help break barriers. Esma, for ex-
ample, may have reinforced the female Gypsy sensual image, but she her-
self never wore immodest belly dance outfits. Rather, she was the first
Romani performer to appear in Romani-style dimije for non-Romani au-
diences. “I was the only one, with Teodosievski’s help, to jump up publicly
on stage and wear dimije, and I wear them to this day. I am not ashamed
to wear them and I am not ashamed to say I am Romani.” Dimije, which
emphasize hip movements, linked Esma specifically to Roma, to other
Muslims all over the Balkans, and to tradition. Esma’s dimije were fash-
ioned from modern fabrics and colors, and she further innovated with
accessories and headpieces, some evoking Eastern themes.
Emotion is perhaps Esma’s trademark affect. I have pointed out that
emotion is iconically associated with Roma in terms of unbridled passion
(Silverman 2011 and in press). Esma capitalized on emotion in both her
voice and her stagings. Her iconic song in terms of emotion is “Hajri Ma
Te, Dikhe, Daje” (May you see no good, mother), where she enacts the la-
ment of a young girl being married off to an older man. In the 1970s video
of the song she is dressed in a white veil and virtually cries while she sings
the song (video example 10.2 with text supplement). The sobs become part
of the unmetered melody. This staging depicts an older Muslim husband
who is served by a young wife. In later concert stagings of this song, Esma
sings from beneath a black veil with her face totally obscured and her ac-
companying musicians bowing their heads in sympathy. At the end of the
song, one of them lifts her veil, and in a dramatic shift the musicians begin
a new and lively rhythmic song; she dramatically plays on the emotional
shift from despair to joy.
Another trademark feature introduced by Stevo was that all the per-
formers stood up, giving them unprecedented freedom of movement on
stage. Typically, they swayed right and left with their instruments in
rhythm, evoking the back-up singers in Western pop groups of the 1960s.
And most daring, Esma danced during musical interludes (see Chapter 6).
She explained:

I am a traditional woman—growing up, the women gathered inside. I
adopted all the old ways. Stevo told me when I was young, “you will
dance exactly how you danced inside with the women at a wedding.”
I answered “but that is shameful.” He said “it is not shameful—it is
your tradition—it is your national dance. Others dance differently, but
you are dressed in dimije, it is not a shame, you have something to
dance about! You aren’t bare, you don’t dance (with your hips) in a
circle, you dance with your stomach.” And he persuaded me that I
don’t need to feel ashamed of that—I have to show my culture—it is
our national dance. I have accepted, embraced, exactly what Stevo
taught me. After I got on the stage and danced, it was easier for other
Romani women and girls.
Stevo staged Esma’s performances as miniature dramatic scenes in which

she enacted the story of the song. Her voice showcased emotions evoked in
the text (often using cries and yelps), and her hand gestures referred to
story themes. Similar to professional female Ottoman dancers (see Chapter
6) and to generations of male musicians, she masterfully played to audience
sentiment. Esma continues stagings of this type to the present, even though
some have criticized them as too clichéd. Stevo also introduced the tara-
buka (hand drum) to concert performances; associated with Muslims, it
had never before been used on a concert stage. Furthermore, he engaged
uninhibited young Romani boys to play the tarabuka dramatically while
they playfully danced with Esma.10 Not only did young boys provide visual
and emotional interest but their participation also created a wholesome
family image for Ansambl Teodosievski, with Esma as a maternal symbol.
Indeed, she did serve as a “mother” to many of Stevo’s pupils.
Esma’s trademark song of the mid-1960s, “Č haje Šukarije” (Beautiful
girl), showcased both her voice and Stevo’s arrangements. Although Esma
claims she wrote the melody and text, her clarinetist at the time, Medo
Č un, also claims credit for the melody; Č un displays his masterful playing
in the opening slow section and the instrumental solo (see Chapter 6).
Video example 10.3 with text supplement is excerpted from the 1968 film
Zapej Makedonijo. Note the pastoral setting, the text about love, and the
fact that Esma is barefoot and wearing šalvari, the čoček rhythm (pattern
number 1 in Figure 2.1), and the melody in phrygian mode. Esma’s voice
is focused and emotional, featuring delicate ornamentation, yelps and
glottals, and a wide rage of dynamics. The male instrumentalists engage in
a question-and-answer dialogue with her and harmonize with her in the
chorus, reminiscent of the “doo-wop” style of popular music of the 1960s.
Esma and Stevo were pioneers in producing music videos. They
appeared on the Yugoslav music scene just when television was making
inroads, and they correctly predicted that visuals would capture the
public. Esma was involved in making four long films11 and many short
music videos. Video example 10.4, “Ciganski Č oč ek” is also from the film
Zapej Makedonijo and features members of Esma’s natal family dancing.
This clip stands in marked contrast to the video example 10.1 of Bašal
Esma Redžepova 209

Seljadin. Whereas Ciganski Č oček shows Roma of several generations
dancing informally with no choreography, Bašal Seljadin show a non-Romani
ballet troupe performing choreographies influenced by modern dance.
Video example 10.5 (with text supplement) of Č haje Šukarije is part of a
landmark 1965 Austrian television show. The staging embodies the classic
Esma trademarks: dressed in šalvari, she emerges from behind the musi-
cians’ heads in an overhead shot; she playfully flirts with them, and she
dances seductively but modestly. Another hit of this era, “Romano Horo”
(Romani dance), about dancing among Roma, also appears on this show
(video example 10.6 with text supplement). The song (in phrygian mode)
features a male chorus and fade-out at the end, both reminiscent of pop
music. Esma’s voice demonstrates emotional variation, for example a
breathy quality alternating with a throaty intensity. The rhythm is pseudo-
Latin: a pseudo-clave (wooden sticks) and cow bell rhythmic pattern
reflect the popularity of Cuban music in the 1960s.
This Austrian show encapsulates how Esma bridged the divide between
East and West via music, language, costuming, and staging. In the first
part of the show she wears a Romani costume, dances čoček, and stages
her scenes in a “village.” By contrast, in the second part of the show she
wears a western cocktail dress and high heels, has short bobbed hair, and
peeks through a curtain with a modern art design. To “Romano Horo” she
dances the twist, the most popular dance in the west at the time. Esma
ends her show with “Makedo,” a pop song entirely in German, arranged by
Stevo, and she encourages Germans to try Macedonian dances and songs.
Esma composed a line dance in 7/8 (2+2+3) to this song and hoped it
would catch on in Germany.
Stevo wanted Esma to appeal to wider Macedonian, Yugoslav, and inter-
national audiences, and so early in her career he broadened her repertoire
and arranged tours. In 1960 Tito, the president of Yugoslavia, invited her
to perform for a gathering of world leaders, and subsequently he sent her
abroad to represent Yugoslavia (Cartwright 2003a). Her early repertoire
included Macedonian folk songs, for which she dressed in traditional vil-
lage costumes. For example, the video of the Macedonian song “Kolku e
Mačno em Žalno” (How painful and sad it is) was filmed at the Sveti Naum
monastery and shows close-ups of icons. This appealed to the visual and
aural sense of nationalist pride (tied to religion and rural folklore) for
Macedonian audiences. In addition, Stevo arranged concerts and re-
cording sessions of duets with some of Macedonia’s most famous vocal-
ists, legitimating Esma’s talent beyond the Romani sphere.
Vocal repertoire in other Yugoslav languages was added, including songs
in Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Slovenian, Turkish, and Albanian. She
embodied Tito’s principle of bratstvo i edinstvo (brotherhood and unity) by
performing the music of all the ethnic groups in Yugoslavia (see photo-
graph 10.4). The video Pesmom i Igrom Kroz Jugoslaviju (With song and
dance from across Yugoslavia; Serbian) features songs from all the repub-
lics with traditional regional costumes. Eventually songs of neighboring
Balkan countries were incorporated (e.g., Bulgarian, Romanian, and

Greek), and then songs of far-flung ethnicities: Russian, Hebrew, German,
and Hindi; again costumes reflected the region (see photograph 10.5). In
publicity shots she is depicted as a performer of many ethnic musics and
also a modern worldly citizen (photographs 10.6 and 10.7).
Perhaps the most important international tie in Esma’s career was her
link to India. In the early 1970s, Roma in Macedonia were beginning to
develop a sense of their historical ties to India as part of a larger politici-
zation process and a movement to define their identity.12 Ensemble Teo-
dosievski made its first (uninvited) trip to India in 1969, followed by two
invited trips in 1976 and 1983. In 1976 Esma and Stevo were crowned
“King and Queen of Romani Music” at the First World Festival of Romani
Songs and Music in Chandigarh. A video of her 1983 trip documents Esma
giving Indira Gandhi šalvari and showing her how to tie a Romani head
scarf. As a result of her growing awareness of India and the pan-Romani
identity movement, Esma incorporated a Hindi song into her repertoire;
she also continued to perform the song “Dželem Dželem,” which devel-
oped into the Romani anthem (see Chapter 3). Although Esma first
recorded the song in Serbian (Č erga Mala Luta Preko Sveta, A small Gypsy
tent wanders through the world; see video example 3.3), on video exam-
ples 3.2 and 3.4 she sings it in Romani (at Šutkafest in 1993 and in New
Jersey at a Macedonian church in 2004; similar texts are in text supple-
ment 3.1). This link between Romani identity politics and music helped to
facilitate Esma’s relationship to Roma.
Stevo’s School
In the late 1960s, Stevo and Esma founded a music school in their home
to train young boys from disadvantaged homes. Virtually all of the mem-
bers of the Teodosievski ensemble throughout the last fifty years have
come from Stevo’s school.13 Many, such as Medo Č un, Enver Rasimov,
Sami Zekirovski, Pero Teodosievski (Stevo’s nephew), Zahir Ramadanov,
Eljam Rašidov, Simeon Atanasov, Bilhan Mačev, Tunan Kurtiš, Saško Vel-
kov, and Šadan Sakip, went on to become famous musicians in their own
right (Teodosievski and Redžepova1984:187). Sakip, one of the only vocal-
ists, developed a singing career and won first prize at Šutkafest 1993; as a
child he appeared in Esma’s video playing tarabuka for “Kec” Ibro Demir’s
song “Aj Leno, Lenorije Čhaje” (Hey Lena, girl, 1979; video example 10.7
with text supplement). The song affirms that goodness and beauty exist in
spite of poverty.
Many of Stevo’s pupils came to the school at a young age from impover-
ished families; one was even rescued from abandonment. Although most
of the boys were Romani, a few were not; Simeon, for example, became
Romani by virtue of his upbringing with Esma and Stevo from the age of
five. He was later officially adopted by them and became Esma’s music
arranger after Stevo’s death in 1997. Both Esma and Stevo believed that
anyone of any ethnicity could play Romani music well; Stevo said he was
Esma Redžepova 211

proof of this. During two trips to the United States, Esma was thrilled to
teach Americans at the East European Folklife Center’s Balkan Music and
Dance Workshops in 1997 and 1998.
In Stevo’s school, all the children received instruction, lodging, meals,
and clothing free of charge. Esma served as an adopted mother and vocal
coach. Because she never had children of her own, she achieved the role
of motherhood through these boys, who to this day call her “mama.” Stevo
was a strict teacher, notorious for rigor and sternness. Neither Esma nor
Stevo believed in talent; they believed only in hard work. All the boys
began with tarabuka in order to master Balkan and Romani rhythms; then
they switched to various instruments. Simeon, for example, was, accord-
ing to Esma, sickly as a boy and could not blow hard enough for a wind
instrument, so he was given an accordion. Zahir was already playing the
trumpet when he was recruited, after Stevo heard him play at a wedding
in Kočani. Zahir narrated:
I was a young student of twelve years when I came to Stevo’s school. I

played the trumpet incorrectly, on the side of my mouth, and Stevo
taught me to play correctly. He was very strict—we were up at 6:00
AM, then we went to school, then we played; on weekends it was eight
to fourteen hours a day. Mama had the watch, and we had to practice
a certain oro [dance], for example, twenty-five times! It was a great
deal of work. There were no excuses like “I can’t do it.” If we played
something wrong we had to stand on one foot and play it!
Musicians received not only a musical education but also valuable expo-
sure to a wider world. As a twelve-year-old Romani boy living in a Romani
neighborhood, Zahir spoke Turkish well and Macedonian poorly; when he
moved to Belgrade he learned Serbo-Croatian in school and Macedonian
and Romani from Esma and the other boys. He also learned the ropes of
the music industry and had a chance to travel to many foreign countries.
Note that Esma and Stevo had only boys in their school. They did not ac-
cept girls because of the close living quarters; she asserted: “Stevo and I
realized that it would be asking for trouble to put boys and girls together
at that age, at puberty.” Since the 1990s, Esma has trained several female
singers, including her protégée (Eleonora Mustafovska, discussed below).
Esma considers these forty-nine protégés her living legacy.
Esma, Politics, and Humanitarianism
Esma has always been vocal about her patriotism for Yugoslavia and
Macedonia. These are her true personal beliefs, but this ideology also po-
sitions her as an ally of the nation/state rather than as an oppositional
activist for a minority. She sees herself as an ambassador for Macedonia
more than for Roma, and some Romani activists object to this. She and
Stevo moved back to Macedonia in 1989, just before the outbreak of war.

In 2006 she said, “I represent Macedonia everywhere in the world and my
ambassador mission is to present my country to my best [sic]” (www.cul-
ture.in.mk). The fact that this quote appeared on the country’s website
shows Esma’s vision has a nationalist dimension rather than an ethnic
one. Indeed she is an icon for many Macedonians. In 2007 she was
awarded a diplomatic passport that allows her to travel without visas as a
“cultural ambassador.”14
Esma’s patriotism extends to a defense of Macedonia as a haven for
Roma. When I asked her in 1996 about problems Roma face in Macedo-
nia, she answered:
Macedonia is the least oppressive place for Roma; it was one of the
first countries in the world that early on had a radio show in the
Romani language, with singing and music. One of the first Romani
leaders was a mayor [of Šutka]. We have Romani members of parlia-
ment, we have two private Roma channels on TV and several radio
stations in the Romani language, and on national TV, there are two
half-hour weekly shows so all of Macedonia can watch us. Macedonia
is definitely one of the most democratic and accepting places for
Romani people.
As patriots, Esma and Simeon have often argued with her cousin Šani
Rifati about their defense of Macedonia. Whereas Simeon pointed to his
beautiful apartment and middle-class life as evidence that there is no
prejudice in Macedonia, Šani pointed to the health crisis, police brutality,
high unemployment, and squalor in Romani refugee shantytowns (Euro-
pean Roma Rights Centre 1998, 2006). Note that although Esma spon-
sored more than 2,000 benefit concerts for various causes throughout her
career, it wasn’t until 2002 that she sponsored a benefit specifically for
Roma. This concert was organized by Šani as head of the NGO Voice of
Roma and took place in Kosovo among refugees. I maintain that Esma
has crafted a somewhat unthreatening profile. She stresses Macedonian
patriotism in the realm of politics and Romani music in the realm of
entertainment.
Proud of being middle-class, Simeon and Esma were critical of the
documentary film on Romani music When the Road Bends: Tales of a
Gypsy Caravan (2006) because it graphically showed the poverty of the
native villages in Romania of the Romani bands Taraf de Haidouks and
Fanfare Ciocarlia. They were afraid audiences would think all Roma
lived in mud. Macedonian Roma in New York have expressed similar sen-
timents that international images of Roma focus on rural poverty and do
not represent them. On the other hand, some activists thought that the
film did not deal enough with prejudice. We may observe that both activ-
ists and musicians engage in “strategic essentialism” (Spivak 1988); the
former essentialize Roma as victims and latter essentialize Roma as en-
tertainers (see Chapter 3). This postcolonial concept helps us understand
how subaltern activists reject some essentialized concepts of themselves
Esma Redžepova 213

as codified by their oppressors (all Roma are musical) while they embrace
other essentialized concepts of themselves for identity politics (they are
all oppressed). Musicians often confound the stance of activists, and vice
versa.
When Šani, for example, introduced concerts in Esma’s 2004 American
tour with lectures on discrimination, Simeon objected, saying it would
alienate the audience. Šani also asked Esma to open her concert in Sebas-
topol, California, with a Romani song, because the city was the home of
the sponsoring organization, Voice of Roma. Esma refused, insisting that
she open the show with a Macedonian song and reminding Šani that her
artistic decisions were paramount. In general, Esma resists artistic advice
from activists, claiming they aren’t performers. Simeon and Esma, then,
are more interested in the artistic, entertainment, and commercial value
of music whereas activists are more interested in the educational aspects
of music—or are hostile to it. I explore this topic further in Chapter 12.
This brings up the question of resistance. Esma certainly resisted the
exclusionary categories of institutions by her pioneering use of Romani
language, dance, music, and costume, but she also resisted political
agendas that might hurt her commercial success and infringe on her artis-
tic decisions. In addition, she collaborated with the commercial establish-
ment by endorsing positive Romani stereotypes; finally, she embraced a
broadly humanitarian stance rather than a narrow Romani activist stance.
Esma’s image is that of a universal humanist; her public statements re-
peatedly stress pacificism and cross-cultural understanding. When she
discusses Roma, she points out that they have never started a war: “We are
born naked and we die naked and we don’t carry anything with us to the
next world. So fighting doesn’t make sense. The greatest barrier to all
people is war.” When interviewed by the Serbian newspaper Blic, she said
“We Roma don’t like war. . . . It doesn’t matter what nationality you are.
What matters is if you are a good person.”15 Esma’s commentary brings up
a point that I stress in this book: Romani musicians have selectively
resisted, on the basis of strategic decisions about what they could actually
accomplish and how resistance would affect their careers; furthermore,
resistance is always paired with collaboration (Ortner 1995, 1999).
Related to Esma’s nationalist stance vis-à-vis Macedonia is her elevation
of Macedonian Romani music to being the most “authentic” Romani
music. In Chapter 12 I discuss how she defended her use of the synthe-
sizer even though European audiences rejected it as nontraditional.
Although she embraces modern instrumentation, Esma insists that her
style of singing is old, classic, and traditional: “It’s all traditional. I try to
keep the style pure so I don’t mix cultural influences” (Cartwright
2005:103). Similarly, Stevo elevated Macedonian Romani music by claim-
ing that “in India in 1976, all of the presenters from twenty-three countries
agreed that Macedonian Romani music would be the music of all Roma.”
He interpreted the fact that he and Esma were crowned King and Queen
at the Chandingarh festival as an implicit affirmation that Macedonian
Romani was superior to other Romani musics. Esma concurred: “In 1976

twenty-three representatives of Roma from many countries gathered.
They wanted to see who had the most traditional Romani way of singing.
From the twenty-three representatives, I won first place!” Stevo elabo-
rated: “In India we were crowned because only we played true Romani
music. The other Roma played Turkish, Spanish, etc., music.”
Esma continues to criticize the hybrid nature of Romani music in other
countries, such as Spain and Hungary, where she claims Romani music
sounds like the local non-Romani music: “Macedonia did not persecute
the Romani language, and therefore the language, music, and the culture
and traditions have been best preserved.” She does not see her defense of
her “authenticity” as contradictory to innovations in her music. She
readily admits that her vocal style has become technically advanced, with
more dramatic timing and numerous, complicated ornamentation; and
she also defends the use of synthesizer and her collaborations with pop
stars (to be discussed shortly). I believe she valorizes the concept of tradi-
tion in part because the concept was so venerated in the Yugoslav period.
She feels Romani music is worthy of that veneration, and so her patri-
otism and elevation of Romani music are intertwined.
Esma became directly involved in Macedonian politics in the 1990s after
the formation of Romani political parties (see Chapter 1). For a period of
time, she was aligned with the Romani leader Amdi Bajram, and her per-
formance at his son’s wedding was filmed for Macedonian Television (Rom-
ska Svadba, discussed in Chapter 5). She was also aligned with Macedonian
politician Vasil Tupurkovski’s Democratic Alternative, a multiethnic party.
Now she is aligned with Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski’s ruling party
VMRO-DPMNE and still maintains a strong public profile, which includes
her extraordinary commitment to causes of the needy. She has given thou-
sands of benefit concerts for hospitals, orphanages, disaster victims, poor
children, and so on; she continues to generously donate her time and tal-
ents to charity. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 and
2005, is an Honorary president of the Red Cross, and received the 2000
Medal of Honor from the American Biographical Institute, the 2002 Mother
Teresa Award, and several awards from UNICEF as well as from Tito. On
International Roma Day in April 2010, she was awarded a Medal of Honor
from the ruling government. She has a special interest in women’s issues,
and in 1995 the Macedonian Association of Romani Women took her name
as its title. In 2002 she won the Woman of the Year from the Macedonian
magazine Žena (Woman) and in 2010 she took part in a United Nations
conference on women as part of the Macedonian delegation.
After Esma and Stevo returned to Skopje in 1989, they started work on
a humanitarian and documentation project entitled the Home of Hu-
manity and Museum of Music. This ambitious project includes construc-
tion of an outpatient clinic for underserved people, a recording studio, a
performance space, and a museum and archive of Romani music. The
economic crisis of the war years plus Stevo’s death in 1997 have consider-
ably slowed work on this project, but Esma is still committed to it. In 2010
the city of Skopje granted her land for the museum.
Esma Redžepova 215

Esma briefly considered retiring after her husband’s death, but instead
she resumed her career, with renewed energy. She toured fairly regularly
and has sought new international and local collaborations. She was of-
fered a recording contract with the German label Asphalt Tango about ten
years ago but declined in order to have more control over options in her
career; in 2008, however, she accepted a contract with them and thus per-
forms as a soloist in their “Queens and Kings” tours.16 Her adopted son
Simeon has assumed the role of her arranger, and several albums under
his direction have been released.17
Collaborations and Current Directions
Throughout her career, Esma has collaborated with many non-Romani

musicians, which broadened her appeal. Her early album and video Leg-
endi na Makedonska Narodna Pesna (Legends of Macedonian Songs), for
example, featured her in solos and in duets with non-Romani Macedonian
singers. After Stevo’s death, she widened her circle of collaborators. In
2001, for example, she concertized with the Italian guitarist/mandolinist
Aco Bocina, and in 2000 she collaborated with American klezmer trumpe-
tist Frank London on the album Chaje Shukarije (Times Square), which
features new versions of older songs. In 2000 she also collaborated with
Macedonian composer Duke Bojadžiev (who lives in New York City and
graduated from the Berklee College of Music) on the album Esma’s Dream:
Esma and Duke. The recording features her vocals over an electronic mix
of synthesized arrangements, sometimes augmented by added bass lines
and Indian drums. (This album prefigures the electronic remixes I discuss
in Chapter 13.) In 2007 she collaborated with the French guitarist Thierry
(Titi) Robin on three tracks of her album Mon Histoire (Accord-Croises).
In the realm of pop music, Esma collaborated with the Serbian rock
group Magazin on the 2002 song “Dani Su Bez Broja” (Days are endless;
Serbian), where she sings an introductory verse in Romani and a melis-
matic passage on the syllable “ah.”18 She sang with the Macedonian pop
star Kaliopi on her 2004 hit “Bel Den” (Fair day; Macedonian) and was a
guest at Kaliopi’s thirtieth anniversary megaconcert in 2006. She also col-
laborated with the ethnic Albanian pop singer Adrian Gaxha on the song
“Ljubov e” (Love is; Macedonian). The song was entered in the preselec-
tion competition for the 2006 Eurovision contest and came in second by
approximately 100 votes, which caused some controversy. Although it was
not discussed openly in the media, the national mood was that the country
and Macedonian national television (which sponsored the contest) were
not ready to have a Rom and an Albanian represent them at a prestigious
pan-European event such as Eurovision.19
In 2009 Esma was featured in electronic and film music composer Kiril
Džajkovski’s (formerly of the band Leb I Sol) fusion song “Raise Up Your
Hand” with the Jamaican rap/dub artist Ras Tweed.20 Ras Tweed sings in
English creole and Esma sings in Romani; the video was shot in Macedonian

Romani neighborhoods. In 2010 she began her retirement with the premiere
of her female vocal protégée Eleonora Mustafovska and with a new name:
Esma’s Band (see www.myspace.com/esmasbandskopje). The band’s song
“Džipsi Denz” qualified for Macedonia’s 2010 Eurovision finals in tenth
place. The band continues Esma’s international humanitarian mission,
according to leader Simeon Atanasov: “Our message is to fill our music as a
bridge which connects the differences between the nations, because Roma
(Gypsies) are living in every European country and feel themselves as cos-
mopolitans.”21
Perhaps Esma’s most famous, and most commercially successful, collab-
oration was with Toše Proeski in 2002, via the song titled “Magija” (Magic)
in Macedonian and “Čini” (Spells) in Serbian. Toše (who died in an auto-
mobile crash in 2007) was one of the top young Macedonian pop singers
and songwriters, with a huge following among Macedonian and Serbian
youths; in 2004 he represented Macedonia at Eurovision (http://www.
myspace.com/inmemoryoftodorproeski). The song won awards for best
song and best video of 2002 at the 12 Veličanstveni (12 greatest) ceremony,
Macedonia’s version of the Grammy’s. “Magija” is actually a combination
of two songs, Toše’s in Macedonian (or Serbian) and Esma’s (in Romani).
Esma’s song “Naktareja mo Ilo Phanlja” (He closed my heart with a key) is
a preexisting cut22 that is inserted into Toše’s song. Toše’s song is about a
love affair gone sour because of a magic spell, and Esma’s is about a
woman whose boyfriend deceived her and married her best friend. The
Serbian version appears on video example 10.8 with text supplement.23
Although each of the songs has its own internal narrative, the pair seem
to have few textual connections; they are combined for musical reasons
rather than for narrative logic. Also remember that the intended audience
is non-Romani, so the Romani text is irrelevant. The viewer, however,
would immediately pick up on aural and visual cultural clues. The two
songs contrast markedly in musical style: Toše’s is in 2/4 rhythm in pop
style, and Esma’s is in 7/8 rhythm (number 10 in Figure 2.1), has a drone-
based harmony, and has synthesized zurla and tapan accompaniment, this
last a symbol of Roma.
In addition, the visuals portray two contrasting worlds: Toše’s sunny
daytime world of upper-class love and conviviality, and Esma’s nighttime
world of Gypsy magic, abandon, and the occult. Indeed, the text seems to
suggest that Esma (and by extension all Gypsies) can cure Toše’s despair
(for perhaps she sent it as a spell) with music and dance. Esma is pictured
in flowing dimije in the middle of a wild party on the beach, amidst tents,
rusty cars, fire dancers, and couples who wear revealing clothes and sen-
suously belly-dance and kiss. All the elements of the standard Gypsy ste-
reotype are here: sex, music, the occult—even a crystal ball, into which
Toše gazes at the end of the video.
Why would Esma engage in such a stereotypical treatment of Roma?
When her cousin, activist Šani Rifat of Voice of Roma, asked her this
question, she replied, “It is an artistic staging. It is art.” And when Garth
Cartwright asked her about these images, she “insisted she liked the video
Esma Redžepova 217

and enjoyed the pop spotlight” (2005:110). Esma’s reasons for collabora-
tion with Toše are complex: she may have had an affinity for him because
he was from a minority ethnicity (Aromun/Vlach) or because, like her, he
was involved in humanitarian work and received several humanitarian
awards. Toše seems to have had an affinity for Romani music and can be
seen on Skopje television station BTR in several YouTube clips performing
Bregović ‘s song “Erdelezi” (see Chapter 13) with the Macedonian Romani
singer Erdžan (see Chapter 2).
Collaboration with a pop star was certainly one way of increasing
Esma’s visibility and expanding her audience. The song was clearly listed
as his, and he was definitely a rising star; however, she claims that she was
helping him with his career. In the end, Esma probably chooses to collab-
orate whenever a good opportunity presents itself. For a decade after Ste-
vo’s death, she refused to sign an exclusive Western contract in order to
manage her own career (with Simeon as arranger); but in 2008 she signed
a contract with Asphalt Tango in Berlin. Does she have choices in her
artistic products? Theoretically yes, but in a tight musical market she has
fewer choices. Esma has carved a viable musical niche, but as an aging
Romani star she is vulnerable.
In surveying Esma’s life, we can see just show innovative she was. Under
the tutelage of non-Romani Stevo, she created an unprecedented niche for
Romani music and dance. Moreover, she raised female arts to a level of
respectability by playing with images of emotionality and sexuality in the
framework of the elite concert and recording stage. By achieving success
among non-Roma first, she legitimated her role as a professional among
Roma. By displaying her patriotism to Yugoslavia and Macedonia and by
supporting international rather than Romani humanitarian causes, she
achieved an unprecedented level of legitimacy. Today Esma is a living leg-
end for many Roma, and many Macedonians.
The constellation of Romani female performers, including professional
singers such as Esma and professional and nonprofessional dancers
(whom I discussed in Chapter 6), points to a delicate convergence of a set
of historical, economic, political, social, and aesthetic factors. Within
Romani communities, female musicality and dance, although tinged with
sexuality, is valued, prized, and encouraged to flower in appropriate set-
tings. Moreover, female artistry as an occupation has a long history, as
witnessed by Ottoman professional dancers and early-twentieth-century
frame drum players and singers. In spite of the economic necessity pro-
pelling professionals, female singers and dancers are still scrutinized as
immoral, but at the same time they are in demand by non-Roma and
Roma. Sexuality is dangerous, but necessary. The position of female
Romani performers to Roma structurally mirrors the position of Romani
male performers to non-Roma: they are marginal, sexual, and dangerous,
yet they are necessary for celebrations because they embody artistry and
musicality and they bring out the “soul of the patrons.” Okely makes a
parallel point about British Romani fortune tellers who mingle freely with

non-Roma for work but are ideally supposed to preserve modesty and
reputation (1975).
Both fortune tellers and dancer/musicians have been stereotyped by
non-Roma as quintessential images of Romani women. The marginal po-
sition of Roma, their lack of control over image making, and their role as
service workers all contribute to the trafficking of their arts in the realm
of the market. Females have a significant role in this market, as their tal-
ents, images, and bodies are a saleable commodity. Images of Romani
women are rarely designed by women themselves; rather, they rely on
patron fantasies that may be mimetically sold back. In all of these pro-
cesses, female performers are not passive. Although they are rarely in
charge of the institutions that shape their performances, Romani women
have managed to exert control over certain realms of artistry and carve
out new domains of performance. As Esma’s case shows, they tailor their
talents and sexuality to varying contexts. The nexus between in-group
ideals of female modesty and the economic and aesthetic requirements of
the marketplace has created a space for a variety of female performers.
These women, like Esma, strategize to maximize both their commercial
success and their reputation.
Esma Redžepova 219

11
ab
Yuri Yunakov
Saxophonist, Refugee, Citizen
T his chapter explores identity in transnational contexts via a Bulgarian-

Turkish-Romani-American male musician who has performed for
both Romani communities (on several continents) and the world music
market. This case study serves as a bridge between local and global sites
and between Chapters 3, 4, and 5 (about Romani transnational commu-
nities) and Chapters 12, and 13 (about global marketing of Romani music).
It is clear that the supposedly recent distinguishing characteristics of the
global age, such as border-crossings, hybridity, multiplicity of identity, and
interconnectedness of economic systems, have been operable for Roma
for centuries. Furthermore, we must interrogate the local and national
with as much vigor as we interrogate the global (Shuman 1993), for all
three arenas reveal hierarchies and representational conflicts. Through
examination of the life history of the saxophonist Yuri Yunakov, I illustrate
how musical performances are strategies in personal identity politics.
With music, Yunakov mediated the tension between supposed binaries
such as official-unofficial, traditional-modern, authentic-hybrid, social-
ism-postsocialism, inclusion-exclusion, and local-global. But rather than a
merely celebratory tale, this chapter also reveals the disjunctures and
challenges in Romani identity making.1
Early Years: Border Crossings
Yuri Yunakov was born in 1958 in the Muslim Romani Turkish-speaking

neighborhood of Haskovo, Bulgaria, about thirty miles from the Turkish
and Greek borders:
YY: My mother was born in Bulgaria, but my mother’s father was

born in Turkey, around the 1920s. There was border at that time, but
it wasn’t a secure border like with the Communists. My grandfather,
221
a butcher, came to Bulgaria and married my grandmother; after their
daughters were married off, my grandfather went back to Turkey,
Izmir.
CS: Why did he go back?
YY: I don’t know why; I’ve never seen him. He died before I came to
America. He married another woman back in Izmir. And there’s a
whole family there. I know an aunt from there. When I was a soldier
in the army, my mother’s sister came from Turkey for the first time to
see her relatives, that is, the aunt I had never seen. My relatives
couldn’t go to Turkey. It would have been impossible during the Com-
munist period. I was in the army and I had been given a leave; I was
waiting for my mother and father to come see me. They [the officials]
called me to the gate. I was looking at someone and I thought it was
my mother. I said to her, “What’s going on, you came so late?” I got
closer. My mother was hiding behind this woman, because they
wanted to see what I would do when I saw this aunt. She looked like
my mother, but she had a younger face. And then my mother came
out. I couldn’t understand what was happening. And she started
crying, and my aunt whom I’d never seen, she embraced me, and
they started explaining, “This is my sister from Turkey.”
CS: Did anyone from your family ever go to Turkey?
YY: When the Communist government fell, my mother went to Tur-
key to see her other brothers and sisters, her family from her father
and his other wife. . . . There are some relatives in Istanbul, Edirne,
and Izmir.
CS: Did you ever go to Turkey?
YY: No. I lived only thirty miles from the Turkish border, but I never
went. . . . My father’s family is more interesting. My father’s mother
was Greek. I don’t know why, but a long time ago people came from
Greece to Bulgaria, they were very poor. I’m just learning this from
family stories. In those years, Bulgaria was somewhere to go, it was
a good place for work. I think my father’s mother was Muslim Greek
Gypsy.
CS: Did they speak Romani?
YY: My grandparents on both sides didn’t speak Romani. My moth-
er’s mother spoke Turkish, and maybe some Greek. . . . I spoke
Turkish with all of my relatives from a very early age. It was my
first language. . . . My father’s father was from Sliven. He spoke
Romani but not at home; at home, he spoke only Turkish. He mar-
ried a woman who didn’t speak Romani, so they spoke Turkish at
home.
These comments reveal that Yunakov grew up with a strong connection to

Turkey despite the fact that Bulgarians could not travel to Turkey during
the communist period.
Note that Yunakov, like Ivo Papazov (see Chapter 7), identified as a Bul-
garian Turk until quite recently:

YY: We identified as Turks growing up, not as Gypsies.
CS: If you didn’t identify as Romani and you called yourselves Turks,
then what was the difference between you and the other Turks who
weren’t Roma?
YY: Well, we called them dahli,2 meaning a lower class. . . . We felt we
were the real Turks. . . . Dahli are blond, with a different shape of the
head, flat in the back! Our type of Turk was dark. . . . The dahli didn’t
like us, we didn’t intermarry. We had nothing to do with them, we
weren’t like them at all. We never said we were Roma. Even today, my
relatives don’t identify as Roma because they don’t know the Romani
language. . . . To be Romani you had to know the Romani language.
There wasn’t a person in our group who didn’t have relatives in Tur-
key, even though they didn’t know them.
Yunakov’s relatives identified as Turks; according to historians they

were Roma who abandoned the Romani language and adopted Turkish
during the Ottoman period in their effort to move up the social and eco-
nomic hierarchy (see Marushiakova and Popov 1997 and Chapters 1, and 3).
More important, most Bulgarians saw Yunakov as a Gypsy (despite his not
speaking Romani). Yunakov apologetically noted that in his younger years
he actually looked down on some Romani-speaking Roma: “There are
some dirty Gypsies you know, so when we [the wedding band Trakiya]
bargained for a wedding fee, we required a roast lamb just for the band so
we wouldn’t have to eat the cooked food from their plates.” His attitude
shifted in later years, as I shall describe.
“I’ll tell you my life history in short form: all my male relatives are mu-
sicians. If a male child was born, he had to become a musician. . . . I have
two sons and they both play,” proclaimed Yunakov. “The neighborhood
was my school” (mahalata mi beshe uchilishte; Bulgarian), Yunakov insists,
meaning that informal music instruction was the rule. Yunakov’s great-
grandfather, grandfather, and three uncles were violinists, and his father
was a prominent clarinetist: “My grandfather on my father’s side, from
Sliven, nicknamed ‘Kemenche [violinist] Ali,’ was a really good violinist.
He was the best in the area and he even sang very well. He played only
Turkish music. He didn’t go to music school; nobody went to music school.
There were no saxophones, guitars, accordions in Turkish music at that
time. It was traditional music—ud [short necked fretless plucked lute],
kanun [plucked zither], violin, clarinet, and tarabuka, tŭpan, sometimes,
but mostly tarabuka. Clarinet was very important.”3
Like many Romani musicians, Yunakov learned to play the tŭpan first to
learn the rhythms; he also needed to accompany his father and older
brother at weddings: “My father neither went to school nor learned notes,
but his brother went to school and learned notes and so they were hired to
play drums in the circus.” One uncle played in first-class restaurants, and
another joined Yunakov’s father’s band. Before sound systems were intro-
duced in the early 1970s, multiple clarinets were used for outdoor perfor-
mance. “One would play, another would play, we would take turns with
Yuri Yunakov 223

the clarinet. You had to have stamina because you might lead a dance for
seven hours nonstop, just one horo [line dance]. The clarinet players stood
all night next to the person leading the dance line; they went home with
swollen legs. My father played weddings every weekend, and one wedding
would be five days long. . . . I was six or seven and the big drum was taller
than me!” This commentary reveals that midcentury Romani musicians
had to be versatile and adjustable, and they had to have stamina (see Pey-
cheva 1999a). Yunakov’s male relatives played light popular music in the
circus as well as folk music for weddings.
Yunakov’s second instrument was the kaval (end-blown flute), which he
played in school: “I was already in first grade when a teacher, Mitko Ange-
lov, came to teach us music. I was the first person to play kaval in my
school; it was the first time they introduced folk music to the school, and
I was the first person to sign up. In the first two hours I learned a whole
song, I’ll never forget that. The teacher said ‘What are you doing—you
don’t even have the embouchure and you already have the notes!’” Yuna-
kov, the only Romani member of the school ensemble, played with them
in Haskovo performances for about five years.4
Simultaneously, Yunakov started playing the clarinet surreptitiously at
home when his older brother wasn’t around: “My elementary school was
closer than my brother’s school, so there was some time free time when I
came home. I would grab my brother’s clarinet before he got home and
play a little. He would beat me up if he saw me touching it. . . . When my
father realized that I was already fooling around on the clarinet, he was
just amazed.”
Regarding his childhood, Yunakov states that although his own commu-
nity preferred Turkish music, some Bulgarian music was required for
patrons. “In my family contexts, there was only Turkish music, but we
liked Bulgarian music. It was necessary to know Bulgarian music—hora—
for weddings—it was impossible not to know how to play it. Even for a
Romani wedding it was necessary.” Being a professional musician neces-
sitated knowing multiple repertoires; in the Haskovo region the ethnic
groups that Yunakov’s family served included Turks, Turkish Roma,
Romani-speaking Roma, Bulgarians, and Pomaks (Bulgarian-speaking
Muslims). Pomaks migrated from the Rhodope mountain region to Has-
kovo after the 1950s; their celebrations require extensive knowledge of
Rhodope songs. Regional singers were required because they received
paid requests from patrons; thus a knowledgeable singer was essential to
a band. Yunakov continued: “Yes, we played for Bulgarians as well. For
them we wouldn’t take the Turkish singers, rather we would take two to
three Bulgarian singers. We’d play completely different music.”
Yunakov’s older brother Ahmed (Mecho) was his model because he had
extensive ties with Bulgarian musicians as well as Turkish music and op-
erated successfully in both spheres. Over the years, the membership of the
family band changed. Yuri remembers his uncles and his father (on B-flat
Albert system clarinet) in his grandfather’s band; then his father took
over, switched to saxophone, and he and his brother played clarinets

(Boehm system) in the band Aida. Then: “My father started getting ill;
Mecho and I decided to relieve him from playing. We told him, you’re
getting older, we can take over, you’ve suffered so much. So my brother
left the Bulgarian bands in which he was playing and he came back to
Turkish music.” Their father died when Yunakov was only seventeen.
Although Yunakov knew some Bulgarian music as a young man, he
came to master it under the auspices of Ivan Milev. Milev is a legendary
Bulgarian accordionist also from the Haskovo region; he was the leader of
the prize-winning band Mladost (youth; Bulgarian; see Chapter 7). In
1982 Yunakov was playing clarinet in a small restaurant when Ivan Milev
walked in:
At that time Milev had his own wedding band and everyone knew
him, he was really famous. . . . He listened, he drank and drank, and
he said to me, “I want you in my band on saxophone.” I said, “What
do you mean, I have work here in this restaurant. I have my brother’s
band. No! What are you talking about? . . . I can’t even play the instru-
ment you want me to play—the saxophone.” Milev said, “You will be
able to. . . . You can do better. I’ll make you the best saxophonist.” I
had actually started playing saxophone a little earlier with my
brother. . . . So Ivan took me and convinced me. I hardly played Bul-
garian music before that. I played when I had to, but not much. . . .
Bulgarian music wasn’t very clear to me then—then I played mostly
Turkish and Romani music. . . . Ivan gave me the foundation of Bul-
garian music. At the beginning he showed me the most unbelievable
things—he was a virtuoso player with incredible technique. At first I
refused—I was scared of his music. But Ivan said: “Now I’ll show you
that you can do it.” So we started slowly, with easy dances; the orna-
ments were the most important. . . . It was very gratifying. . . . I found
strength in myself. . . . Ivan didn’t play other musicians’ repertoires;
he composed his own music, so I had to learn his repertoire. . . . I
needed a great deal of time to master his repertoire—maybe a month
and a half. . . . Ivan was up at seven or eight in the morning and we
would play for twelve or thirteen hours. People were still sleeping but
Ivan was ready to play. He would come in the morning, he didn’t care
if people were sleeping—he was ready to play. The women were run-
ning around making food for him all day long because he has a big
appetite—more food, more food!
Yunakov recalls that Milev spent so much time at Yunakov’s house that it
was Milev who took Yunakov’s wife to the hospital to give birth to their
son Danko. Yunakov compares this incident with the fact that a few years
later Ivo Papazov brought his wife to the hospital for the birth of his
daughter Ani. His point is that these musicians were totally integrated
into his life.
I dwell on Yunakov’s acquisition and mastery of Bulgarian music
because this was one of the first borders he crossed as he ventured outside
Yuri Yunakov 225

his community to become adept in many musical styles. Another bridge
to “being Bulgarian” was his boxing career, because boxing was a presti-
gious state-sponsored public sport. In fact, when Yunakov made his
public debut with Milev’s band at the Stambolovo festival of wedding
music in 1985 (the band won third prize; see Chapter 7), the public knew
him only as a boxer. “When I stepped on the large stage at Stambolovo the
audience was amazed because they knew me as a boxer. They wondered,
when did he become a musician, and start playing with the best of them?”
Yunakov trained as a boxer in his teenage years and won three national
middleweight championships, but he left the sport disappointed and
returned to music. He realized that “you couldn’t make a living from
boxing. You couldn’t support your family. All the best sportsmen from
Bulgaria had emigrated. There was always discrimination against Turks
and Roma.”
Yunakov experienced prejudice in the sports arena during the late 1970s
when the socialist government forced all Muslims to change their names
to Bulgarian ones (see Chapter 7). Those who resisted were fined, beaten,
harassed, or jailed. “I had to change my name to become a boxer. My
trainer told me, ‘If you want to succeed as a boxer, you have to make your
name Bulgarian.’ And my father was so angry with me for that that he
wouldn’t let me into the house for years. He hit me.” Yunakov’s birth name
was Husein Huseinov Aliev, after his father Husein and his grandfather
Ali. His government-issued name, Yunakov, came from the legend that his
grandfather was a yunak (hero; Bulgarian) because he played for haidutsi
(anti-Ottoman guerilla fighters in the mountains; Bulgarian). His new first
name was chosen because Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin had recently
become famous. His brother’s name was changed from Ahmed to Andrei,
and his wife’s name was changed from Nusret to Lidia. Yunakov often
emphasized that despite living in Bulgaria for thirty years he never felt
wholly Bulgarian because of racism and exclusionary practices. He was
lauded for his talent in music and boxing, but there were always strings
attached.
Wedding Music: Creativity, Resistance,

and Accommodation
Yunakov’s life presents insights into selective state-sponsored representa-

tions of folk music during the socialist period. Growing up, Yunakov not
only never heard his community’s music on the radio, television, on a re-
cording, at a folk festival, in school, or played by an ensemble, but also he
was bombarded by media that lauded only the socialist brand of Bulgar-
ian music and vilified all others. Socialist officials and music scholars
alike claimed Turkish and Romani music was “foreign” to Bulgaria and
was corrupting folk music, to which no one listened anymore. The new
genre of “wedding music” was seen as the culprit for the decline in folk
music (see Chapter 7).

Precisely during this time, Yunakov was charting his path as a musician.
He recalls the introduction of electrification and drum sets in the 1970s
and his own switch from clarinet to saxophone: “I was developing a really
different style on the saxophone. . . . I was used to playing very fast stuff
on the clarinet, so I transferred that to the saxophone, . . . long runs and a
richer tone.” In 1985, after hearing Yunakov play with Milev, Ivo Papazov,
the legendary star of wedding music, invited Yunakov to join Trakiya.
Yunakov narrates: “I didn’t refuse. I was ready, prepared. At that time,
every musician’s dream was to play with Ivo Papazov. We played together
for ten years. . . . I spent more time with Ivo Papazov than with my wife!”
As I described in Chapter 7, wedding music reached its apex of popularity
in the mid-1980s, with fans crowding wedding tents to glimpse the super-
stars. Video examples 7.3 and 7.4 show a rare television performance of
Trakiya from 1987. Yunakov recalls: “Hundreds of uninvited onlookers
would arrive from miles around.” People booked Trakiya years in advance
and married in the middle of the week to accommodate their busy sched-
ule. Yunakov was earning a typical month’s salary in a weekend and was
able to build a large house. “Everyone wanted us to play at their celebra-
tions—weddings, engagements. Everyone wanted us but we just couldn’t
travel everywhere. One day we would be at one end of Bulgaria, the next
day at the other end, sometimes two weddings in one day, or even three. It
was very hard but we needed the money.” At this time virtually all the mu-
sicians in Trakiya were investing in houses and cars.
The 1980s was also the era of socialist attempts to harass Roma, espe-
cially those who were successful. Sometimes Yunakov was harassed just
because he was Romani. He recalls a bank robbery in Haskovo: “I was
playing in a restaurant and the police made me stop; they took me as a
suspect. I was a boxer, Romani. We were in jail all night. My wife was
pregnant; she asked them, ‘Why are you holding my husband?’ but they
lied and said, ‘We don’t have anybody here.’ The true culprit was the son of
the Secretary General of the Communist party in Haskovo. That is the
kind of corruption we suffered.” This was the era of socialist attempts to
suppress and control wedding musicians. Yunakov and his colleagues
were jailed twice for playing the Muslim genre kyuchek; their heads were
shaven, they had to break rocks, and their cars were confiscated by the
police. Yunakov narrated:
In the early days, we didn’t add many new musical elements because
we were afraid of the authorities. Those were very difficult years. Our
orchestra was the most well known in all of Bulgaria. We were so well
known that there were ministers who weren’t as well known as we
were. Every kid knew us! But the most significant part of this story is
that Romani and Turkish music was forbidden. I was in prison for
fifteen days twice; also Ivo, Neshko, Sashko, and many other col-
leagues. Even Petŭr Ralchev [a Bulgarian], one of the youngest and
finest accordionists, was in prison. This was a shameful thing, all
because of music! We could stir the poorest and richest with our
Yuri Yunakov 227

music. But unfortunately, Bulgarian politicians mixed music with
politics. According to me, music has nothing to do with politics; I
think music remains music. Our politicians made music political. . . .
Imagine yourself in a big field, in a tent where we hold our weddings,
and you see fifteen police cars coming. We run away. Imagine Ivo
Papazov with his weight, running, because he had been in prison
already and he didn’t want to go back. They arrested the sponsor of
the wedding also, and if we were in a restaurant, the owner too. But
in spite of this, we played Romani and Turkish music anyway. Jailing
us was the most shameful thing for our country, and everyone learned
about it via newspaper and radio. They put us, the most famous, in
jail, so other musicians would see. They made examples of us so
others would be afraid.
Yunakov’s comments suggest that that his performance of kyuchek was

not a deliberate antigovernment move, not conscious resistance, but
rather a strategic, tactical, and subjective life choice based on his beliefs
(see Chapter 7). Yunakov vividly remembered strategies for avoiding ar-
rest, such as posting a lookout on the roof to scout for the police, stylisti-
cally morphing a kyuchek into a pravo horo, and developing intuition for
approaching police officers. Many times Trakiya musicians ran away even
before the police arrived. According to Ortner (1995), the literature on
resistance unfortunately tends to be “thin” because it is not grounded in
thick ethnography. Ortner calls for fieldwork that moves beyond the bi-
nary of domination vs. resistance in political terms and investigates cul-
tural ramifications.5 Scott’s explication of “everyday forms of resistance”
(1985, 1990) opens up the question of what can be counted as resistance,
and his attention to performance as power is useful for music (Ebron
2002:117). Ortner highlights the ambiguity of resistance and the need to
ground it in the subjectivity of actors who are all individuals with unique
motives and histories (1995, 1999). Thus Yunakov’s strategy of performing
kyuchek in the face of sanctions made sense to him in aesthetic, cultural,
and economic terms. He was intimately involved with Turkish and Romani
music; it was the music of his community, and he was making a good
living from it.
Yunakov’s resistance, however, should neither be romanticized (Abu-
Lughod 1990) nor elevated to heroic defiance, because in several arenas he
(as well as other wedding musicians) accommodated the socialist govern-
ment. For example, he ran away from the police, he did not resist the name
changes even though his father ostracized him,6 and he recorded sanitized,
censored versions of his music so it could be disseminated via the state
media. (Audio examples 7.1 and 7.2 compare a wedding version and a
sanitized commercial version of the same piece; see Chapter 7.) Even in
Stambolovo in the 1980s, he abided by regulations not to include kyucheks
and to “clean up” Bulgarian music. Scott suggests that in public spaces
“public transcripts” are performed in order to flatter elites, while back-
stage “hidden transcripts” express grievances (1990; Ebron 2002:117–118).

Indeed, wedding musicians courted favors with communist officials so
they wouldn’t be driven out of business. Yunakov recalls private parties
where socialist officials requested kyucheks: “These ministers, they were
our fans!”
It is difficult, however, to fit weddings into Scott’s rubric “hidden.”
Family celebrations take place in public space (the street, the village
square) but still should be coded as unofficial as opposed to official. Fur-
thermore, they are located in the free market realm, one reason the
socialist government was trying to regulate them. Precisely here, wedding
musicians staged their resistance. They felt they were making an eco-
nomic point rather than a political one. So then, is Yunakov naïve when he
states that music is apolitical? Doesn’t he know that prohibiting kyuchek
was an anti-ethnic move? His statement may be either a utopian senti-
ment or a strategic defense of his resistance. Given the range of social acts
I have considered, I underscore that collaborations with the dominating
order exist side-by-side with acts of resistance; these are the performative
contradictions that musicians enact.
Becoming Romani
As I discussed in Chapter 8, Trakiya morphed from a Bulgarian legend to

an international touring phenomenon in the early 1990s thanks to the ef-
forts of British impresario Joe Boyd (photograph 8.1). On an American
tour, Yunakov made contact with the Macedonian Roma living in the Bel-
mont neighborhood of Bronx, New York (described in Chapters 4 and 5).
A group of Macedonian Roma went to hear Trakiya, warmly welcomed
them, called them “brothers” in Romani, offered them hospitality, and in-
vited them to play at a private dance party. They accepted the invitation
and, as the legend is told, Romani community members were so excited at
this event that the musicians received $5,000–$6,000 in tips. After this
dance party, Yunakov was invited back to the United States to play at the
wedding of a community member, who then sponsored him for a work
permit. He connected with Macedonian Romani musicians and started
playing for Macedonian Romani events.
At this time, Yunakov decided to stay in the United Sates and try to em-
igrate because the situation of Roma in Bulgaria was declining rapidly
(see Chapter 1). In the mid-1990s, one of his closest friends was perma-
nently maimed by a racially motivated attack. He had earned enough
money in Germany to open a nice restaurant in downtown Haskovo, and
Yunakov often played there. The mafia, in cahoots with the local police,
ordered the business closed. According to Yunakov: “They said ‘We can’t
have a thriving Gypsy business on main street. A Gypsy can’t have a suc-
cessful business in the middle of this town.’ When my friend refused to
close it down, the mafia, which was tied to the police, brutally beat him up
and destroyed the restaurant. He is brain-damaged from the beating. They
also beat up my cousin, who is a drummer.” In addition, Yunakov claimed
Yuri Yunakov 229

that his children, living in his hometown of Haskovo, were threatened
with abduction by the local mafia in conjunction with the police, who
were former communist officials. Yunakov decided to apply for political
asylum, on the grounds of a well-founded fear of persecution if he returned
to Bulgaria. I helped him assemble his file and was his translator for his
hearing. Asylum was granted in 1995, and he received a green card several
years later. In answer to the question, Why did you come to America?”
Yunakov answered:
I wanted to live a calmer life. For Roma in Bulgaria, there weren’t any
possibilities. In my time, there were many terrible things. They wanted
to abduct my children—I went to the police—they didn’t want to help
me—everything was getting worse at that time. I wanted a normal life.
I wanted to play—I want to share my knowledge with others. What-
ever I have in my soul I want to show people—I want to give my music.
I am very uninvolved in politics—I don’t even understand politics.
In the United States, Yunakov came to feel he was Romani on a deep

personal level. In 2001 he reflected:
I realized I was a Rom when I was already grown. Only here in

America, seven years ago, did I feel Romani. I’m speaking here of my
inner feelings. Lidia and I have been together for twenty years. I
never had the feeling that I was a Gypsy. Occasionally, people have
told me I’m a Gypsy but my inner feeling was that I wasn’t a Gypsy.
I knew who Gypsies were—those that speak that language. I’ve
played at every kind of Gypsy wedding; they are different people,
and we are different. I felt that we were Turkish. But here, I under-
stood. I thought about it and understood things, how it is, and why
it is. In Bulgaria, the history wasn’t clear, who you are, why. Even
now, the exact history isn’t clear. No one ever told us the true history,
from where we came.
I believe one reason Yunakov came to identify as Romani was his im-
mersion in the Macedonian Romani neighborhood in New York. He lived
there for seven years and his closest friends were all Roma; he socialized
with them and attended and performed at their celebrations; they helped
him interface with American institutions such as hospitals, schools,
lawyers, and immigration. As discussed in Chapter 4, these Macedonian
Roma are Muslim and speak either Romani or Turkish as well as Macedo-
nian (which is fully intelligible to Bulgarians) and English. They are quite
clear in private about their Romani identity, although in public they may
pass as other ethnic groups (see Chapter 4). Yunakov and his family felt
comfortable among these Roma in large part because of their shared
music, languages, religion, and culture. He played regularly for Macedo-
nian Romani events. I am not implying that Yunakov admired everything
about this community; to the contrary, he often criticized some aspects of

the “neighborhood mentality, such as its inwardness. But I believe a cul-
tural tie resonated within him; in addition, this was the only Balkan com-
munity in American that accepted him fully (there are very few Bulgarian
Roma in New York City). Several thousand Bulgarians live in New York,
but they do not constitute an organized community and do not have reg-
ular musical events. In addition, most Bulgarians are prejudiced against
Roma and do not socialize with them. A second reason for Yunakov re-
thinking his identity may be his exposure to Romani history via conversa-
tions with me. He often asked me what historians have written about
Roma, and we discussed the newest theories. A third reason may have
been the public attention to Gypsy music, to be discussed here and in the
next chapter.
As soon as he arrived in New York, Yunakov widened his musical niche,
partly from necessity and partly because of his talent in quickly learning
new genres. For several years he was the only immigrant musician I knew
from Bulgaria who was able to support himself solely from music.7 This
was possible because he was so versatile. His instrument and his improvi-
satory style could be adapted to pan-Balkan and even Middle Eastern
music. From Macedonian Romani performers, he learned Macedonian
styles and repertoire, including the Romani dance gaida and rhythms
such as beranče (often 3+2+2+3+2) and the myriad types of 7/8. He also
learned specific melodies that are popular among Roma, such as “Kjuper-
lika” and the many songs that are requested at events.
His first regular restaurant job, at the Turkish Kitchen restaurant in
Manhattan (where he played for ten years), facilitated contact with several
prominent Turkish, Armenian, and other Middle Eastern musicians, and
they began to invite him to gigs. On the CD Gypsy Fire he plays Middle
Eastern music; on this album the song “Fincan” is sung in Turkish and
features the typical Armenian meter 10/8, which Yunakov learned in Amer-
ica. He has been flown to Los Angeles many times by wealthy Armenians
for whom he mastered specific Armenian songs and rhythms.
Yunakov also performed with Avram Pengas, who introduced him to
Greek, Israeli, and Arabic styles. Turkish music has become his main-
stay—not the Turkish music he grew up with, but rather Turkish-Ameri-
can and belly dance music. This scene supports many restaurants, clubs,
and family celebrations in New York. Several professional belly dancers
began to rely on Yunakov for accompaniment. He feels very indebted to
the many musicians who generously shared their knowledge with him:
“The person who helped me learn Turkish repertoire was Hasan Isakut [a
Turkish Romani kanun player and singer]—his repertoire is huge. Ara
Dinkjian [a prominent Armenian keyboardist, guitarist, composer, and ar-
ranger] helped me a lot. The more technical aspects of classical Turkish
music I learned from Tamer Pinarbasi [a kanun player].”
Yunakov further expanded his repertoire and contacts when he met the
legendary Albanian singer Merita Halili and her husband and arranger, the
famous Kosovar accordionist Raif Hyseni. They played together in clubs
and weddings for several years, and Yunakov learned a large repertoire of
Yuri Yunakov 231

Albanian songs and musical genres.8 Even before he met Merita and Raif,
Yunakov was familiar with some Albanian repertoire through the Alba-
nian-speaking Romani musicians from Macedonia in New York, including
Ramiz Islami and Kujtim Ismaili (see Chapter 5). Yunakov collaborated
with Kujtim for years and recorded with him in 1993 on an album that
Kujtim produced.
Yunakov has also played with the noted Albanian singer Vera Oruçi and
her husband, violinist Sunaj Saraçi, and also with the famous Albanian
singer Haxhi Maqellara. He recorded a cassette in New York with Sunaj
and Vera that was produced by the Cani company, which then distributed
the album through its offices in Germany and Kosovo. On this album,
Yunakov’s name is listed as Juri (no last name), and on Kujtim’s album his
name is “Albanianized” to Nuri Hysein. Yunakov himself does not pass as
Albanian (because he does not speak the language), though other Balkan
Roma in New York can do so (in Chapter 5 I discussed the Umer musical
family, who speak Albanian).
Not only was Yunakov invited to gigs by Turkish and Albanian musi-
cians, but he also invited them to his Macedonian Romani gigs. I attended
several Macedonian Romani weddings where Yunakov brought Hasan or
Sunaj, and they were both very warmly received (photograph 11.1).
Because both are excellent musicians and both speak Turkish, there was a
shared language and plenty of musical repertoire in common. Video ex-
amples 6.4 and 11.1 features Hasan and Yunakov at a Bronx wedding,
playing with Kujtim Ismaili, Trajče Džemaloski, and Severdžan Azirov.
Yunakov has also been engaged to record improvisations in the middle of
set musical pieces.
Yunakov has collaborated with New York musician Erhan Umer for
many years. As I discussed in Chapter 5, Erhan is a New York keyboardist
and singer from Bitola. Since he is talented in programming drum and
harmonic arrangements for his instrument, he can work easily with a solo
instrumentalist like Yunakov. They are a practical duet in tight economic
times because they can sound like a full band; they can thus earn more
money than they would have earned with a full band. Yunakov has also
exposed Erhan to American audiences. He facilitated inviting Erhan to the
several California Herdeljezi celebrations sponsored by the nongovern-
mental organization Voice of Roma, and they have also collaborated with
Seido Salifoski (see Chapter 5).
Most recently, Yunakov has mentored a young Belmont clarinetist, Sal
Mamudoski (see Chapter 5). Sal was only a child when he first heard
Yunakov at community events and when his parents lived upstairs from
Yunakov. Sal became very serious about music and devoted many years to
teaching himself. Yunakov has shared repertoire and styling with Sal, but
most important he has taught him the sense of how to communicate with
an audience. Now Sal regularly performs with Yunakov and toured na-
tionally with him in 2007, sponsored by Voice of Roma. In 2008 Sal and
Yunakov, joined by Albanian keyboardist Alfred Popaj, began performing
regularly at the club Mehanata under the name Grand Masters of Gypsy

Music. Thanks to Yunakov, Sal has connected with wider audiences, in-
cluding Americans. Video example 5.51 from the 2008 California Voice of
Roma Herdeljezi celebration features Sal, Erhan, and Rumen Sali Shopov,
an excellent Turkish Romani drummer who emigrated to California from
Gotse Delchev, Bulgaria.
In part because he missed playing the Bulgarian genres of wedding
music, Yunakov formed the Yuri Yunakov Ensemble in 1995, a mixture of
Roma, Bulgarians, and Americans. The ensemble changed personnel over
the years, but there was always a mixture of ethnicities. The Americans
were strategically included. I believe I was invited because Yunakov felt
indebted to me for my help with his asylum case, plus I could translate
(see Chapter 1 and Silverman 2000c). Catherine Foster was his first Amer-
ican protégée; as a female clarinetist, she was a rarity. Lauren Brody, who
performed in the ensemble from 1996 to 2002, was a versatile performer
who could translate and help with immigration documents. Other Ameri-
cans who have played with the ensemble are Jerry Kisslinger (tŭpan) and
Morgan Clark (accordion). The Yunakov Ensemble recorded four albums
on Traditional Crossroads, notably New Colors in Bulgarian Wedding
Music and Balada (recorded on an Australian tour).
From 1999 to 2002, the ensemble showcased Ivan Milev, who emigrated
to New York from Bulgaria after he received a green card. This repre-
sented a historic reunion on American soil because Yunakov had not
played with Milev since the mid-1980s. Milev is featured on the 2001 en-
semble CD Roma Variations. In numerous cuts from this album, the pair
display their improvisatory skills. The ensemble was successful in per-
forming at festivals, universities, and clubs throughout the United States,
but its identification with the global aspect of Gypsy music was cemented
when it was invited to take part in the Gypsy Caravan tour in 1999 (which
will be discussed shortly).
For years, Yunakov dreamed of inviting Ivo Papazov and his other
former colleagues from Trakiya to the United States, but the logistics were
difficult to arrange. In 1998, Neshko Neshev (accordion) joined the Yuna-
kov Ensemble for a tour to Australia, and in 1999 Neshko and Salif Ali
(drums) joined up for the Gypsy Caravan tour. In 2003, I helped arrange a
national tour including Ivo, Neshko, and Salif, in addition to newcomer
Kalin Kirilov (guitar and keyboard), who was already in the Untied States.
The tour was very successful and a disk, Together Again: Legends of Bulgar-
ian Wedding Music, was recorded and released on Traditional Crossroads.
The label sponsored a second tour in 2005 in conjunction with the release
of the album (see publicity photograph 11.2).
The excitement of these reunion tours was palpable. Papazov remarked:
Since Yuri left, we’ve constantly missed him. He’s one of the best solo-
ists; now we are so happy we are together—it doesn’t matter if he lives
in America, or Europe, it is still as if we are at a wedding. Because we
all made . . . our recordings together. Even after ten years, we are very
precise together—Yuri quickly gets up to par. We corresponded—we
Yuri Yunakov 233

exchanged material ahead of time. With computers it is easier now.
With Bulgarians and Americans going back and forth Yuri had contin-
uous information about our music.
Indeed, the musicians had only one short rehearsal in Bulgaria and two
days of rehearsals in New York before the first tour began. Moreover, it
was Yunakov who had most of the catching up to do because Ivo, Neshko,
and Salif had been expanding their Bulgarian wedding repertoire for the
recording of their 2003 album Fairground/Panair (see Chapter 8). Yuna-
kov, on the other hand, had been playing mostly Romani and Turkish
music since he emigrated, and when he played Bulgarian wedding music
it was to teach it to Americans. Their rehearsals were basically run-
throughs (the concept of slowing music down was unknown to them).
Yunakov learned the complicated new arrangements very quickly, but they
also decided to revive several older pieces from the 1980s. In addition,
Yunakov introduced Macedonian Romani pieces he had learned in Amer-
ica to the others. Aside from music, there were years of stories about wed-
dings and about fellow musicians to recount. Ivo, for example, claimed
that because Yuri had such a good appetite, they still request a portion of
lamb for him at every Bulgarian wedding, in spite of his having emigrated
to America!
Because of my respect for Yunakov’s musicianship and my confidence
that he could teach well, I tried to facilitate his connection to the world of
Americans playing Balkan music. All over the United States (clustered on
the two coasts), there is a network of Americans who are involved with
Balkan music as dancers, instrumentalists, and singers (Laušević 2007).
Yunakov taught Americans saxophone and clarinet at the Balkan Music
and Dance Workshop for the first time in 1995, and was asked back several
times. He has also been hired as a staff musician at several Turkish music
camps and workshops. Many Balkan musicians, though they are excellent
performers, lack teaching skills. Yunakov, however, is a gifted teacher and
cultivates his relationships with Americans.
In addition, Yunakov is one of the few Balkan Romani musicians (along
with Seido Salifoski) to become involved in activist Romani projects.
Yunakov himself organized a benefit concert in New York for a Bulgarian
Romani orphanage; he has also performed in several other benefit events.
In 2005, 2006, and 2008 he played at the Herdeljezi festival in California
sponsored by NGO Voice of Roma. His involvement in educational activ-
ities has been facilitated by Šani Rifati, head of Voice of Roma, and by me.
As soon as he arrived in New York in 1994, I encouraged him to partici-
pate in panel discussions, lectures, newspaper interviews, and other infor-
mative events about Roma that were associated with concerts and dance
parties. Both Rifati and I believe that music can be combined with educa-
tion, but not all musicians agree and cooperate; for example, in Chapter
10 I described conflicts Rifati had with Esma Redžepova’s musicians over
the issue of activism, and in Chapter 13 I discuss managers’ views of this
issue. I believe that Yunakov agreed to participate in these projects not

only because he believed in them but also because he wanted to cooperate
with Rifati and me and facilitate future connections.
It is clear that Yunakov is not only a versatile musician but also a prac-
tical strategist. He is a consummate collaborator and, unlike most Balkan
musicians, initiates diverse musical contacts for possible future business.
One such contact was Frank London of the Klezmer All Stars; Yunakov
performed with London’s group at the National Folk Festival in Rich-
mond, Virginia, in 2005. Another important contact is Eugene Hutz,
founder of the Gypsy Punk band Gogol Bordello. In Chapter 12, I explore
the Gypsy Punk movement, but here I want to underscore that Yunakov
responded to Eugene’s ideas for joint projects. Yunakov has performed
with Gogol Bordello several times and has recorded with them (the re-
cording has not been released). At the 2005 New York Gypsy Festival,
Yunakov participated in the circuslike atmosphere of Gogol Bordello by
stripping off his shirt, as Eugene does; he even convinced Ivo Papazov to
perform with Gogol Bordello. As I discuss in the next chapter, Yunakov
does not seem to object to the stereotypes Gogol Bordello portrays in its
shows; he is willing to go along with anything that is “good for business,”
whether it is a stereotypical show or an activist panel.
Yunakov has also cultivated a relationship with the directors of the first
New York Gypsy Festival, Alex Dimitrov (a Bulgarian) and Serdar Ilhan (a
Turk); he communicates well with them because he speaks both Bulgarian
and Turkish. He continued his relationship with Serdar, who sponsored
subsequent Gypsy festivals. Yunakov performed regularly in his old down-
town club Maia and continues to perform in Dimitrov’s newer club,
Mehanata on Ludlow Street. He was also involved in helping to lobby the
community board for a liquor license for Mehanata, and he even recruited
me into that endeavor (see Chapter 13). Another project Yunakov enjoyed
was the “Clarinet All-Stars,” which took place at several New York Gypsy
Festivals; at the premiere of this event in 2005, Husnu Senlendirici (from
Turkey; see Seeman 2007), Ismail Lumanovski (from Macedonia; see
Chapter 5), Yunakov, and Ivo Papazov took turns in a dazzling showcase
of solo reed playing. In 2009 Yunakov was honored at a concert sponsored
by the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, and in 2010 his ensemble
performed in the New York Black Sea Roma Festival. The most recent
configuration includes Mamudoski, two keyboardists (Popaj and Erhan
Umer), Erhan’s brother Sevim on drums, Ali Ceyhan on dumbek, and
Turkish singer Gamze Ordulu. In 2011, Yunakov was honored with a Na-
tional Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellowship Award.
The North American Gypsy Caravan tour of 1999 proved to be fertile
ground to examine how Yunakov interacted with Roma from other regions.
In the next chapter, I analyze the representational dilemmas surrounding
the six groups in the Gypsy Caravan tour, including Musafir from Rajast-
han, India; the Kolpakov Trio from Russia; Kalji Jag from Hungary; Taraf
de Haiduk from Romania; Antonio El Pipa from Spain; and the Yunakov
Ensemble. Here I want mention that despite journalists constantly asking
him about what unified the groups, Yunakov underscored their diversity
Yuri Yunakov 235

and hybridity, calling them “six different kinds of music.” He said, “I
haven’t heard some of these kinds of music before—they are excellent mu-
sicians. The Indian music is perhaps closest to me. Of course the Hungar-
ians and Romanians have taken a lot from Bulgarian Romani music.”
Here Yunakov is commenting on some Rajasthani tunes that sounded like
kyucheks to him.
His comment that Taraf de Haidouks and Kalji Jag “have taken a lot”
from us refers to manele, the post-1989 Romanian and Hungarian genre
that is similar to the Bulgarian kyuchek (see Chapters 9, and 12). Yunakov
was both annoyed and proud that his music was imitated, alternately
using the words “they stole from us” and “they admire us.” In the next
chapter, I describe how manele was not allowed to be played by Taraf de
Haidouks and Kalji Jag in the 1999 Caravan show because tour producer
Robert Browning thought it was not distinctive enough to Romania and
Hungary. Yet the genre kyuchek/manele was precisely what unified three
of the six groups, and they enjoyed jamming backstage by playing
kyucheks. Interestingly, Browning changed his mind by 2001, and in the
second Gypsy Caravan tour Fanfare Ciocarlia was allowed to play manele.
The urban-rural dichotomy surfaced on the Caravan tour several times.
As I discuss in the next chapter, Yunakov objected to the tattered peasant
image of the Taraf de Haidouks and thought it would do damage to the
professional image of Roma on the tour. When he personally volunteered
to take the members of the Taraf shopping for new clothes and for instru-
ment cases, he did so as an American urbanite helping less-fortunate Bal-
kan villagers (he also gave bags of clothing to elder Nicolae Neascu to take
home to his village). But when he learned that the Taraf managers actually
cultivated the peasant image on stage, he became very angry with the
managers and called the Taraf’s appearance a “shame.” This was amplified
by his outrage that the managers did not “control” the behavior of Taraf
members, allowing them to busk in the street. To Yunakov, busking was a
low-class activity that professionals should disdain. He was also upset by
surreptitious peddling on the part of Taraf members of pirated versions of
their own CDs and other Taraf activities such as asking for gifts (gold jew-
elry) from fans. Yunakov perceived these actions as fulfilling the Gypsy
stereotype, and therefore objectionable.
Note that Yunakov resisted certain Gypsy stereotypes (such as dirtiness,
poverty, and dishonesty) but not others (exoticism and authenticity). Like
many other Romani musicians, Yunakov was neither interested in nor
surprised at how Roma were pictured and narrated in advertisements for
the Caravan tour. When I showed him what I thought were objectionable
images, such as photograph 12.1 (discussed in Chapter 12), he did not
think it was worth our effort to complain. Perhaps he knew this was a
battle already lost. Moreover, he accommodated to exoticism because it
helped to sell tickets. In working with him in his ensemble, I have adopted
some of that attitude. When Harold Hagopian (of Traditional Crossroads)
contacted me about the publicity he was generating for the 2005 Yunakov/
Papasov tour, he said:

We have to think about marketing. In all these publicity packets, every
group claims they are virtuosic. Our musicians really are virtuosic,
but how do we convey that? Since no one will recognize Ivo’s or Yuri’s
name or even the term Bulgarian wedding music, we need to figure
out a catchy title; the subtitle can be “Gypsy wedding music.” How
about “Bulgarian Bebop”? Remember these guys were inspired by
bebop in the 1970s—by the energy, the improvisation, the creativity,
the speed? They passed around underground tapes when it was illegal
to listen to jazz. I think this could be a way to sell them to the public.
I thought to myself that a few years ago I would have been appalled at this
“misrepresentation.” I would have thought, “These musicians don’t play
bebop, they play Bulgarian and Romani wedding music.” But I found
myself reacting exactly how Yunakov reacted: “Whatever will help the
tour, the sales, the marketing is fine with me, unless of course it impinges
on what I play.”
Yunakov perceives himself as an urban modern performer whose
clothing and music complement his image. He insists his band members
wear dressy outfits, and he irons his clothes before every performance. A
Bulgarian folk costume would be as foreign to him as it would to an Amer-
ican rock group. Musically, in his own view he is as modern as any jazz or
rock performer, even if audiences interpret his music or his ethnicity dif-
ferently. A controversy over instrumentation arose in 2000 when Yunakov
toured Western Europe. His European tour managers, Henry Ernst and
Helmut Neumann (from the Asphalt Tango production company), wanted
him to replace the synthesizer in his band with a kanun because the latter
is an acoustic instrument, and thus more authentic. As I discuss in Chap-
ter 12, European audiences perceive Roma as the last bastion of tradition
in a modern Europe devoid of authenticity. Ernst and Neumann told me
that the Yunakov Ensemble had been rejected from some European festi-
vals because their music was not viewed as authentic. But Yunakov was
adamant in his decision to continue using the synthesizer (see Chapter 12
for similarities to Esma Redžepova’s stance about the synthesizer). Resis-
tance, then, is always paired with collaboration (Ortner 1995, 1999). “Nei-
ther submitting to power, nor ‘resisting’ it in any simple sense,” Yunakov
works through both resistance and collaboration and turns them as much
as he can toward his goals (Ortner 1999:158).
On Multiple Identities
Much recent scholarship attends to the global forces affecting music; but
rather than focusing only on the dichotomies local versus global or
Romani musicians versus non-Romani marketers and mangers, the cate-
gories Roma and local need to be interrogated. This echoes Ortner’s call to
examine the internal conflicts within marginal groups, not just the politics
between resisters and dominant forces (1995). All the local contexts of
Yuri Yunakov 237

Yunakov’s life evince conflicts over representational practices; we do not
have to wait for him to become a transnational musician to see this.
Through Yunakov’s life, we have also seen the myriad divisions and con-
flicts within the category Roma; in Bulgaria this label did not include him
(he thought he was a Turk) and in transnational musical contexts it
includes widely disparate groups with whom he does not identify (such as
Rajasthanis). Note that the pan-Romani human rights movement is facing
precisely this challenge in using the label Roma (see Chapter 3).
Throughout his life Yunakov accommodated to some representations of
himself imposed by dominant structures, such as his name (imposed by
socialists) and the Gypsy authenticity of his music (imposed by a capitalist
market), but he also resisted in select arenas, such as repertoire and in-
strumentation. Yunakov flatly rejected certain stereotypes of Gypsies he
found offensive, such as the dirty thief, but accommodated other stereo-
types such as genetic talent and exoticism. Although his music is eclectic
and amplified, it is viewed by many in Europe as the last bastion of tradi-
tion. Similar to Senegalese musician Youssou N’Dour, Yunakov faces
“constant pressure from westerners to remain musically and otherwise
pre-modern—that is culturally ‘natural’—because of racism and western
demands for authenticity” (Taylor 1997:126). According to Taylor, musi-
cians such as N’Dour “are concerned with becoming global citizens and do
this . . . by making cultural forms as (post)modern as the west’s” (143).
Yunakov favors an “alternative modernity,” which rejects purity and em-
braces hybridity. According to Hall, “the aesthetic of modern popular
music is the aesthetic of the hybrid . . . the crossover . . . the diaspora . . .
creolization” (in Taylor 1997:xxi). Further, “the diaspora experience is
defined not by essence or purity but by the recognition of a necessary het-
erogeneity and diversity; it is a conception of identity which lives through,
not despite difference, by hybridity” (Hall 1989:80).
Yunakov is a diasporic hybrid musician; he is open and flexible, learns
quickly, and can fit into a wide range of ethnic musical groups. Perhaps
this heterogeneity describes a specifically Romani sense of adaptation, or
perhaps it is his personal style. He may sound like a free-spirit hybrid, but
part of Yunakov’s strategy comes from necessity—being excluded—from
being an outsider and having to fit in. He arrived in American with neither
a stable band nor a saleable music product. His mainstay, wedding music,
was not viable in America, so it had to be broken into parts and expanded.
His fluency with Romani and Turkish music served as entry points into
Albanian, Armenian, and Middle Eastern styles. He was a soloist who
needed to find several musical niches because no one musical niche was
reliable enough. His role as solo performer (rather than composer, ar-
ranger, and organizer) necessitated fitting into other musicians’ groups.9
Music is Yunakov’s language of artistry, commerce, and socialization.
Music allowed him to cross borders, but barriers remained. Through his
style of music and his dark-skinned physical appearance, he was known
by various labels—Muslim, Turk, Gypsy, Bulgarian—which implied alter-
nately inclusion and exclusion. Among Westerners, he could be seen as

exotic; among Bulgarians he might be suspicious. He could never be fully
accepted by Bulgarians because he is Muslim, Turkish-speaking, and
Romani.10 Even Macedonian Roma, with whom he felt most comfortable,
often reminded him he is Bulgarian. In Chapter 3, I discussed how we
should resist the urge to romanticize and valorize hybridity as creativity
because celebration of hybridity often obscures its economic and political
implications (Hutnyk 2000). Embracing hybridity might even suppress a
critique of the world music market; in fact, the world music market pro-
motes a depoliticized, consumption-oriented passive hybridity. Striving to
essentialize neither capitalism nor hybridity, in this chapter I have instead
focused on the negotiating practices within the market that musicians
such as Yunakov have fashioned.
Yuri Yunakov 239

12
ab
Romani Music as World Music
“Gypsy music” has become both a commodity and a discursive symbol in

the trafficking of “authenticity” and “exoticism” in contexts such as world
music festivals and tours.1 Gypsy music, as a participatory, artistic, and
processual means of commerce, encodes multiple meanings for per-
formers, as well as for producers, marketers, and audience members. In
this chapter, I examine the marketing and consumption of Gypsy music as
it charts the relationships among festival producers and managers of Bal-
kan Romani music acts (who provide a saleable item), audience members
(who claim to support a liberal, multicultural agenda), the press (eager to
create a catchy story), and Romani musicians (trying to make a living).
Significant here is that the first three groups are elites with cash to invest,
while most performers are members of a marginalized group. However,
rather than viewing Roma simply as victims of manipulation, I explore
how Roma manage to actively negotiate their representations, albeit
within limited options. Sometimes engaging in a type of “self-orientaliz-
ing” (Ong 1997) that sells the product, Romani musicians, as well as their
managers and producers, are all “cultural brokers” with ideological and
economic agendas (Kurin 1997).
How did Romani music become the hip commodity labeled Gypsy
music that is now found in world music festivals, in urban clubs, and
endorsed by movie stars such as Johnny Depp and Madonna? First, we
must remember that historically music is a positive romantic stereotype
associated with Roma; second, for hundreds of years music has been a vi-
able Romani occupation; and third, Roma have intimately interacted with
non-Romani patrons via music making. Music is currently one of the few
arenas for positive articulation of a public identity for Roma; this illus-
trates the paradox I raised in Chapter 1, namely that Roma are powerless
politically and powerful musically. Indeed, music is one of the only bright
spots for Eastern European Roma in an otherwise bleak picture. The few
musical groups who travel abroad are truly lucky; many successful Romani
musicians are supporting whole villages or extended families at home.
241
As discussed in Chapter 8, numerous festivals and tours of Romani
music have been organized all over Europe since 1989 that serve various
political and cultural functions. In 1999, the first Gypsy festival/tour was
organized in North America. This tour constituted a rich opportunity to
analyze the interaction of the American public and press with Balkan
Romani musicians in the public commercial sphere. Why did an interest
in Gypsy music suddenly arise in the 1990s in Western Europe and North
America? One answer is that the end of socialism opened up a new vista
for enterprising promoters (Gočić 2000). More important, the French doc-
umentary Latcho Drom (1993, The Good Road, discussed in this chapter)
plus Emir Kusturica’s fictional feature films2 initiated a veritable craze for
Gypsy music in the world music scene. These films became cult classics,
and audiences began to flock to festivals and concerts to see and hear the
performers. These films catapulted previously unknown performers into
the world music scene; as an example, the ensemble Taraf de Haidouks
went from villagers to stars almost overnight.
Gypsy music festivals can be divided into two broad categories, those
sponsored by Roma and non-Roma, the latter usually Western European or
North American impresarios.3 The materials for this chapter fall into the
latter category; I focus on two tours of the North American Gypsy Caravan
(1999 and 2001) with comparative materials from Western European Gypsy
music festivals and the New York Gypsy Festival. The first Western Euro-
pean Gypsy festivals were held in Berlin in 1992 (Musik and Kultureage der
Cinti und Roma) and Paris (Les Tsiganes a l’Opéra); these were followed by
a number of spectacles under the title Magneten, organized by German
impresario Andre Heller. Other festivals followed, among them le Vie dei
Gitani (Ravenna, Italy, 2000), Barbican: The 1000 Year Journey (London,
2000), the Time of the Gypsies (a tour to several countries, 2001), and the
1995 Lucerne festival, which featured a Gypsy component. More recent
examples are the Iagori festival in Norway in 2005 (www.iagori.com); the
annual Khamoro festival in Prague; the annual Gipsy Festival in Holland,
started in 1997 (www.gipsyfestival.nl); the Festival Internazionale di Musica
Romani (held in Italy since 1993); Barbican: The 1000 Year Journey, held in
London for second time in 2007; and the Festival Tzigane (www.festival.
tzigart.com), held in France annually since 2000. In addition, Roma often
appear in general world music festivals such as WOMAD, the annual Bal-
kan Trafik Festival in Belgium (www.1001valises.com) and Balkan Fever
first held in Vienna in 2004 (www.balkanfever.at). In 2007 the Tenth Medi-
terranean Youth Festival at Akdeniz University in Turkey advertised a
Gypsy focus, and the annual Athe Sam Romani festival began in Hungary.
North American interest in Gypsy music grew in the mid-1990s when
recordings became available and Balkan groups such as Taraf de Haid-
ouks toured. The 1997 festival Herdeljezi, sponsored by the NGO Voice of
Roma, was the first American festival to feature Balkan Romani music in
the context of activism. Voice of Roma (www.voiceofroma.com) was
founded by a Kosovo Rom, Šani Rifati, and has successfully combined the
goal of music programming with direct aid to Kosovo Romani refugees.

Its website states: “Voice of Roma is working domestically, primarily in
the San Francisco and Northern Bay Area of California, presenting
authentic Romani culture, music and art, counteracting the hype of the
romanticized ‘Gypsy,’ and educating the public about history, current
events and the plight of the Kosovo Roma.” Since 1997, the California
festival has grown to attract hundreds of Americans, and VOR has received
funding from state and national folk arts agencies. VOR also presents an
annual April International Roma Day celebration and has sponsored sev-
eral tours of Balkan Romani musicians. A Herdelezi celebration was also
held 2007–2009 in Maryland by the nonprofit World Music Folklife Center.
VOR strives to present Romani artists; their audiences, however, are
mostly Americans. VOR has Roma on its board of directors, has invested
in significant educational programming, and has sponsored activist pro-
jects in Europe. This distinguishes VOR from most of the festivals men-
tioned above that are run by non-Roma.
The first multigroup North American tour was the Gypsy Caravan: A
Celebration of Roma Music and Dance, sponsored by the World Music
Institute of New York for six weeks in 1999; thanks to its success, a second
tour followed in 2001. The 1999 tour featured six groups: Musafir from
Rajasthan, Trio Kolpakov from Russia, Taraf de Haidouks from Romania,
Kalyi Jag from Hungary, the Yuri Yunakov Ensemble from Bulgaria and
the United States, and Antonio El Pipa Flamenco Ensemble from Spain.
The 1991 tour featured four groups: Antonio El Pipa and Musafir again
(under the name Maharaja), Fanfare Ciocarlia from Romania, and Esma
Redžepova from Macedonia. (Note that the documentary Gypsy Caravan
combines both tours.) In 2004 Gypsy Spirit: Journey of the Roma, per-
formed by the Budapest Ensemble, toured North America.4 In 2005 and
2007 the Romani Iag (fire) festival took place in Montreal. The annual
New York Gypsy Festival began in 2005 (see Chapter 13).
The film Latcho Drom provided both the performers and the structural
model for early Gypsy festivals. The model articulates a linear diaspora of
Romani music, starting in India, the homeland, and ending in Western
Europe, including groups from Rajasthan, Egypt, Turkey, Romania, Hun-
gary, Czech Republic, France, and Spain (Malvinni 2004). Although the
linear diaspora model is quite problematic, it serves as the unifying trope,
as I critiqued in Chapter 3 and discuss later in this chapter. Latcho Drom
is a staged documentary: performers are filmed in local settings prear-
ranged by the French half-Romani director Tony Gatlif. Stunning musical
performances and stark visuals accompanied by few words evocatively
display artistry and marginality, but the filmic viewpoint is of an outsider
looking into a world of supposed “authenticity.” There are no naturally
occurring contexts, and there is little attention to music as a profession.
The film perpetuates several essentialist notions: all Roma are “natural”
musicians; Roma constitute a bounded, unified ethnic group; and finally,
there was a linear path of migration from India to Western Europe.
Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to analyze this documen-
tary (Silverman 2000a), I emphasize that the film created an iconic
Romani Music as World Music 243

sequence in which to present Gypsy music: from India to Spain. Further-
more, the groups featured in the film were the first to travel in world music
circuits (e.g., Taraf de Haidouks, Musafir, and Musiciens du Nil from
Egypt); finally, the film helped create the viability of the marketing cate-
gory Gypsy music.
Marketing Exoticism and Authenticity
How is Gypsy music presented to the wider public in world music festivals
and tours? Drawing on stereotypes, promoters and marketers emphasize
exoticism, which is indeed a theme in much world music marketing (Tay-
lor 1997, 2007). As I discussed in Chapter 3, world music thrives on height-
ened ethnic and racial difference. Most representations of Roma (like
other oppressed groups) have been produced by outsiders, because histor-
ically Roma have had little control over hegemonic discourse and symbol
systems (Hancock 1997). Recalling Edward Said’s “Orientalism” (1978),
Roma are pictured as located on the (eastern) margins of Western civiliza-
tion, furnishing a figure of fantasy, escape, and danger for the imagination.
In the process of exoticization, the most eastern Gypsy groups are the
most “orientalized” by marketers and producers. For example, the Rajast-
hani group Musafir’s promotional packet reads:
Classical and mystical musicians, unexpected instruments played by

virtuosos, whirling desert drag queen, devotional and frantic folk
dances, hypnotizing snake charmers, and dangerous fakirs, including
fire eating, balancing acts, sword swallowing, and walking on crushed
glass—a fantastic entertainment! . . . Sufi desert trance music by ele-
gant gipsy wizards. . . . A music of ecstasy, whirlwinded of climaxes
punctuated by the gentle gesture of a breathtaking tune. An authentic
magical experience [Maharaja, email promotion, July 11, 2001].
The exotic trope also extends to Europe’s margins. The poster for Fort
Worth’s Bass Hall concert (photograph 12.1) on the 1999 Gypsy Caravan
tour reads: “Get in touch with your inner gypsy. Join in this impassioned
celebration of Gypsy traditions. . . . The elders supply soul and experience,
the young speed and energy. Come feel the heat of a Gypsy fire.” The im-
agery includes eight photographs, only three of which feature groups from
the actual show that the poster is advertising. The other five are stereotyp-
ical pictures of generic Gypsies: a dark-skinned man with a bare chest
playing the violin, three women in seductive poses, and a red rose. Clearly,
all Gypsy images are interchangeable, for Gypsies are merely a place-
holder for the premodern, the exotic “other.” Similarly, Zirbel reports that
the campfire and caravan imagery used in marketing for the 1995 Lucerne
festival heightened differences between the Swiss audience and “others”:
“such marketing reinforced the belief that the Gypsies were freshly
imported, authentic exotics” (1999:38).

Music is an especially fruitful medium for trafficking in exoticism. As I
discussed in Chapter 9, in the Balkans exoticism is coded as “oriental” or
eastern (Turkish and Middle Eastern), and marked by scales and rhythmic
patterns that are associated with the East, Gypsies, sex, and passion.
These elements of musical style and text have been appropriated by non-
Roma and are now widespread in pop and fusion styles such as chalga in
Bulgaria and manele in Romania. On the other hand, otherness is some-
times tied it to inner truths: “The pattern whereby society’s Others are
recruited from the periphery in order to articulate musically the ‘soul’ of
the more settled members is not an oddity from Serbia” (Van de Port
1999:292). Indeed, African Americans have historically served this role in
Anglo-American society. Van de Port’s research shows that devoted Ser-
bian fans of Romani cafe music in Novi Sad, Vojvodina, Serbia, need
Gypsy musicians to bring out their souls; the “stranger within” brings out
“implicit social knowledge” (1999:292).
Exotic others, however, may conflict with local Roma, who are often less
fortunate than touring musicians. The 2000 British Gypsy festival Bar-
bican, for example, had an uneasy relationship with local Roma and Trav-
elers while simultaneously capitalizing on “foreign” Roma. Traveler activist
Jake Bowers pointed out that no British Travelers performed in prominent
locations:
Call me a purist, but surely a Gypsy festival should predominantly fea-

ture Gypsies, especially those from the country hosting the event. . . .
After receiving a few concessions from the organizers such as extra
performances featuring British Travelers and cut-price tickets for
Romani refugees, British traveler organizations gave the festival their
reluctant stamp of approval. Even crumbs from a table are better than
nothing at all in a time of starvation. . . . The trap they [festival orga-
nizers] fell into was one of exoticism where “real” Gypsies belong to
some other place and time. They didn’t consult any British Traveler
organizations during the planning but used a world music consultant
who wouldn’t recognize a genuine Traveler if one slapped him with a
hedgehog.5 Musicians in the here and now were turned down in favor
of people whose dress and music represented the there and then. Turks
in tuxedos and Rajasthanis in turbans are a world apart from the av-
erage British Gypsy site or squalid refugee hotel (Patrin listserv, May
25 and 27, 2000).
Bowers’s phrase “a time of starvation” refers to the current hostile cli-

mate in the United Kingdom (and elsewhere in Western Europe) for
Roma, related to the fear of incoming waves of Romani refugees from the
east.6 Bowers writes: “Outside in the streets, Romani women from Roma-
nia were causing hysteria . . . by daring to beg for money. . . . Armed with
nothing more threatening than children, the women were being vilified by
the national press for threatening the shoppers of Chelsea. A housebreaker
from a British Romani family had just been shot dead by a racist farmer

causing even greater hysteria about Gypsy intimidation” (Patrin listserv,
May 25, 2000). Indeed, we must remember that music festivals take place
amidst growing xenophobia and anti-Romani violence. University of Texas
Romani activist Ian Hancock took a stance squarely against Gypsy music
festivals, finding them a poor substitute for real activism fighting discrim-
ination: “It’s not unusual for concerts to be funded for Roma to distract
from the real issues. The money could be far better spent” (Patrin listserv,
May 24, 2000).
In addition to displaying the exotic, festivals also cleanse, tame, appro-
priate, and colonize the exotic (Zirbel 1999:72). The structure of the festi-
val is, in fact, a microcosm of colonialism: the Romani “darkies” wait at
the margins of Europe (or in Western European ghettos) to be discovered
by white promoters; they are then escorted to the west, briefly put on stage,
and escorted home afterward. Kathryn Zirbel notes that at the Lucerne
1995 festival there was uneasiness among organizers that the Romani per-
formers would overstep their place; indeed, when they were simply out on
the street as nonperformers, they were met with hostility and suspicion
(1999:84): “In response to community concerns, it was rumored that the
festival organizers had to sign an affidavit promising to reimburse all
goods stolen or damaged by the visiting ‘Gypsies’” (Zirbel 2000:137).
Racism often lurks beneath artistic adoration. The connection between
artistic adoration and colonialism has been noted by Paul Gilroy (1993); in
fact, nostalgia for the lost authenticity of the past is often intertwined with
domination (Taussig 1987). Rosaldo’s phrase “imperialist nostalgia” simi-
larly invokes how colonialists yearn for the very markers of non-Western
life they have destroyed (1989). Susan Stewart reminds us that nostalgia is
a representational practice (1984), a strategy of representation according
to Lisa Rofel (1999:137). For Roma and their producers alike, nostalgia for
the premodern authentic is a strategy not only of marketing but also of
representing identity via music.
The concept of authenticity is evoked by sponsors and the media to con-
vey the message that Gypsy music festivals are “the real thing.” Statements
such as “experience the true arts of the Gypsies,” “authentic music,”
“authentic ensembles,” “authentic culture,” and “Take a ride on the Gypsy
Caravan and discover the power and joy of traditional Gypsy culture”
(Kennedy Center Performance Calendar, 1999) peppered Gypsy Caravan
advertisements. Michel Winter, manager of the Taraf de Haidouks, com-
mented: “People are moved because they feel they are seeing something
that they thought no longer existed” (quoted from the DVD No Man Is a
Prophet in His Own Land). Similarly, Zirbel reports that for the Lucerne
festival Gypsies were depicted as “nostalgic throwbacks in the midst of
modern Western Europe, persisting embodiments of older values and cus-
toms” (1999:38). Live performances reinforce authenticity even more than
the actual music; the musicians perform their Gypsy identities on stage.
“Live music performance . . . explicitly and publicly encourages and directs
audiences to imagine lives and subjectivities of the performers they see
before them” (Zirbel 1999:45; also see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998).

Unlike classical music festivals, where the interpretive and technical
abilities of the individual artist are paramount, Gypsy festivals display the
amazing fact that Gypsies are on stage: “The ‘Gypsiness’ of Gypsy music is
a construct on the perceivers’ part, but which is elaborated and commod-
ified by Gypsy musicians. . . . Gypsy musicians return what is projected
onto them” (Van de Port 1999:292). A good illustration of this is the theat-
rical framing used by the Romanian band Fanfare Ciocarlia: one of the
trumpet players yells “Gypsies!” to the audience to initiate the show, en-
suring that they are authentic.7
Similarly, Robert Browning, director of the World Music Institute,
explained to me the challenges of producing Gypsy music: “The dilemma
is how to market Romani musicians in an ethical manner given the fact
that the Gypsy label has a host of stereotypes associated with it. If we pre-
sent a Hungarian band or a Rajasthani group, audiences want to know if
this is ‘authentic’ Gypsy music, and, I confess, the answer is very compli-
cated. I don’t know how to handle the situation when Gulabi Sapera calls
herself ‘Queen of the Gypsies.’” Here Browning highlights the fact that
marketing relies on audience recognition, which in turn relies on histor-
ical stereotypes. Sapera, a Kalbelia dancer from Rajasthan, adopted the
label of Gypsy when Latcho Drom made Kalbelia dancers famous (see
Girgis 2007).
Western European audiences seem to be especially receptive to the
trope of authenticity of Gypsy music, perhaps because they feel that they
have lost their own authenticity and folklore. Suspicion of the homoge-
nizing effects of the European Union is related to this fear of loss of local
culture; this may cause Western Europeans to categorize Gypsy music as
traditional and contrast it with their own pan-Europop. Ionitsa, the lead
arranger for the band Taraf de Haidouks, commented in the liner notes to
the CD Honourable Brigands, Magic Horses and Evil Eye: “At last I under-
stand why Taraf de Haidouks is so successful in the West. The West has
lost its own folklore and people are saturated with electronic music; they
want something more natural.” One manager concurred: “I think there is
a . . . desire to keep something very pure and very traditional because we
lost it—most of the Western audience, Western civilization, they lost stuff
like this. . . . Music like Fanfare Ciocarlia, a huge brass band, it seems very
rootsy, it hasn’t been performed in Europe before. . . . For a world music
audience, it can’t be too electric, too modern, it has to be old time, roots.”
This current association of Gypsy music with tradition and authenticity is,
however, ironic considering the historic Eastern European exclusion of
Gypsy music from the category of traditional (see Chapter 7).
I concur with Paul Sant Cassia (2000) that European “modernity” is in-
creasingly pursued through the celebration of “traditionalism” (282). Tra-
dition and authenticity, however, are not self-evident categories; rather,
they must be defined and narrated in discourse. “‘Tradition’ thus becomes
not just something invented in an identifiable (recent) past (as Hobsbawn’s
contributors suggest), but a way of talking about the past and the present
through the identification of certain practices that require preservation”

(289). Romani music becomes a “symbol of marginality . . . not so much
power from the past, but power that has survived in spite of the past, and
which is likely to ‘disappear’ because of the onslaught of the ‘modern
world’” (293). According to Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, heritage is a mode of
cultural production in the present that has discursive recourse to the past
(1998). She shows how authenticity oscillates between concealment and
discovery of the marginal or authentic.
Sant Cassia elaborates on how the category marginal is “confabulated”:
the marginal is represented as exotic, as a “unique experience” that is dis-
covered, then the narrating subject confers authenticity, and then authen-
ticity is reproduced on a mass scale (2000:293). Oppression may also
confer authenticity, as I discussed in Chapter 3. This advertisement nar-
rates the tie between music and persecution: “Whirling wedding dances.
Flamboyant fiddle and cymbalom [sic] music. Passionate lamentations
born of centuries of persecution. . . . The Roma have kept alive their his-
tory, tradition and religions solely through oral and musical communica-
tion” (Dartmouth University concert advertisement, 1999). Similarly, Imre
points out that Romani rappers in Hungary capitalize on the authenticity
of the ghetto as fertile territory for the artistry of the marginal; they have
turned the ghetto into a site of profitable entertainment (2006:663).
Roma themselves, however, do not usually buy into the dichotomy of
tradition-modernity. For example, Esma Redžepova rejected the idea of
recording an acoustic, more traditional album in her home; this idea was
proposed by her cousin Šani Rifati, the sponsor of her 2004 American
tour. Similarly, she argued with her Dutch manager, Anton Verdonk, when
he suggested that audiences prefer the traditional sound of a tarabuka
(hand drum) to a drum set. She insisted that the drum set provides a fuller,
more modern sound for her “traditional music.” Similarly, a controversy
over authentic instrumentation arose when Esma’s ensemble toured West-
ern Europe in the early 2000s; they were met with hostile reactions, even
booing in Spain, because they used a synthesizer, which is perceived as a
nontraditional, modern intrusion. According to one of her managers, au-
diences want acoustic Gypsy music:
The controversy is that many people say, “That is a great band, but it
is a shame that the synthesizer is there. . . .” The crowds in Europe
have this kind of purist view that it should be authentic; the manage-
ment in Europe has been trying to talk Esma out of using the synthe-
sizer. . . . It has to do with the image people have of a certain kind of
music—they want to see that image on stage. They see something
modern and they think it is not the real thing. . . . They might be look-
ing for a certain stereotype of what people think Gypsy music is about.
Another manager claimed: “Now it is the fashion to hear real acoustic

Gypsy music. . . . If it’s amplified, electrified, audiences think it is not authen-
tic. . . . It is quite ironical since Gypsies are very open, very influenced, very
open to influences. But it is not accepted if they change something.” Another

manager concurred: “We can’t convince audiences that the Gypsy community
in the Balkans uses electric instruments. They want the acoustic way. . . .
People want to keep music like it is. They don’t see that Gypsies are in flux.
They want to keep it so as not to change it. . . . I don’t like this kind of purism
because it is not so different from colonialism. You like it, it is so sweet, but
you don’t recognize their reality.”
Indeed, labeling the synthesizer as nonauthentic is ironic considering
the open and eclectic attitude musicians have toward styles and instru-
mentation (see Chapter 2). They have historically adopted and adapted
both Western and Eastern elements, including rap, rock, jazz, rumba, and
Indian motifs. They were among the first musicians in the region to use
amplification, capitalizing its association of electrification with the West
and with modernity. Also recall Yuri Yunakov’s decision to reject his man-
agers’ advice to substitute a kanun for a synthesizer in order to make his
music more traditional (see Chapter 11). Similarly, Esma was adamant in
her decision to continue using the synthesizer: “Yes, there was this argu-
ment. My manger wanted us to use the contrabass, not the synthesizer—
they wanted an older sound. This is stupidity—Romani music has used
modern instruments for a long time. I insisted on having my way and we
now use the synthesizer.”
According to Simeon Atanasov, Esma’s accordionist, “We had an argu-
ment at WOMEX [European booking conference]. Now there’s a new fash-
ion in Europe to do it the old way, to use older instruments. It is stupid.
One time we agreed to use the contrabass—it was a total waste. We were
very upset; it doesn’t go with the music. The synthesizer fills out the
sound.” When I told Simeon that the managers claimed that the audiences
didn’t like the synthesizer, he answered: “The audience likes what you give
them if you play well. You train an audience what to expect.” Trumpet
player Zahir Ramadanov concurred: “These managers are not musicians.
They don’t understand music, they don’t play music. They shouldn’t tell us
what to play. We are musicians—we know what sound we want.”
To these Roma, it was more important for them to control the music
than the marketing images that are controlled by outsiders. Esma not only
defied her managers’ directives about the synthesizer but she fashioned her
show as she pleased; for example, in Berkeley, California, in 2001, in front
of more than 2,000 spectators, and in defiance of the union rules of the
stage crew, she invited her cousin Šani Rifati on stage to dance with her.
“What was important here was that culture was an object of self-conscious
display and hence control” (Schein 1999:380). Performers, then, manage to
exert artistic control, albeit within constraints.
Another marketing trope is depiction of Romani musicians as authentic
peasant villagers. Among the groups in the North American tours of the
Gypsy Caravan, the two Romanian groups Taraf de Haidouks and Fanfare
Ciocarlia are composed of villagers, and the marketing imagery for these
groups emphasizes dirt roads, frayed clothing, broken-down fences, old
village houses, mud, and farm animals. The imagery of Taraf’s village of
Clejani is so iconic that Marc Hollander wrote: “All those who take an

interest in the Taraf have seen it so often in magazines or in film: the wide
dirt roads lined with long row houses—it feels as if you’ve been there
before” (2001). According to one manager, “European audiences admire
folklore (but not too staged)—they want naturalism—nothing styled up—
just how they normally are. . . . People like groups such as Fanfare Ciocar-
lia and Taraf de Haidouks because it seems as if they just came in from
the agricultural fields—they just washed their hands and picked up their
instruments, and then they will go back to the fields.”
Peasantry can always be staged if necessary. The Fanfare Ciocarlia
album Baro Biao features a photograph of a trumpeter aiming his instru-
ment at a chicken in its nest inside a village house; another photograph
features a horn player on a horse, with a cow watching. Similarly, the
Taraf album Band of Gypsies features the band in the back of a farm truck
(photograph 12.2). Furthermore, when this album was recorded in 2001
in Bucharest, Taraf managers arranged a mandatory visit to the Taraf vil-
lage of Clejani for the assembled two dozen journalists and photogra-
phers. They set up a huge media event that was filmed by director Elsa
Gatlif.8 She put the Taraf members in an old cart pulled by a tractor and
had them driven through the village while playing, with views of the coun-
tryside passing by; indeed the album cover features this scene. Another
photography shoot was arranged by Masataka Ishida, who had previously
photographed Taraf members in designer Yohji Yanamoto’s couture. Ishi-
da’s idea was to place the musicians in a farmyard, “surrounded by the
entire population of the farm, chickens, pigs, and goats, huge bundles of
firewood, assorted farming tools” (Hollander 2001).
While I am not denying that these musicians reside in a village, I under-
score that peasantry has become cultural capital to market. The 2005 film
Iag Bari, for example, chronicles the remoteness of the village of Fanfare
Ciocarlia to illustrate how the musicians have been transformed into in-
ternational travelers and cosmopolitan stars. Similarly, in the Taraf video
No Man is Prophet in his Own Land, singer and violinist Pasalan is filmed
standing awkwardly in front of his huge new house playing his violin and
doing his famous animal vocalizations; off camera, farm animals echo his
imitations. Indeed, manager Stephane Karo commented in the video
about Taraf: “Wherever they’ve been they always end up in the same
place.” These images implicitly try to convince viewers that there is an
authentic village mentality that never changes.
Clothing plays a significant role in the audience perception of authen-
ticity. For example, both Fanfare Ciocarlia and Taraf de Haidouks perform
in their everyday clothing, that is, shirts (often T-shirts) and pants. Accord-
ing to Fanfare manager Henry Ernst: “Fanfare never uses costumes at
home in Romania for wedding or ceremonies. They just dress normally.
On tour in Western Europe they just kept this practice, and afterwards we
saw this is what audiences like.” His partner Helmut Neumann concurred:
“This creates, ironically, authentic Gypsy culture, because Europeans like
to see a band which can create a really good party and they came on stage
in absolutely normal clothing—not like folklore ensembles.” Journalists

often write about the appearance of these two Romanian groups: how
everyday it is. As record producer Harold Hagopian of Traditional Cross-
roads comments, “Audiences and promoters want Gypsies to look and act
like Gypsies.” Similarly, Dušan Ristić, founder of the Serbian band Kal,
said, “After the audience pays its money, it wants to see and hear what it
expects. They have stereotypes, and the promoters and the managers have
to satisfy the audience’s taste.”
Roma, however, are certainly not all villagers, and among themselves
there is often disagreement about presentation styles. When Taraf mem-
bers showed up at the start of the 1999 Gypsy Caravan tour carrying suit-
cases with holes, having no cases for their musical instruments, and
wearing tattered clothing in which they performed, many of the other per-
formers were horrified. They pointed out that this image would reinforce
stereotypes of poor, dirty “Gypsies” and do a disservice to Roma all over
the world. Bulgarian saxophonist Yuri Yunakov, who is from an urban
clothes-conscious tradition, offered to personally take Taraf members
shopping at his expense (see Chapter 11). Some performers spoke directly
to Taraf manager Michel Winter about this “disgrace,” but Winter replied
that audiences actually like the tattered image; it is good for business.
Yunakov’s group, by contrast, created an urban sophisticated image,
wearing suits and ties and fashionable styles. Similar to Yunakov, Turkish
Romani clarinetist Husnu Senlendirici views himself as a modern musi-
cian. Seeman relates how Senlendirici conceived the fusion album Laço
Tayfa in response to his exposure to jazz and his assessment of the Western
market. Only with Seeman’s insistence did any distinctly Romani music
get included. Ironically, Hagopian, who marketed the album in the United
States, said it did not sell well perhaps because it wasn’t perceived as
“authentic” (Seeman 2002:363). By contrast, Winter markets Taraf as vil-
lage peasants, part of the past, part of tradition, even though they play
contemporary eclectic styles.
Esma Redžepova has yet another attitude toward clothing: her male
band members wear identical costumes with Slavic folkloric elements
(such as embroidery), while she wears traditional Muslim women’s
clothing (šalvari) with modern touches. Her choices reflect the specific
musical history of Yugoslavia: in the socialist period, Romani musicians
formed amateur collectives and appeared at state-sponsored folk festivals
where costumes were obligatory (see Chapter 2). In socialist Bulgaria, by
contrast, Romani music was not allowed in state-sponsored festivals. In
short, with these examples it is clear that imagery accomplishes ideolog-
ical work, whether dictated by managers or conceived by Roma.
Whereas scholars have questioned the concept of authenticity because
it conveys a static view of history, marketers seek to promote it. Not sur-
prisingly, some Romani performers themselves have begun to use the vo-
cabulary of authenticity and tradition. Recall that in Chapter 8 I described
how the organizers of Bulgarian Romfest strive for purity and authen-
ticity. They may be tapping into nationalist discourse as well as respond-
ing to commercial forces. Not only have Romani musicians picked up on

desirable marketing terminology, but their identities also accommodate
authenticity as well as modernity, not finding them contradictory. Simi-
larly, Esma Redžepova sees the diversity represented in Gypsy festivals as
due to all the other Romani groups being assimilated, but not hers. “The
Roma from Spain are assimilated to the Spaniards—they play Spanish
music. The Indians play Indian music. They have all been assimilated
except me. My music is authentic Romani music. We Roma in Macedonia
aren’t assimilated—we keep our language, we keep our traditions.”9
Remember, this is the same performer who refused to remove the synthe-
sizer from her band even though European audiences found it too mod-
ern. Esma clearly has a stake in being “authentic”; she created a
performance niche in Yugoslavia that displayed a consciously authentic
Gypsy identity (see Chapter 10).
Education or Entertainment?
At the same time that promoters produce exoticism and authenticity, they
also appeal to audiences to engage with diversity and multiculturalism.
North American and Western European audiences for Romani concerts
tend to be middle- or upper-class, from eighteen to forty years of age, well
educated, with liberal leanings. Although Roma are familiar to them from
popular and elite literature and art, and from the current refugee crisis,
few have ever met or socialized with Roma. Suspicion is the main emo-
tion in Europe, according to one manager: “Gypsies are present in Euro-
pean countries—like the begging of refugees at train stations. But
Europeans know nothing about the culture—only that it could be dan-
gerous. The concert is a window for people to learn something about this
culture.” Some European Gypsy festivals (for example, le Vie dei Gitani in
Ravenna and Barbican in London) include educational components in
the form of booklets, museum exhibitions, panels, lectures, and film
showings with discussions. These events cover history, discrimination,
and diversity, but in locations and times that are separate from the mu-
sical program. On the 1999 North American Gypsy Caravan tour, my role
as education coordinator included lecturing and writing extensive con-
cert notes. Lectures were always well attended, and many audience mem-
bers appreciated the historical, political, and cultural information in the
notes, but in general only a select portion of the audience is interested in
education.
World music events are often assumed to have a progressive agenda. As
Hutnyk’s work shows, the type of multiculturalism produced by music
promoters often turns into a bland form of liberal feel-good politics (2000,
and see Chapter 3). Zirbel writes that Gypsy festival “audiences appeared
to believe . . . that participating as audiences in such performances . . .
constituted an act of progressive solidarity with whatever historical or
current oppressions the performers’ people were believed to face”
(1999:80). In the xenophobic atmosphere of Western Europe, attending a

Gypsy concert or buying a Gypsy CD may appear to be a brave public
statement of liberalism, but it can hardly be called activism. It does, how-
ever, make audience members feel good about their role. British activist
Jake Bowers notes that “multiculturalism is fine and dandy when it is at
an acceptable distance” (Patrin listserv, May 27, 2000). Gočić, a commen-
tator on Balkan politics, remarked: “It is sad that the current fashion for
Gypsy music, interest in Gypsy folklore, and dramatic depiction of the
Gypsy soul has not translated into some kind of concern for Roma suf-
fering. Beyond rousing applause for their musicians, Gypsies need sub-
stantial support from the West. . . . Of course, ‘the art of the oppressed’ is
nothing new. Cultural adoration and political discrimination have often
walked hand in hand. . . . Renewed interest in the culture of some ethnic
group . . . often means it’s in deep trouble” (Gočić 2000).
The uneasy relationship between education and entertainment was il-
lustrated by the 2004 dance show Gypsy Spirit, sponsored by Columbia
Artists. The show tried to educate the audience about Romani history and
diversity by using slides of Roma as a backdrop and by incorporating
Indian and Balkan music and dance, as well as its main focus, Hungarian
dance. The program notes included commentary by professor and activist
Ian Hancock on Romani history and language, and a reference to the
Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas; in
addition, Hancock’s 2002 introductory book on Romani history and cul-
ture was for sale at every performance. But many venues chose not to
print the background information, opting to emphasize entertainment
over education. The show was sponsored by the Hungarian Governmental
Office of Equal Opportunity, Directorate of Romani Integration, and the
program included testimonials from government officials affirming their
commitment to Roma. Coming exactly at the time of Hungarian member-
ship in the European Union, these statements rhetorically legitimated the
government’s involvement in Romani culture.
Ironically, there were very few Roma in the Gypsy Spirit show; the
dancers were overwhelmingly Hungarian and the musicians were a mixed
group.10 Although the projected slides were of Roma, they depicted stereo-
typical poses and iconic occupations (such as fortune telling); along with
a recurring motif of fire in the show, a myth was narrated about how
Roma were once birds. This staging suggested that Roma were a mystical
wandering people from a distant place. Audience members loved the high
energy and impressive talent, but I doubt many were educated. When I
asked one audience member what he learned about Romani culture, he
responded, “It is all mixed up.” Another said, “It reminds me of Fiddler on
the Roof.” A simplistic view of Romani psychology pervaded press re-
leases, and the title Gypsy Spirit morphed into “free spirit.” One sponsor
said: “Gypsy Spirit is open, free, and very, very creative. They want to ex-
perience life to its fullest, and they are still very close to nature. They still
believe in things that other people don’t, like fortune-telling” (Peterson
2004). The New York Times reviewer, Brian Seibert, picked up on the
superficial nod to education:

Like many folkloric shows, Gypsy Spirit . . . purports to correct his-
tory, then abandons that ambition in the effort of putting on a good
show. The program notes glance at the centuries of oppression the
Gypsies or Roma have endured, and the stereotypes with which they
have been branded. And then it goes on to celebrate what it calls the
“fiery” Gypsy spirit. . . . Except for projected slides of actual elderly
Roma, the group is treated less as an ethnicity than as a mythic people
[2004:12].
Seibert remarks that he is actually glad that the nod to education is super-
ficial because “the performers and their art are the story here” (12).
Romani musicians have recently become hip images for Hollywood
stars and the fashion industry. As mentioned above, Japanese fashion de-
signer Yohji Yanamoto dressed the Taraf in his clothing, achieving a look
of distressed chic (Hollander 2001). Johnny Depp has regularly hired the
Taraf for his private parties in Los Angeles; Depp states he is “a fan of
Taraf as musicians, as artists, as people, as human beings.” He made this
statement on the video about the Taraf, No Man Is a Prophet in His Own
Land, and he is now part of Taraf’s marketing strategy. Depp’s testimonials
and his publicity photographs with Taraf are by now iconic, and he gave
Taraf its 2002 BBC prize for World Music in front of an audience of mil-
lions of television viewers. Depp met the Taraf on the set of the movie The
Man Who Cried, where they played his family.
Because of Depp, other Hollywood figures have hired Romani musi-
cians for their parties. Hollywood film composer Danny Elfman said:
“Fanfare Ciocarlia . . . performed at my birthday last year on a rooftop in
Hollywood. I was fortunate to catch them on a world tour, and hired them
to perform at my party for the night” (Oseary 2004:443). When Taraf or
Fanfare are unavailable, Hollywood stars sometimes hire Americans to
play Romanian Gypsy music, and, according to these musicians, the stars
expect them to dress up and act like Gypsies, and put on a “wild show.”
These stars, however, rarely “mention the general plight of the Gypsies.
Neither do Roma artists themselves—attaching oneself to an already lost
cause is not exactly a good career move” (Gočić 2000).
Roma know that they are paid to entertain, not educate, so they learn
not to raise political issues on stage. In fact, several Romani performers,
such as Macedonian accordionist Simeon Atanasov (of Esma Redžepova’s
ensemble), sincerely believe they do not face discrimination. Atanasov is
a successful middle-class professional who thinks (as Esma does; see
Chapter 10) that Macedonia affords Roma full rights; in fact, he blames
poverty on the laziness of Roma themselves. His attitude, however, was in
direct conflict with the American tour in which he appeared in 2004.
Sponsored by the American NGO Voice of Roma, the tour had a strong
educational component, featuring a short lecture on the history of
exclusion delivered from the stage before the musical performance by
tour manager and Voice of Roma president Šani Rifati. Because Rifati
believes strongly in combining music with information, Voice of Roma

founded the booking company Romani Routes precisely to foster educa-
tional music events and also to help Roma manage their own marketing.
(The title of my book comes from this effort.) Rifati is very passionate
about using the label Roma as opposed to Gypsy, and he has often con-
fronted journalists, managers, and musicians. As discussed in Chapter 10,
Rifati engaged in arguments in which Atanasov accused him of being too
political and lecturing too much, and thus ruining the music; Rifati ac-
cused Atanasov of being a nationalist apologist for Macedonia.
Two Romani musicians who ardently believe in activism and seek to
combine education and entertainment are Dušan and Dragan Ristić from
the Serbian band Kal. Dragan stated, “We are not living in the past. . . .
I’m an urban person, belong to the modern world, [and] go to rave parties
. . . so mixing traditional and urban elements is the best way of present-
ing our culture. . . . And I’m a Roma. Gypsy is pejorative, a misnomer.
We’ve always called ourselves Roma, so I find it distasteful to be called a
Gypsy” (http://nygypsyfest.com). On Kal’s 2006 tour Dragan actively par-
ticipated in preconcert lectures and panel discussions organized by
Rifati. In addition to the Ristić brothers, Yuri Yunakov has also willingly
participated in numerous educational events (see Chapter 11). To edu-
cate non-Roma about Romani music, the Ristić brothers started the
Amala (friends) Summer School in 2001 in their hometown of Valjevo,
Serbia (www.galbeno.com).11
On the other hand, virtually all the producers and promoters I inter-
viewed felt that education was not the main purpose of performance. One
manager said, “It is not my idea to lead lessons with this music—it is en-
tertainment”; another remarked, “I don’t think it is very important for the
public to be educated”; and a third said, “I don’t like the very open educa-
tional style. I don’t like to play with education . . . the best way is to take
the music and give it to the audience, let them listen to it. They will like it
and for those that are interested, there are lectures.” One promoter
expressed the dilemma between entertainment and education: “I think it
is important to give the political background of the countries where the
Roma are living. Well, I also understand that people go to a concert for
experience and they don’t care about politics—just to enjoy music for a
couple of hours and forget about real life. So I wouldn’t emphasize politics
too much in the program—but they could also find time to read about
what they are going to see. . . . You can’t deny where these musicians are
coming from. You shouldn’t separate their suffering from their music.”
Discrimination became a contested topic when the program notes that
I wrote for the 1999 Gypsy Caravan tour were scrutinized by Michel Win-
ter, the non-Romani manager of the Taraf de Haidouks. I had courteously
asked Winter for feedback on my notes because the organizers were
willing to make changes for the final New York City concerts. Winter
insisted that I remove this paragraph:
In the 1970s, Ceausescu’s policy of homogenization became more op-

pressive and Rom culture was targeted. Some Roma were removed

from large government ensembles, where they made up 90% of pro-
fessional musicians. The Rom ethnicity of musicians was frequently
covered up and Roma were not allowed to perform in-group music,
such as songs in Romani. Since the 1989 revolution, life has consider-
ably worsened for Romania’s approximately 2.5 million Roma. While
they can now organize their own cultural and political organizations,
they suffer numerous attacks on their homes, possessions, and per-
sons. Groups like Taraf de Haïdouks salute the resilience of Rom
music under trying conditions.
Winter claimed there was no discrimination against Roma in Romania

and Roma could do anything they wanted, “even become president.”
Trying to mediate between Winter and me, Robert Browning, director of
the sponsoring organization, the World Music Institute, reduced my entire
paragraph to its last sentence.
The very artists Winter represented, the Taraf members, contradicted
his absurd claim that there is no persecution. In conversations with Taraf
members I learned of systematic abuse, taunting, and discrimination in
schooling, employment, and health care. For me, the most moving mo-
ment of the 1999 Gypsy Caravan tour occurred during a panel discussion
at Dartmouth University that I led on music and politics. Nicolae Neacsu,
the elderly Romanian fiddler in Taraf (1924–2002), recounted his life his-
tory: how he left school in the fourth grade to work to support his mother
and siblings, how he barely survived the Holocaust, how he was neglected
during the Socialist period, and how in the 1990s, only because of Western
European acclaim, did he have any respect in Romania.12 Russian musi-
cian Sasha Kolpakov and Hungarian musician Gusztav Varga also shared
experiences of prejudice and discrimination. Winter was not present to
hear them. In fact, he forbade Ionitsa, an articulate leading younger mem-
ber of Taraf, to take part in the panel even though he was slated to appear.
My interpretation of Winter’s 1999 stance is that he believed Taraf’s rep-
utation would be tarnished by the intrusion of politics, specifically dis-
crimination. Perhaps he felt it would hurt ticket sales. However, after the
1999 tour this stance changed; in the liner notes for the 2001 CD Band of
Gypsies, the author, Marc Hollander, describes discrimination to illustrate
how Taraf’s talent was ignored by Romanians until it was discovered in the
West by Winter. Similarly, on the 2006 Taraf DVD The Continuing Adven-
tures of Taraf de Haidouks, manager Stephane Karo states, “There is no
respect, in the cities, at least, for Gypsy musicians.” The narrative strategy
on these albums is to market members of Taraf as unsung heroes who are
despised in their own country while exalted in the West. This relates to my
point above and in Chapter 3 that discrimination confers authenticity.
With Taraf, then, discrimination was either downplayed or, more recently,
underlined as the key to Gypsy talent.
On the 1999 tour, Winter exhibited a patronizing attitude toward Taraf
members.13 He implied that Taraf members simply didn’t know any better
about how to dress and act; after all, they are just Romanian villagers.

For example, Winter made decisions for Taraf members without consul-
ting them and without informing them. For their part, the Taraf members
were not critical of Winter; on the contrary they were thankful to him as
the person who had discovered them and made them famous. On the
other hand, they often ignored Winter and did what they wanted, some-
times selling pirated version of their own albums or privately produced
recordings instead of their official albums. Taraf musicians, then, had
neither a role in creating their international image nor a desire to modify
their image; they perceived themselves as powerless in this arena, and
dependent on non-Romani mediators. Winter cultivated this dependency,
but Taraf members asserted their independence in other ways.
Self-Stereotyping
Romani musicians seem not to resent the use of the exotic/authentic ste-
reotype; the majority are neither interested in nor surprised at how they
are pictured and narrated.14 Most agree that exoticism helps to sell tickets.
Several of Esma Redžepova’s films made for Yugoslav audiences in the
1970s and 1980s feature campfires, tents, and caravans, which are totally
foreign to her urban, sedentary Balkan culture (see Chapter 10). Similarly,
Bulgarian Romani bands feature half-naked belly dancers even though
Bulgarian Romani in-group dancing is subtler and clothed (see Chapter
6). Imre’s research on Hungarian Romani pop music singers likewise
shows how they participate in their own stereotyping; she labels this
process “double cooptation, by both state discourses and by commercial
media” (2008:336; also see 2009).15
Lemon’s perceptive research in Russia deals precisely with the interplay
of historical stereotypes of Roma and their constructed identities. She
shows how non-Romani discourse has molded Romani perceptions of
themselves; the Romen Theater (a professional Moscow company com-
posed of Roma, founded in 1931) was significant in this process. For ex-
ample, on a documentary film shoot in a Kelderara neighborhood the
crew insisted on building a campfire in the snow and ordering all the
young girls to dance simultaneously, behaviors which were totally foreign
to the Roma; yet she learned that “the Kelderara did not criticize how they
had been filmed. . . . In fact . . . Kelderara themselves shared and valued
some of the same forms of stereotypic representation valued by the crew”
(2000:156–157). This supports my point that Roma pragmatically essen-
tialize themselves.
Van de Port similarly points out that Serbian Roma musicians in Novi
Sad enact the stereotypes expected of them; Roma are embedded in a hier-
archal patron-client relationship that depends on fulfilling dramatic roles
(1998). Acton remarks that this is “shown to be as false and demeaning a
relationship as that between southern aristocrats and nigger minstrels in
the ante-bellum United States” (2004:110). He points to a parallel paradox
in films about Roma that is “infuriating” to Romani activists: “. . . in many

cases the more authentic the Roma involved in performance, the more
powerfully dangerous is the stereotyping, a stereotyping all the more per-
suasive and damaging because of the authenticity of the actors and the
backgrounds, and the fact that Gypsies will be bowled over by the rare
privilege of hearing Romani spoken on screen in any context at all”
(2004:112–113).
This hearkens back to my example in Chapter 6 of the Macedonian
Romani journalist who embraced the stereotypical Romani dance perfor-
mance of a Dutch group costumed with whips for the men and bare shoul-
ders for the women; what is important to him was that songs were sung in
Romani by an international group at a national folk festival. Similarly,
Bosnian director Emir Kusturica’s film Time of the Gypsies, although por-
traying stereotypes, was hailed by Roma for its use of Romani actors
speaking Romani. Acton further explains that the “artistic collusion of the
oppressed and the oppressor” is not unique to Roma; it has similarities, for
instance, to “blaxploitation” movies, which were in opposition to but could
not escape the stereotyping of African Americans in early cinema (113).
Romani musicians, then, do not actively resist stereotyping; they also
often employ it fruitfully. Historically, Roma have sometimes believed and
transmitted stereotypes (both positive and negative) about themselves,
such as their “genetic” gift for music (Peycheva 1999a). Fortune tellers
often presented themselves as exotic and powerful to their clients, and
Ottoman female dancers capitalized on their perceived sexuality (see
Chapter 6). Ong reminds us that “speaking subjects are not unproblematic
representers of their own culture” (1997:194). Everyone speaks from a
point of view with various motives. “Self-orientalizing” moves should not
be taken at face value but should be examined within the webs of power in
which they are located. “Self-orientalization” displays the predicaments of
marginal “others” in the face of Western hegemony, but it also points to
their “agency to maneuver and manipulate meanings within different
power domains” (Ong 1997:195). Savigliano, writing about tango, coins
the term “autoexoticism,” defined as “exotic others laboriously cultivat[ing]
passionate-ness in order to be desired, and thus recognized” (1995:212).
Romani musicians, who have never been in control of their own imagery
and reputations, are quite used to being made (and making themselves)
into “exotic others” or “authentic originals.” These tropes may be good for
business, but more important they are just one of many labels and iden-
tities that Roma embrace.
Caravans, Nomadism, and Dilemmas

of Romani Unity
The most ubiquitous trope of marketing is the caravan concept itself: the
theme of linear nomadic migration, starting in India and ending in Spain.
The World Music Institute labeled its two tours the “Gypsy Caravan,” and
their 1999 press packet described the festival as “a musical journey

following the Romany trail from Asia to Europe” comparable to Tony Gat-
lif’s film Latcho Drom. Sponsors for the 1999 tour embellished this idea
with “The 1000 Year Journey” (Barbican, London 2000 and 2007); “Take a
journey in sound along the winding road followed over the span of cen-
turies by Gypsies” (University Musical Society, Ann Arbor, Michigan);
“Roma ensembles take you on a century-spanning journey of authentic
Gypsy culture” (Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College); “thirty-five musi-
cians and dancers will lead you on a nomadic musical journey through
the traditions of the Roma people (gypsies) from their origins in Rajast-
han India to Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Russia, and Spain” (Barclay
Theater, Irvine, California); “The Gypsy caravan features authentic en-
sembles representing a sweeping scope of Gypsy migration, beginning
with Asian and Indian influences from a thousand years ago and moving
westward to contemporary Romanian fiddle music and Andalusian fla-
menco music and dance” (University Musical Society, Ann Arbor).
Building on the migration theme, the World Music Institute arranged for
sale of the compact disc The Gypsy Road (Alula) at concert venues. In ad-
dition, Jasmine Delall’s 2006 documentary When the Road Bends: Tales of
a Gypsy Caravan picks up this theme.
The problem with the theme of linear migration is that it distorts
Romani history. As I discussed in Chapters 1, and 3, Roma were probably
not a unified ethnic group who left Northwest India at one time, moving
westward together; rather, Roma may have left India in several waves and
coalesced as an ethnic and linguistic group outside of India (Hancock
1998, 2002). Furthermore, not all Roma are nomadic: Roma in Eastern
Europe have tended historically to be more sedentary than Roma of West-
ern Europe. In fact, most Romani groups currently performing in the
Gypsy festival circuit have been sedentary since their arrival in Europe
centuries ago.
As discussed earlier in this chapter, most festivals begin with Rajasthani
music and end with Flamenco. Inclusion of Indian music conveys the sim-
plistic linear message that Rajasthani music today represents what
Romani music sounded like a thousand years ago. In truth we do not even
know which specific groups in present-day Rajasthan are related to Euro-
pean Roma. In his insightful M.A. thesis, Girgis chronicles how Latcho
Drom director Tony Gatlif and his music consultant Alain Weber rather
arbitrarily selected performers in Rajasthan for the film, and how they
were elevated to the category “Gypsies” (2007:87–90).
In my conversations with Caravan organizer Robert Browning, I tried to
problematize the message that might be conveyed by including an Indian
group: I was afraid audiences would assume that the Rajasthani group
Musafir/Maharaja performed the music of European Roma of a thousand
years ago. My program notes for the Gypsy Caravan tours therefore dwelt
on the symbolic role of a contemporary Rajasthani group, the likelihood
that it has no direct relationship to European Romani groups, and the fact
that its music has changed a great deal during the last thousand years, as
has the music of all the groups.

The market, however, has a life of its own; hence Musafir/Maharaja’s
promotional materials label them Indian “Gypsies.” This label, however, is
not merely a current invention; the British also mistakenly applied the
term to virtually all professional musicians in India. The market dictates
that whatever sells is adopted. Zirbel reports a similar ethnic marketing
strategy for the Egyptian group Musiciens du Nil, who also performed in
Latcho Drom. Although they had never used the label, after the film they
were marketed as “Gypsy” (Zirbel 1999:60–64).
Related to the idea of a common Indian homeland is the question of the
unity of all Romani musics.16 The multiple cultural brokers (marketers,
managers, audiences, journalists, musicians, and intermediaries like me)
have varying views on the topic of the unity of Gypsy music. In general,
non-Roma seek a bounded unit to label, describe, admire, or hate; they
implicitly reason that if there is nothing that unifies Gypsies, then why
bother with a festival? Reporters and audience members alike constantly
want to know what unifies all these musicians. Cultural features among
the performers are extremely varied: any one concert typically embraces
several religions and linguistic groups. Consider the six groups that partic-
ipated in the 1999 Gypsy Caravan: the Romanians and Russians were
Eastern Orthodox, the Hungarians and Spaniards were Catholic, and the
Bulgarians and half the Rajasthanis were Muslim, with the other half of
the Rajasthanis being Hindu.
In terms of language, communication among the 1999 Caravan partici-
pants was almost impossible: Romani was spoken by two of the five Hun-
garians, a few of the Romanians, and all three Russians—but none of the
Bulgarians, Spaniards, or Rajasthanis spoke Romani. I do not wish to
give the impression that Romani performers at festivals do not get along
with each other. On the contrary, Gusztav Varga, the director of Kalyi Jag,
told interviewers in 1999 that all the performers in the Gypsy Caravan
seemed like brothers; there was something familiar, perhaps a shared his-
torical sense of discrimination. Indeed, at Gypsy concerts there is defi-
nitely a feeling of group camaraderie, but it is derived neither from
musical specifics nor from lengthy conversations since few of the per-
formers can communicate with one another. The performers, however, do
carefully listen to each other’s musics, clearly respect talent, and some-
times jam.
Focusing on music, the media insisted on knowing what the groups had
in common and what made Romani music unique. In the last chapter, I
mentioned that Bulgarian saxophonist Yuri Yunakov admitted in inter-
views that the groups in the 1999 tour shared nothing musically, except
that the Romanian and Bulgarian groups knew Balkan rhythmic patterns.
In general, Romani performers do not find the subject of unity worth dis-
cussing, and they often remark that the diversity is a strength of the festi-
vals, a point with which I agree wholeheartedly. On the other hand, it
seems as if it is intellectually impossible or morally wrong for journalists
to accept the concept of diversity. One review was titled “Gypsy Show Of-
fers a Lesson in Universality.” If journalists could not readily find a

common musical thread, they groped for one: passion, talent, soul, impro-
visation, which of course are not unique to Romani music.
Audience members too are caught up in the detective work of figuring out
what the groups have in common. According to Zirbel’s Lucerne research,
one audience member suggested “Gypsies get a certain look in their eyes,”
while another “suggested they were linked by how they moved” (1999:53).
Zirbel asserts that audiences assumed that amid the different musical cul-
tures, “there was a sense that such elements formed a thin veneer over a
similar underlying, originary identity. . . . In the case of the Gypsies, cultural
difference provides a brilliant surface, but part of the curiosity and excite-
ment for audiences and for scholars . . . has been the alleged underlying
unity of racial and geographical origins” (52–53). She shows that Swiss
audiences were engaged in a kind of safe nation building (55).
Typical audience comments include this observation of the 2001 tour:
One of the people I went with had JUST finished telling me how she
could see/hear the commonalities between the Romanian and Mace-
donian Rom music but she just COULD NOT see any connection
between those and the Flamenco or Rajasthani music. Then the three
singers [Macedonian, Spanish, Rajasthani] did their three little bits [a
cappella vocal phrases in the finale]—ALL strikingly similar but each
done completely within their own styles. They were clearly put to-
gether to show EXACTLY that connection, and it was a little obvious
but educational nonetheless for those who might still not have figured
out what these four groups had to do with each other.
After hearing this appraisal, I still am puzzled as to how to evaluate what

the groups have in common musically; clearly what they share is highly
ornamented, unmetered (free rhythm, parlando rubato) singing; but nei-
ther the ornamentation nor the unmetered singing is unique to Roma—it
is all shared with regional musics. One can just as plausibly posit that
Muslim influence historically caused the similarities!
When Caravan producer Robert Browning suggested that the 1999
Gypsy Caravan performers arrange a finale, it was quite a challenge since
the groups had no single tune, style, or language in common. Yuri Yuna-
kov suggested performing “Dželem Dželem,” the Balkan Romani song
adopted as the Romani national anthem in 1971 at the first Romani Inter-
national Congress (see Chapter 3), but the Spaniards and Rajasthanis had
never heard of the song and the Romanians hardly knew it. What finally
emerged was this (video example 12.1): after an introductory, unmetered
a cappella section (performed first by a Rajasthani vocalist and then by a
Spanish vocalist), the Hungarians began an instrumental tune, then the
Russians joined, then the Romanians joined, and then the Bulgarians
joined. The Indians joined, embellishing the rhythm and adding a vocal
improvisation, and finally the Spaniards joined, dancing Flamenco to the
group’s rhythm. The Hungarians and the Russians shared the first tune;
everyone else learned it by ear during rehearsal. Audiences remarked that

the finale worked precisely because it was so unpolished and allowed
spontaneous personal interactions between the groups. Indeed, in the fi-
nale Sasha Kolpakov, the elder Russian dancer, flirted with Tia Juana, the
elder Flamenco dancer. Personal connections between performers hap-
pened despite lack of a common language and musical style.
The question of unity is further complicated in terms of repertoire. In
festivals the mandate is to perform Gypsy music, but each group inter-
prets what that means on its own. For example, before the 1999 Caravan
tour the Bulgarians had prepared a program entirely composed of
kyucheks and songs in Romani, even though at a typical Bulgarian Romani
wedding the band would also perform Bulgarian music. When the Bulgar-
ians heard Taraf from Romania perform, they realized that Taraf mem-
bers sang in Romanian only and played Romanian village dance music;
the Bulgarians then adjusted their program to include Bulgarian music.
Ironically, the Romanians originally included a manele piece that was very
similar to a Bulgarian kyuchek, but Browning cut it because it didn’t
sound distinctly Romanian. Similarly, the Hungarians also had a kyuchek-
like instrumental in their performance, but Browning cut it for similar
reasons.
Although we may think Browning was too rash or narrow in cutting
these new pan-Balkan Romani styles, we should also realize that Roma
themselves can be very possessive and essentialist about their supposedly
“unique styles.” As discussed in Chapter 3, essentialism helps define dis-
tinctive musical symbols of regional and ethnic identity in a competitive
and politicized playing field. In other words, if you don’t define and defend
your own music, you can’t sell it as your own. The band members in Esma
Redžepova’s ensemble were at first quite upset that Fanfare Ciocarlia per-
formed manele at festivals. Accordionist Simeon Atanasov said: “I told the
Romanians that they shouldn’t play orientala on stage—they should play
their own music—Romanian.” Esma and Yuri Yunakov both agreed that
the Romanians and the Hungarians “stole it from us, from the Balkans.”
On the other hand, their band members tremendously enjoyed jamming
backstage with the younger Romanians precisely because they had the
genre čoček/kyuchek/manele in common; the genre is a dynamic means of
communication across borders. Also note that for the 2001 tour Robert
Browning changed his mind and allowed Fanfare Ciocarlia to play manele;
Fanfare even accompanied Esma for one song in 2001, and she sang with
this band in the Queens and Kings show for several years (see Chapter 13).
As a result of festivals, many performers have been exposed to new,
wider-ranging Romani musics and some have started to collaborate (see
Chapter 13). Taraf de Haidouks invited Bulgarian wedding musician Filip
Simeonov (see Chapter 2) to perform with them on several tours, to record
on the album Band of Gypsies, and to play at a gala concert in Romania.
As a result of this collaboration, Simeonov performed as a guest on the
album of another Romanian Romani group, Mahala Rai Banda. Although
Simeonov has no language in common with Taraf members (Simeonov
speaks Bulgarian and Turkish, Taraf members speak Romanian and some

Romani), they share the musical genre of kyuchek/manele. Simeonov has
now learned some Romanian and is a regular member of Taraf.
Taraf also worked with the Kočani Orkestar for a gala concert and in
2011 toured and recorded with them. Stephane Karo, the Belgian manager
of both Kočani and Taraf, orchestrated this 2011 project. Other projects,
such as one led by the Hungarian Romani cimbalom player Kalman
Balogh, are based on collaborative compositions whereby each artist con-
tributes a portion. All of these projects are fueled by audiences who enjoy
watching different groups of Gypsies interact; Balogh’s project was filmed
as it progressed, and the film was issued under the title Ušte Opre (Rise Up).
These examples illustrate some paradoxes. First, Gypsy music means
different things to different performers; some groups define it as the music
that is distinctly Romani, while others define it as the entire range of
music Roma perform. Second, although media critics and audience mem-
bers look for unifying musical factors that might be indexical to older
layers, the one genre in fact shared by the Bulgarians, Macedonians,
Romanians, and Hungarians is not the oldest but rather the newest:
kyuchek, a post-1989 phenomenon in Romania and Hungary, influenced
by Bulgaria and Macedonia. Indeed, the Romanian performers are all avid
listeners of Balkan wedding music and pop/folk, and they know the names
of the famous Bulgarian and Macedonian Romani stars.
Gypsy Punk and the New York Gypsy Festival
In comparison to Europeans, Americans seem less overtly xenophobic

about Roma; negative stereotypes certainly exist, but there is less perni-
cious violence (see Chapter 4). The reasons for this contrast include that
there are far fewer poor Romani refugees in the United States than in
Europe, and additionally in the United States there is less contact between
non-Roma and Roma than in Europe, so knowledge about Roma is less
available in America. Another factor is that the role of the American state
is more circumscribed than in Europe. Whereas in Europe the state plays
a greater role in citizens’ lives in terms of social welfare and regulation, in
the United States it does not track citizens as closely as in Europe; thus
Roma are more invisible and mobile. Roma are more remote to most
Americans than Europeans, so festivals and concerts serve as a window
into an inaccessible foreign world.
For some Americans, music serves as the ticket to a fantasy realm of
wild Gypsy music, exotic costumes, and freedom. A 2006 concert by the
Portland, Oregon, band Vagabond Opera was titled by its sponsors at
Reed College “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” (from the song by Cher)
despite the band insisting that the word Gypsy be omitted from its mar-
keting. The American penchant for imitation (or simulation) of the ex-
otic was illustrated during several 1999 Gypsy Caravan concerts when
audience members dressed up in their idea of Gypsy clothing. Some
men looked like Johnny Depp in the film Chocolat, and some women had

colorful skirts, shawls, and gold earrings. This points to the American
tendency to participate in Gypsy music, not only to patronize it. In fact,
many non-Romani Americans perform versions of Gypsy music (see
Chapter 13 and Laušević 2007).
In the last decade, Gypsy music has become a major factor in the New
York punk fusion scene, almost entirely comprising non-Romani musi-
cians. In 2002, the New York Times featured an article titled “‘Gypsy Punk
Cabaret,’ A Multinational” (Sisario 2002:25 and 36), and in 2005 the paper
featured a color photography display titled “The Rise of Gypsy Punkers: A
Home-Grown Eastern European Hybrid Catches On” (Sisario 2005:A15);
the first sentence of the latter article reads, “How many Gypsy punk groups
does it take to start a movement?” (A15). The “movement” started in 1998
with the formation of the band Gogol Bordello and has expanded to
include various groups and styles. What is this genre, what is Gypsy about
it, what is its relationship to Roma, and why is it so popular?
There is no unified musical style in the Gypsy Punk movement; in fact, we
need to ask what is punk and what is Gypsy in the groups clustered under
this rubric. Slavic Soul Party, sometimes categorized as part of this move-
ment, plays traditional Balkan Romani tunes as well as original composi-
tions in Gypsy style, jazz style, and Latin style. The Hungry March Band
draws repertoire “from their multi-cultural world community . . . influenced
and inspired . . . with Latin flavor, Klezmer sounds, polish [sic] jigs, punk
rock noise, hip-hop beats and music of the streets” (www.hungrymarch-
band.com). On rare occasions they feature a recognizable Balkan Romani
melody. The bands Gogol Bordello on the east coast (www.gogolbordello.
com) and Kultur Shock on the west coast (www.kulturshock.com) are the
most popular groups in the movement. According to the latter’s web page:
“Kultur Shock isn’t just the name of our band. It’s Balkan punk rock gypsy
metal wedding-meets-riot music from Bulgaria, the US, Japan, and Bosnia.
Six members, and no two of us really speak the same language. You may
wonder what brought such an unrelated, mixed-up group of people to-
gether, and you can read our biographies to find out. Call our music what-
ever the fuck you want—we’ll still play every song of every performance as
if it were our last.” Kultur Shock derives its power precisely from the shock
and clash of cultures. It was performing Balkan fusion pieces for many
years before it was swept up in the Gypsy Punk scene.
With shows at the Whitney Museum and several successful albums and
international tours (in 2007 to Japan, recently to Australia, and annual
European tours), Gogol Bordello has set the standard for the Gypsy Punk
movement. Founded by Eugene Hutz and composed of immigrants from
Eastern Europe and Israel, the band combines “the passionate rage of
punk with the ragtag theatricality of traditional Gypsy music” (Sisario
2005:A15). Hutz is an eccentric, larger-than-life character actor who had a
leading comic role in the film Everything Is Illuminated. His acrobatic cha-
risma on stage as a vocalist and guitarist is unmistakable, and his philo-
sophical ideas on the revolutionary potential of music inform his song
lyrics. When asked if he plays Gypsy music, Hutz remarked, “It’s music of

a traveling mind. We are doing music that is authentic even though it
departs from its roots and from what is normally known as authentic. But
it is authentic because it is the true immigrant experience music” (36). A
typical song theme, often performed in multiple languages (Russian; Eng-
lish, sometimes mangled; and Romani, sometimes mangled), describes
the refugee/immigrant caught between two cultures and inventing his
own. Hutz portrays music as a cacophonous, unstable hybrid that is coun-
tercultural: the “chaotic clash of musical cultures. . . . Culture is a living
being. The minute the culture is not challenged, it dies” (25). Multi kontra
culti vs. Irony, the title of Gogol’s 2002 album and Whitney show, high-
lights the satiric quality of the music, almost making fun of itself.
For Gogol Bordello and the Hungry Marching Band, the musical rubric
Gypsy seems to signify a loud sound, brass instruments, and the aura of
Eastern Europe. The tunes are reminiscent of pop or folk music, some-
times with Eastern European or Balkan motifs. Instrumental improvisa-
tion, though prominently featured in Slavic Soul Party, does not play a
central role in these two bands; rather, they capitalize less on technique
and more on punk texture, the feverish climax of volume and emotion.
Perhaps what is most characteristic of their version of Gypsy style has
little to do with music but is instead defined by a circuslike atmosphere on
stage. A live show features provocative female dancers, cross-dressing, cir-
cus costumes, clownlike makeup, and dramatic scenarios, often depicting
Eastern European military figures. The distinguishing profile of this music
is its edgy, visceral quality rather than its technique.
The Gypsy punk scene was prominently featured in the first weeklong
New York Gypsy Festival (www.nygypsyfest.com) in 2005, which had as its
logo an image of the Statue of Liberty belly dancing with zils (finger cym-
bals) and with a red rose in her ear. This image combined iconic symbols
of Middle Eastern female sexuality and Flamenco; thus Gypsies were si-
multaneously orientalized (located in the east) but also located in the
west. In 2006 the logo of the festival featured the same Statue of Liberty
with a red rose, this time playing a tapan. The 2007 festival image featured
a trumpet, the 2008 festival featured a violin and the 2009 featured a gui-
tar, and the 2010 festival featured a drum. According to its website, “The
program of the festival was done very carefully to allow the mix of many
genre-bending acts from punk-rock to jazz, hip-hop, global beats, funk
and cabaret music with an underlying gypsy aesthetic.”
Until 2007, the festival organizers were two club owners/entrepreneurs,
Serdar Ilhan and Alex Dimitrov, a Turk and a Bulgarian who operated the
clubs, Maia Meyhane and Mehanata, respectively (see Chapter 11). In
2008, Ilhan (sometimes in conjunction with the World Music Institute)
took over programming. Marketing materials have emphasized the diver-
sity of Gypsy music, but very few Roma actually participate in the festi-
vals. In 2005, for example, participating groups were heavily drawn from
the Gypsy Punk scene, and Gogol Bordello received top billing. In addi-
tion, there were Flamenco dancers, belly dancers, Eastern European folk/
pop DJs (see Chapter 13), and Zlatne Uste (Golden Lips; Serbian), a brass

band composed of Americans. Two Roma performed in the Russian
Romani group Via Romen, and the Clarinet All-Stars were also Roma:
Husnu Senlendirici from Turkey, Ismail Lumanovski from Macedonia (see
Chapter 5), and Ivo Papazov and Yuri Yunakov (see Chapters 7, 8, and 11)
from Bulgaria. More recent festivals have featured fewer Roma and more
fusion “Gypsy inspired” genres.
Gypsy Punk fusion is a good example of the phenomenon of “appropri-
ation”17: non-Roma pick and choose elements of “the Gypsy” to enact mu-
sically and theatrically for audiences of adoring fans. The New York Gypsy
Festival differs from European Gypsy music festivals and the North Amer-
ican Gypsy Caravan tours in several ways: there is no reference to India, no
diaspora model, no politics, no educational component, no concert notes.
It is all about experiential simulation and visceral music. The festival does
share themes with European festivals, among them displaying the exotic,
the authentic, and the marginal outsider. But rather than dismiss this
scene as pure fantasy disconnected from Roma, I think it is important to
analyze how the scene works and how Roma are mobilized within it, even
though they are not in charge of it and do not reap much profit from it.
I attended the 2005 festival with several Macedonian Roma from the
Belmont community (see Chapters 4 and 5), and they were totally baffled
at any connection Gogol Bordello and the other Gypsy Punk groups might
have with Romani music. They saw Gogol’s show as a circuslike parody of
their own culture and were insulted and bored. But note that they had no
problem with the phenomenon of Americans playing Gypsy music. They
liked and danced to the Zlatne Uste Brass band. Thus tasteful, recogniz-
able appropriations are fine with them. The Roma who participated as
musicians in the festival had contrasting views of the event. Vadim Kolpa-
kov, a member of Via Romen, felt it was misleading to use the label Gypsy
for punk groups like Gogol Bordello; he told me “There’s no Gypsy in it!”
However, in later years he has collaborated with Gogol Bordello, and most
recently with Madonna. Ivo Papazov viewed the Gypsy Punk scene with
scorn (remember, it does not exist in Bulgaria), commenting that true mu-
sicianship was replaced by “a shallow show.” He was, however, proud to
play in the Clarinet All-Stars because the quality of the music was high.
Yuri Yunakov had the most open and accommodating attitude; he proac-
tively arranged with the organizers to participate in the clarinet extrava-
ganza, and he made sure that he and Ivo Papazov could fit the festival into
their tour schedule. He felt the festival offered good public exposure for
his music, despite the low pay. During the event, he cultivated future col-
laborative possibilities with festival musicians. In fact he had already
worked with Eugene Hutz and previously played as a guest with Gogol
Bordello (see Chapter 11).
When Yuri was invited to join Gogol Bordello on stage at the festival
during its climactic final evening, he readily agreed, motivated by the fact
that hundreds of fans were ecstatically jumping to their music (Ivo also
eventually joined them). His musical contribution could hardly be heard
because the volume was so loud, but the visual spectacle was significant.

Yuri surprised his family and Balkan colleagues when he imitated Eugene
Hutz’s trademark of stripping off his clothes on stage: Yuri took off his
shirt and played the saxophone. When I asked him later what motivated
him to strip, he said, “It’s good for business!”
Thus, although some Romani musicians were critical of the festival,
none refused to perform, and some even embraced the future professional
and economic possibilities of fusion. Indeed, the New York Gypsy Festi-
vals have all been successful. In addition, Alex Dimitrov opened a new
club in 2006 originally called House of Gypsy, and later renamed Mehan-
ata, whose website at one time featured a photograph of a seductive belly
dancer on a New York stoop. In the next chapter, I describe my interac-
tions with the sponsors regarding the name and the image, but here I want
to underscore that the stereotypes bothered me more than they bothered
the Romani musicians.
Considering that Romani musicians depend financially on obtaining
gigs and patrons, they have little choice as to where they play and how
they are depicted. As I show in the next chapter, appropriations are ex-
ploitive of performers at the same time they are good for business (Feld
2000a, 2000b; Stokes 2004; Keil and Feld 1994; Meintjes 1990). Non-Roma
appropriate from Roma with neither proper credit nor compensation, but
as a result wider audiences listen to Gypsy music and more people buy
albums and concert tickets. Roma, in the end, cannot object to the struc-
ture of the market because they are dependent on it.
Beyond Caravans: Concluding Comments
Festivals are instructive for investigating the motivations and choices of

images and musical styles involved in cultural brokering of Gypsy music
for Western audiences. In the world music scene, one can find a huge
array of Gypsy musics: Romani music played by Roma (e.g., Esma
Redžepova performing čočeks), Roma playing co-territorial music (Taraf
de Haidouks playing Romanian village music), Roma playing fusion
musics with pseudo-Gypsy elements (Yuri Yunakov playing Gypsy Punk),
non-Roma playing Romani music (Zlatne Uste playing čočeks), and non-
Gypsies playing fusion musics with pseudo-Gypsy elements (Gypsy Punk
bands). In addition, there are a huge group of non-Romani performers
who use Gypsy as one element in a long list of fusion styles. Here is a
sample of the publicity for the groups featuring Americans that performed
in the 2005 New York Gypsy Festival: “The Luminescent Orchestrii is a
gypsy tango klezmer punk acoustic string band from Brooklyn. . . . An
explosive union of Romanian Gypsy melodies, punk frenzy, salty tangos,
hard-rocking klezmer, haunting Balkan harmony, hip-hop beats and Appa-
lachian fiddle, all eaten and spit out by two violins, resophonic guitar,
bullhorn harmonica and bass” (www.lumii.org). The band Romashka
quotes the words of Bulgarian DJ Joro-Boro: “This lethal dose of gypsy fire
water distilled from the Carpati to Canal street, Romashka will kick you in

the ass and sing about it.” Similarly, the band Cafe Antarsia claims: “This
is high passion folk with streaks of Greek blues, Balkan goth/gypsy and
sheer working-class fire from the NYC rebels of American opera. Rife with
sudden transformation, disaster and ecstasy” (www.nygypsyfest.com).
The stereotype of the passionate Gypsy has clearly been appropriated by
non-Romani musicians.
We can also see that performers, whether they are Romani or not, make
strategic artistic choices. Economics informs most choices about style and
image; however, there are varied interpretations as to what sells. Whereas
some promoters do not want politics to spoil the entertainment, others
believe audiences need to know about persecution and that historical and
political information augments the multicultural agenda of world music
festivals. Romani performers themselves have varying artistic and histor-
ical interpretations of what Gypsy music is, which they then must nego-
tiate with promoters and managers, who often have other interpretations.
Whereas some Romani performers actively take a stake in creating their
own images, such as urban sophisticates, others passively collaborate
with their promoters to create other images, such as backward peasants.
Historically, Romani musicians are used to performing for varied audi-
ences with varying expectations; they are also used to hostility. These skills
are useful in the European festival circuit, where their exoticism and au-
thenticity are displayed on stage while xenophobic sentiments rage out-
side. In the United States, where audiences know less and interact less
with Roma than in Europe, Gypsy music has become a major factor in the
punk fusion scene. In all these contexts, Roma negotiate their identities
performatively on stage and off, sometimes rejecting, sometimes ignoring,
and sometimes embracing stereotypes. Following Appadurai (1996), my
approach has emphasized the sphere of the artistic and the imaginary, but
always embedded in the political economy of inequality. As Nonini and
Ong have written, “The concept of imaginaries therefore conveys the
agency of diaspora subjects, who while being made by state and capitalist
regimes of truth, can play with different cultural fragments in a way that
allows them to segue from one discourse to another, experiment with al-
ternative forms of identification, shrug in and out of identities, or evade
imposed forms of identification” (Nonini and Ong 1997:26). Romani mu-
sicians excel precisely in this fluidity of cultural fragments. Whereas non-
Romani audiences seek unity in culture and authenticity in music, Roma
play with hybridity and with novel combinations, honing their adapt-
ability. As Lemon remarks, “It is not Roma who find ‘hybridity’ problem-
atic, but non-Roma who see it as shifty” (2000:212). Roma embrace a
surprisingly modern cosmopolitan sensibility while dutifully fulfilling
their multiple roles: either as Europe’s last bastion of tradition or as New
York’s vanguard of punk fusion.

13
ab
Collaboration, Appropriation, and
Transnational Flows
T he global musical landscape of Balkan Romani music has expanded

dramatically in the last two decades; in 2002 Time magazine’s music
section proclaimed that “Roma Rule” (Purvis 2002:70–71), and in 2007
Newsweek wrote “The World Embraces Gypsy Culture” (Brownell and
Haq 2007; see also Bax 2007). With multiple BBC Planet awards from
2002 to 2008,1 Balkan Romani music became increasingly visible in West-
ern Europe and the United States. In addition, Bulgaria’s Jony Iliev, Roma-
nia’s Fanfare Ciocarlia and Mahala Rai Banda, Serbia’s Kal, and several
remix albums were all high on the European pop music charts in the years
2003–2010.2
In addition to buying albums, audiences heard Balkan Romani music
on the Borat movie soundtrack and can currently dance to Gypsy remixes
played by DJs in clubs in New York, San Francisco, London, Frankfurt,
Brussels, Berlin, Vienna, Paris, and Amsterdam, often under the banner
“Balkan Beats.” Finally, Madonna’s 2008–09 Sticky and Sweet tour in-
cluded a section titled Gypsy, featuring the Russian Romani Kolpakov
Trio.
What does all this mean for Romani music and musicians? Before we
celebrate too glibly, we need to investigate not only the transmission of
musical styles but also the flow of international capital and media atten-
tion. This chapter ties together previous threads to discuss issues of col-
laboration, appropriation, and the transnational movement of music in
relation to the political and economic matrix. I address how Roma histor-
ically have appropriated from non-Roma and from other Roma, and how
non-Roma are currently appropriating from Roma; moreover, I interro-
gate who is producing and marketing Romani music and how power rela-
tionships are implicated in these exchanges. I further examine issues of
ownership and compensation through preliminary case studies of DJ
remixes and the movie Borat.
269
Collaboration
Collaboration, at first glance, seems to be less messy than appropriation.

In several chapters, I discussed collaboration between Romani and non-
Romani musicians, examples being Esma Redžepova’s duets with folk and
pop singers and Yuri Yunakov’s, Sofi Marinova’s, and Azis’s projects, along
with the widened exposure that resulted. Turning to projects among
Roma, I note that some collaborations are more artistically and commer-
cially successful than others.3
The 2007 album Queens and Kings (Asphalt Tango) features collabora-
tions between the Romanian brass band Fanfare Ciocarlia and guest
Romani vocalists not only from the Balkans (Šaban Bajramović from Ser-
bia, Esma Redžepova from Macedonia, Jony Iliev from Bulgaria, Ljiljana
Butler from Bosnia, and Dan Armeanca and Florentina Sandu from
Romania) but also from Hungary (Mitsou) and France (from the band
Kaloome). The Serbian band Kal is also featured as a guest. According to
Fanfare manager and producer Henry Ernst, the idea behind the disk was
generated by the band, and management facilitated it; in one bold move
they complemented Fanfare’s instrumental virtuosity with top vocalists.
This collaboration was feasible precisely because many of the artists are
managed and produced by Henry Ernst and Helmut Neumann of Asphalt
Tango; the others willingly cooperated.4 Non-Romani producers routinely
do the behind-the-scenes work paving the path to collaboration; they often
envision and orchestrate artistic products. The album was very successful
and has led to numerous tours; it reached the number two spot in the
European world music charts only a few weeks after its release.
Asphalt Tango has pioneered in forging imaginative and tasteful collab-
orations that also seem to be fair to Romani artists in terms of financial
compensation. Fanfare Ciocarlia’s huge success is based on the band’s
talent and versatility, facilitated by its managers. In addition to the artists
already mentioned, Fanfare has recorded with the Bulgarian women’s
choir Angelite (on the song “Lume Lume”) and with the Croatian guitarist/
mandolinist Aco Bocina (on the album Aco Bocina and Fanfare Ciocarlia,
Ponderosa 2003), and it performed with Kodo drummers at the 2004
Japanese Earth Festival. Fanfare also appears briefly in the German film
Head On (2004, directed by Fatih Akin), and it figures prominently in the
soundtrack for the movie Borat.5 In fact, Asphalt Tango deftly coordinates
collaboration among its Romani artists and facilitates their recording to-
gether. Similarly, Piranha facilitates collaborations between its artists: the
Serbian brass band of Boban Marković has collaborated with Frank Lon-
don’s Klezmer Brass All-Stars.
Reflecting on Fanfare’s collaboration with Jony Iliev on the song
“Godzila” on the album Gili Garabdi (audio example 13.1 with text supple-
ment), Henry Ernst explained: “The band met Jony at a festival years ago.
They started to have a good relationship, and I proposed that they play
together. During the arrangement stage for their album I proposed to
invite Jony to join them and the band loved this idea.” The song, however,

has a more complicated history. Most non-Romani fans in the west asso-
ciate “Godzila” with Iliev from his own album (Cartwright 2005b:258;
audio example 13.2 with text supplement) or from the Fanfare remake,
both widely available in the west from Asphalt Tango. More recently, how-
ever, wider audiences know the song from its reissue on DJ Shantel’s
album Bucovina Club 2 (Essay, 2006), discussed later in this chapter.
Bulgarian and Macedonian Roma, on the other hand, including those in
the diaspora, associate “Godzila” with the band Kristali, from the Bulgar-
ian city of Montana (several parties claim copyright). One of the premier
Romani bands in the diaspora with a steady output of albums through the
Payner label, Kristali is led by bassist Kiril Dimitrov and featured the mas-
terful vocals and clarinet of Aleksei Atanasov Stefanov (Alyosha), who now
performs with Orkestŭr Universal. Although it doesn’t have the media vis-
ibility of “mainstream chalga” (see Chapter 9), Kristali’s albums sell well,
especially among Roma. Its performances feature songs in Bulgarian,
Romani, and Turkish languages, but it is especially prolific in Romani
songs.
Kristali’s version of “Godzila” (video example 13.1 with text supplement)
shows a clever combination of migration themes and popular culture im-
ages. The text is a love song from the point of view of a man who is lament-
ing the emigration of his girlfriend. The song also turns on the double
meaning of Godzila: it is the girlfriend’s name and also equates with the
name of the movie monster. The video depicts the band entering a movie
house in Bulgaria, watching the film Godzilla, and eating popcorn. Amidst
gory scenes of the monster, Alyosha mounts the movie stage and, as his
shadow overlays the film, sings about his girlfriend.
Audio example 13.3 features a live recording of “Godzila” by Kristali
with guest vocalist Džansever (see Chapter 2) singing harmony at a
Romani wedding in Bujanovac, in southern Serbia, near the border with
Macedonia and Kosovo; you can hear shouts of jaša . . . (long live . . . and
then names of musicians and wedding guests are inserted). This recording
illustrates the transnational reputation of Kristali; the band is regularly
hired for Romani events not only in Bulgaria but also in Macedonia, Ser-
bia, and the Romani diaspora in Western Europe (this example features a
Romani wedding in Serbia with a Bulgarian band and a guest vocalist
from Macedonia). Many videos of Kristali and Alyosha performing at pri-
vate Romani parties in Western Europe as well as concert videos from
Bulgarian and Macedonia can be found on YouTube.6 In addition, Mace-
donian Roma in New York regularly listen to Kristali.
These versions of “Godzila” illustrate the collaborations among Roma
that are regularly occurring outside the recording industry. Famous artists
such as Džansever, Kristali, Husnu Senlendirici, Amza, Ćita, Erdžan,
Ševčet, and many others are hired in various combinations for family
events in the Romani diaspora, where they are exposed to one another’s
repertoire and styles. It is a very rich context for fertilization, but the mu-
sical products are rarely on commercial albums; on YouTube, however,
they receive thousands of hits. Parallel but rarely intersecting with this
Collaboration, Appropriation, and Transnational Flows 271

in-group Romani universe is the universe of non-Romani fans and com-
mercial products. Non-Roma know “Godzila” from Jony Iliev on Western
labels; Roma, on the other hand, don’t buy Western labels because they
can’t afford them and seek alternative sources. Thus Jony, although
famous in his hometown region of Sofia and Kyustendil (Cartwright
2003b, 2005b), is hardly known among Roma in Macedonia and in the
diaspora. Roma know “Godzila” from Alyosha and Kristali, not from Jony;
they rely on duplicated recordings obtained from relatives and friends.
More young Roma are trading digital recordings and videos via the inter-
net; as I mentioned, some young Macedonian Roma have thousands of
songs on their computers and iPods.
To further illustrate the issue of collaboration, I turn to the popular
Romanian band Taraf de Haidouks,7 that invited the Bulgarian wedding
clarinetist/saxophonist Filip Simeonov to perform and record on their
albums Band of Gypsies and The Continuing Adventures of Taraf de Haï-
douks. Taraf and Simeonov share the manele/kyuchek genre; in addition,
because he is from north Bulgaria, Simeonov was familiar with Romanian
village folk music, and he could learn tunes by ear very quickly. Conversely,
Taraf members kept abreast of Bulgarian trends and followed respected
performers such as Ivo Papazov, Yuri Yunakov, Neshko Neshev,8 and Filip
Simeonov. Yet collaboration is very delicate. In 2005, Simeonov com-
plained about how little he played in a Taraf concert (in one ninety-minute
concert he was featured in two numbers), and about how little he was
paid; he also complained about lack of communication (he spoke Bulgar-
ian and Turkish, and Taraf members spoke Romanian and Romani; he has
since learned some Romanian); on the other hand, he was immensely
grateful because of the economic crisis in Bulgaria.9
Like the Asphalt Tango managers/producers, Belgian managers Michel
Winter and Stephane Karo of Divano Productions (together with the label
Crammed Discs) arranged the terms of Taraf’s collaborations.10 For ex-
ample, one reason they invited guest musicians Simeonov, Turkish dara-
buka player Tayik Tuysuzoglu, and the Macedonian Kočani brass band to
perform in Taraf’s 2000 Bucharest concert and for the subsequent re-
cording Band of Gypsies was to draw the attention of the press. Indeed,
before 2000 Taraf had been ignored in Romania despite their international
success. In a wise marketing maneuver, Karo “decided to invite foreign
journalists to Bucharest, to the village to see the reactions of the Roma-
nians. . . . We would give them the works” (DVD No Man Is a Prophet in
His Own Land). They also invited a European film crew to document the
whole event, as described in the liner notes to the CD and on the DVD.
Through collaboration, Taraf’s managers also wanted to show musical
connections across borders. Winter explained: “It’s all regional music. All
these elements have always intermingled between Turkey, the south of
Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece. These types of musics all
have common elements, so this combination is in no way artificial. . . .
They have a lot in common in terms of music, languages. The music of
Taraf has a very Turkish sound to it” (No Man Is a Prophet in His Own

Land liner notes). Although Winter’s comments emphasize unity, scholarly
work shows that before the 1980s Taraf’s music had little in common with
Turkish music and the Romani musics of Bulgaria, Turkey, and Macedo-
nia. Archival recordings, Speranta Radulescu’s recordings of the early
1990s (released in 1996), and conversations with older Taraf members all
reveal that before 1989 Taraf played mostly regional Romanian music and
some Romani songs. Romanian manele in its current form is a recent
phenomenon.11 But as I discussed in Chapter 12, both audiences and the
media want to see connections, not diversity; they then assume all connec-
tions are deeply historical when in fact some are quite recent.
Reinforcing the theme of unity, Cartwright’s liner notes for Fanfare Cio-
carlia’s album Queens and Kings read in part:
Casual observers may wonder how Fanfare Ciocarlia’s roaring Balkan

funk could possibly fuse with the flamenco guitars of French Gitans
Kaloome or Macedonian legend Esma Redžepova’s accordion driven
music? Zece Prajini’s musical magicians shrug off such concerns,
noting that they share elements of language, experience, and an
almost indescribable yet very Gypsy musical synergy with their guests.
Hungarian music has permeated northern Romania for centuries,
while Yugoslav and Bulgarian music came from encounters with trav-
elling Gypsy communities or on pirate cassettes. Spain and France
existed in pre-war memories, lost yet not forgotten Latin connections;
as did jazz and pop flavours long filtered through closed borders.
From these sources and their own ancient Gypsy roots, Zece Prajini’s
musicians built Fanfare Ciocarlia. Here, accompanied by some of
Europe’s finest singers, Romania’s brass dervishes share tales of life,
love and loss. “Queens and Kings” celebrates unity in diversity. . . .
Note that the terms “unity in diversity,” “ancient Gypsy roots,” and
“Gypsy musical synergy” allude to a timeless mystical connection that
these groups somehow magically possess (see Chapter 12). In actuality,
the Balkan performers on the album currently share the Romani language
and the new manele/kyuchek genre; even Kaloome’s song “Que Dolor”
works well as a kyuchek because its melody is so similar to Fanfare’s and
Dan Armeanca’s song “Iag Bari”; in fact, the band uses the exact same
instrumental break.
Appropriation
Collaboration is a concept used by many non-Romani musicians and pro-

ducers when describing their relationship to Romani musicians, as if the
term itself guarantees equal participation and equal benefits. Most non-
Romani musicians subscribe to the belief that hybridity and fusions are
inherently liberating (see Chapter 3), and some Roma would agree. Other
Roma, by contrast, are aware of the slippery slope from collaboration to

appropriation to exploitation. By appropriation I mean taking music from
one group and using it in other musical projects, usually for profit.12 I am
aware of the underlying essentialism in the concept of appropriation;
music cannot be ultimately assigned to unitary “sources.” Postmodernists
would argue that neither music nor any other part of culture is owned by
individuals or groups, and I would agree that music cannot be ultimately
owned; intermingling has always occurred.13 Notwithstanding this obser-
vation, certain musics are associated with certain groups or individuals
and do get used in new contexts outside the group.
Drawing from Murray Schafer, Steven Feld uses the term “schizopho-
nia” to mean a split between source and use: “By ‘schizophonic mimesis’ I
want to question how sonic copies, echoes, resonances, traces, memories,
resemblances, imitations, duplications, all proliferate histories and possi-
bilities. This is to ask how sound recordings, split from their source
through the chain of audio production, circulation and consumption,
stimulate and license renegotiations of identity” (2000a:263, 1994:258).
Although Feld seems to presume one source, I would prefer avoiding the
terms source and origin since for Roma they are often irrelevant. Rather, I
focus on the process of transmission, that is, giving and taking, and ask
who orchestrates and who benefits from these exchanges?
Historically, Roma have been characterized as the ultimate music
appropriators. They have been accused of neither having nor creating
music and merely appropriating the music of other ethnicities.14 Although
it remains true that Roma have taken numerous musical elements from
co-territorial peoples (as well as from India and Western classical and pop
music), it must also be remembered that they do not take indiscriminately
but instead borrow selectively and then creatively rework what they
take.15 Throughout this book I have stressed that Roma contributed to
many musical styles and genres in the Balkans: čoček/kyuchek, Bulgarian
wedding music, and chalga. When Roma appropriate, however, their class
relationship is rarely altered; no matter how powerful their music, they
do not become powerful politically. They may supply a desirable com-
modity, but they have not lost their stigma. Furthermore, they still need
patrons; even the most famous performers are managed by non-Romani
producers. Appropriations by the powerful are different from appropria-
tions by the marginal; when the powerful appropriate, the marginal often
lose in the process because they can’t fight back in terms of ownership or
copyright.
Musical appropriations by non-Roma from Roma thus need to be inves-
tigated in terms of motivation, profit, and artistry. In the category of appro-
priators, we can find a diverse group: nonprofessional performers of
Romani music, belly dancers who liberally use the term Gypsy, composers
and arrangers who produce Romani music under their own name, Gypsy
Punk musicians, DJs who remix Romani music, and celebrities such as
Madonna. I will briefly discuss these groups in turn (but will leave Madonna
and DJs for my next research project). Note that access to money and re-
sources is not uniform in this group of appropriators.

Non-Roma who play Romani music as amateurs typically do not earn
much money and are not internationally known. Balkan Roma tend to
applaud these groups, have trained some of them, and sometimes collabo-
rate with them.16 The same benign attitude is often found toward non-
Romani belly dancers for whom Romani musicians provide accompaniment.
The term Gypsy has been widely appropriated into tribal belly dance, an
American genre that features group choreographies (unlike Oriental or
Egyptian belly dance), hand-made costumes (usually of natural fibers)
reminiscent of Central and South Asia, a discourse about empowerment of
women, and a focus on the tribe (group cohesion) that is imputed to be a
Gypsy trait. The troupe name Gypsy Caravan is used in many locales, in-
cluding Portland, Oregon (www.gypsycaravan.us); New Jersey (www.
gypsycaravanenterprises.com); and Chicago; other popular names are
Ultra Gypsy and Romani (Sellers-Young 2006:296). A founder of the genre
describes Tribal as an “American fusion of elements from many countries
along the Romani trial” (Sellers-Young 2006:285). In addition, tribal
dancers often reproduce images from the film Latcho Drom as a source of
inspiration (292). Some belly dancers have a superficial stereotypical grasp
of Romani arts; others have adopted an educational and even activist role
in relation to Romani dance.17
Goran Bregović
Whereas belly dancers are not routinely criticized by Balkan Roma, Goran
Bregović is an object of wrath and is even labeled by some Roma as a thief
and robber. At the same time, he is perhaps the most widely known per-
former/arranger of Gypsy music in the world, getting top billing at Gypsy
and world music festivals (Marković 2008 and 2009). Why do Roma speak
of him in these condemning terms, whereas they speak more kindly of
other “collaborators”? How has Bregović’s history pulled him squarely out
of the category of collaborator and into the category of appropriator?
Born in Bosnia of mixed Serbian and Croatian heritage, he was a rock
guitarist in the 1970s band Bijelo Dugme (White Button; Bosnian/Croa-
tian/Serbian), which pioneered in performing rock-folk fusions of all the
ethnic groups in Yugoslavia. In the 1980s and 1990s, he became interna-
tionally famous for his musical scores for Bosnian film director Emir Kus-
turica, whose films deal with Romani themes and employ Romani actors.18
The movie Underground (1995), for example, prominently features the
Boban Marković Serbian brass band.
Although Underground helped launch Marković’s career, he was critical
of Bregović for not giving him proper credit. Indeed, according to the 1995
Polygram CD all the music in Underground is composed, directed, pro-
duced, and copyrighted by Bregović. This includes an instrumental ver-
sion of “Čhaje Šukarije,” Esma Redžepova’s hit, which he rerecorded with
Polish vocalist Kayah in 2000 with the credit line “Gypsy folklore.” Esma
commented: “His music is not original. Those records he makes, they use

a lot of my songs. . . . I am not happy about this” (Cartwright 2003:98). She
expanded: “Goran Bregović . . . took something from everybody. . . . He
took 30% of my music and then some of Šaban Bajramović and other
Roma musicians. So he made music for business. There’s no quality in it”
(Cartwright 2005b:109).
Marković claims that many tunes from Underground are his; other
Roma say they are “traditional.” According to Marković: “Bregović . . .
well, we worked together and the music is my idea. One part is from a
Šaban song and the other part is mine. I took the winning tune from that
year’s Guča [Serbian brass band festival] and played it and Bregović added
his things and when the soundtrack came out he did not credit me for
writing the music. This made me very angry. Bregović has asked me to do
more work with him, but I’ve established myself and don’t need to work
[with him]. If we do work [together] in the future it’ll be on my condi-
tions” (2005b:76–77).
One Underground hit song can be traced directly to Šaban Bajramovič,
one of the greatest Serbian Romani singers (Cahn 2001b; Cartwright
2005b:52–67). “Mesečina” (Moon; Serbian) is based on Šaban’s song “Djeli
Mara” (Mara left); Bregović transforms it from a soulful ballad with piano
accompaniment into a brisk brass arrangement. Šaban had an ambivalent
attitude; he has been quoted as saying that Bregović and Kusturica stole
his songs, but when French Romani activist Cahn asked him whether he
signed away his rights, he said he didn’t remember (Cahn 2001b). “They
took my song. . . . I probably signed things away. I was going to sue
Bregović but taking him to court in Serbia—what a mess. So I don’t bother,
I forgive him” (Cartwright 2005b:62). He went on to work with Bregović in
2002 when he contributed three songs to his album Tales and Songs from
Weddings and Funerals. This illustrates my point that Romani artists who
don’t have stable Western management have few options for egalitarian
collaboration; they usually take whatever is offered to them because the
market is so uncertain.
The case of Bregović’s dubious ethics can be compared to other cases of
world music collaboration/appropriations such as Graceland (Feld 1988;
Meintjes 1990)19 and Deep Forest (Feld 2000b). Feld discusses how Deep
Forest producers sampled a Solomon Islands lullaby and used it in a series
of musical moves involving questionable ethics.20 Feld asks, “Is world
music a form of artistic humiliation, the price primitives pay for attracting
the attention of moderns . . .?” (166). Similarly, do Roma need appropria-
tors like Bregović to achieve popularity in the modern world? Feld points
out that collaborations with famous artists such as Paul Simon, Sting, and
Peter Gabriel are often presented as part of “a politically progressive and
artistically avant-garde movement. . . . This process has the positive effect
of validating musicians and musics that have been historically marginal-
ized, but it simultaneously reproduces the institutions of patronage” (Feld
2000a:270).21
The issue is how music moves between multiple contexts and levels of
commercial power. For many non-Roma, Bregović has come to stand for

all Balkan Romani music; for example, the program notes for his 2006
Lincoln Center concert state he has developed “a reputation as an elo-
quent spokesperson for Gypsy culture in eastern Europe.” Furthermore, at
the 2000 British Barbican Gypsy Music Festival, Bregović received top
billing; he was featured in a prime Saturday night slot, while such artists
as Kočani Orkestar and Fanfare Ciocarlia appeared in small print on ad-
vertisements and played at odd times on the free stage. He also had the
prime slot at the 2010 Guča Serbian brass band festival and was received
like a God. He is actually taken to be Romani by many fans; indeed,
founder of the Serbian band Kal activist Dušan Ristić cynically called him
part of the “Gypsy music industry.”
Bregović’s “reworked” Romani materials are sometimes reintegrated
into the world of Romani musicians; the song “Erdelezi” moved from oral
circulation to Bregović copyright and then out to oral circulation again.
It was first released by Bijelo Dugme in 1986 in Serbian as “Djurdjevdan,”
but its fame was secured by its prominent place in Kusturica’s film Time
of the Gypsies (1989). The title refers to the spring holiday (known as
Erdelezi/Herdelezi/Herdeljezi among Muslims and Djurdjevdan/Gjurgjo-
vden among Eastern Orthodox) when families slaughter sheep (decorated
with greenery to ensure fertility), clean their homes, and gather to dance
and feast; there are many examples on YouTube (see text supplement
13.1). Many Roma in Šuto Orizari, Macedonia (where the film was shot),
claim that they composed the song, but it was probably in oral circula-
tion. Thanks to the popularity of the film and the haunting quality of the
song, it has been reclaimed by Roma back into oral circulation, regard-
less of copyright. It has also been recorded by numerous Romani and
non-Romani artists, most of the time with credit to Bregović.22 A version
in Hungarian and Serbian was entered by Hungary into the 2006 Eurovi-
sion contest, performed by Ruzsa Magdolna (a winner of the national
Megasztar contest).23
Certainly Bregović deserves credit for a signature style of arrangement
that makes Balkan Romani music more palatable to non-Roma. Time con-
sidered him “a pioneer in the gypsy music revival” (Purvis 2002:70), and
the German Financial Times claims that he “found a way to shape Balkan
music appealingly for a global audience.”24 Jane Sugarman points out:
“He’s making a whole career now of slightly arranged music of the former
Yugoslavia, most of it heavily in Rom style, all of which gets packaged in
his name. The arrangements do make a difference. Folks in Balkan coun-
tries who wouldn’t be caught dead listening to a Rom band nevertheless
love Bregović’s music” (East European Folklife Center listserv posting,
May 27, 1998). Thus he has widened the audience for Romani music, but
he has clearly profited at the expense of others in the process.
Bregović positions himself as an antinationalist hybrid musician,
mining the ethnicities of the Balkans as his repository; he implies that he
can’t be accused of taking other people’s music since he is of mixed ethnic
heritage himself. His concert projects have featured more than a hundred
performers from various Balkan ethnicities, and his press reports often

note his masterful “synthesis of the Balkans” (Alvaro Feto, El Mundo,
April 23, 2001, www.goranbregovic.co.yu). One “composition” is “Kustino
Oro,” performed by the Athens Symphony Orchestra; this is a Romani
čoček in hicaz embellished with West African “talking drums.” His touring
group, the Wedding and Funeral Orchestra, includes a symphony orches-
tra, a male choir, several Bulgarian and Serbian female vocalists, and a
Gypsy brass band.25 Recently he presented Karmen with a Happy Ending,
an opera about Gypsies and sex trafficking. It is clear that generic, ethnic,
and national border crossings are his forte.
In this chapter, however, I focus on Bregović’s specific affinity for Roma.
Indeed, the biography on his official website ends with the phase “Gypsy
life full to the brim continues for this eclectic composer figure” (www.
goranbregovic.rs). He seems to allude to the perceived hybridity, wildness,
and unruly quality of Gypsies that he seeks to embrace. In a 2005 inter-
view26 he said:
The Roma are those who are the first to suffer in any group, their life
is difficult and tragic. Living such a life according to the principle of
the wide smile, the gold tooth—isn’t easy. But it’s really true that the
Roma are the cowboys of Europe; it’s difficult to adapt to modern
times and world views; it’s hard to reach a compromise with the ac-
coutrements of modern civilization and that’s why I like them. . . .
We’d all like to be Roma at least for one day just so that the rules of
gravity don’t apply to us, so that our system of values is a little dif-
ferent, a little old-fashioned, not of this world. Those are the Roma!
[Jovanović 2005:44].
Bregović sees Gypsies as a different kind of human: a fun-loving, gold-

toothed, music making tribe that has forsaken the modern world. His
desire “to be Roma at least for one day” centers on their supposed free-
dom. Even though he mentions Romani poverty, it seems to melt into joy.
His stereotypes and fantasies extend to Romani music:
And as a composer I’ve always been impressed by the fact that the
Roma treat music the same way as they treat nature. They don’t
understand music as something made up, but rather as something
given by God, held in common. With unbelievable ease they take a
Spanish harmony and lay a Turkish rhythm and an Arabic melody
over it. This is the old, ancient way of making music. That’s why the
music of the Roma is so fascinating on all levels. Honestly, when I feel
like drinking, I grab a bottle and go to some hotel, but when I want to
write music I go to a Gypsy café. I’m telling you this in all honesty
[44].
Bregović asserts Roma mix styles because they don’t recognize be-
longing; perhaps this belief gives him license to appropriate from Roma—
they wouldn’t mind anyway. He ignores, however, their professional history

of astutely serving patrons and instead imputes to them a childlike, ancient,
static, romantic worldview. Van de Port writes of similar stereotypical sce-
narios involving sex, nature, violence, and music that Serbian patrons in
Gypsy bars in Vojvodina impute to Romani musicians (1998).
Noting that his birth language no longer exists, Bregović turns to the
Romani language as salvation: “These days I write in Romani and in a
made-up language. In the place where I grew up only the Roma speak the
same language they always spoke” (44). “I don’t feel comfortable anymore
writing in Serbo-Croatian. . . . Not long ago I discovered the Gypsy
language, which I’m comfortable with. This is a language with very few
words and it is simply swimming in rhymes. . . . The Gypsy language
serves as a means of communication between the East and West”
(Becković 2002). I doubt if Bregović actually composes in Romani because
he doesn’t speak it; perhaps he collaborates with Roma to write lyrics for
him or, more likely he takes existing lyrics. Furthermore, linguists would
disagree that it has very few words. Bregović posits the Romani language,
and by extension Roma themselves, as an unchanging phenomenon
amidst the pernicious conflicts of the Balkans. This fossilizes Roma as
premodern relics.
We may clearly place Bregović in the “celebratory camp” of fusion
artists. Feld and others have noted the divide between “anxious” and
“celebratory” narratives of world music appropriation. Celebratory nar-
ratives valorize hybridity, feature hopeful scenarios about economic
fairness, and “even have romantic equations of hybridity with overt
resistance” (Feld 2000b:152).27 Anxious narratives fret over purity and
underline the economics of exploitation. I believe that we need to inter-
rogate both narratives. Celebratory scholars and musicians eschew
ownership and valorize the fertile artistic exchange of musical styles.
Lipsitz, for example, shows that appropriations create cultural zones of
contact where intercultural dialogue between ethnic groups can happen;
he says hybridity “produces an immanent critique of contemporary social
relations” (1994).
On the other hand, Lipsitz may “overstate the relative cultural power of
these musics” (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000:27) to effect change.28 Cele-
bratory tales tend to naturalize globalization, emphasizing its inevitability
(Feld 2000b:152). They espouse a “democratic vision for world music,”
which then becomes part of the marketing scheme. When audiences
observe the incredible diversity of music available, they see it “as some
kind of sign that democracy prevails, that every voice can be heard, every
style can be purchased, everything will be available to everybody” (167).
But in celebrating diversity, we shouldn’t confuse the flow of musical con-
tents with the flow of power relations (Feld 1994:263). Often too much at-
tention is paid to the sound aspect of hybrid musics and not enough to the
social, political, and economic relationships that produce them. Anxious
narratives often focus on the pitfalls of recorded music vs. live music29 or
claim that capitalism produces diluted, more commercial forms, less pure
forms: “This fuels a kind of policing of . . . authenticity” (Feld 2000b:152).

Anxious accounts fear that world music erases musical diversity and focus
on what is lost musically. Anxious scholars “want to calculate the kinds of
loss and diminution of musical heterogeneity” (153).30
Regarding Roma, I am not concerned about authenticity; the music that
is produced by Roma is not becoming more homogeneous. The fear of
“damaging Western influence” belongs to purists; it does not illuminate
the Romani case, historically or currently. As I have shown, Balkan
Romani music has always been open to innovation. In addition, there is
vital music making and dancing in the Balkan and diaspora Romani com-
munities, tied to identity issues. I would locate myself in the celebratory
camp in relation to artistic creativity and in the anxious camp in relation
to political economy. Anxious narratives, however, need to focus less on
the aesthetics of music and more on its production and consumption. A
narrow aesthetic analysis ignores “who is doing the hybridity, from which
position and with what intention and result” (Born and Hesmondhalgh
2000:19). Thus we need to focus more on questions of agency, profits, con-
trol, and the range of options available to performers. Along these lines I
turn to Gypsy Punk and DJ remixes of Romani music.
Gypsy Punk and DJ Remixes
In Chapter 12, I discussed the New York Gypsy Festivals and the emer-
gence of Gypsy Punk via the band Gogol Bordello. Here I update this
thread to examine what some have labeled the “Gypsy rock movement”
(http://www.crammed.be/index.php?id=34&art_id=10); I cover only a few
key bands because my research is in progress. A number of bands draw
from Balkan Gypsy materials but do not have Romani members: Kultur
Shock (Seattle), Beirut (New Mexico), Balkan Beat Box (New York), A
Hawk and a Hacksaw (New Mexico), and Basement Jaxx (England).
Although Beirut prides itself on its naïve, fresh sound inspired by Gypsy
brass filtered through Kusturica’s films (Lynskey 2006), Kultur Shock and
Gogol Bordello are distinguished by their overloaded punk sound and
edgy circuslike shows. Balkan Beat Box overlaps with Gogol Bordello in
its expression of the immigrant experience but has a more hip hop and
electronic texture. Gogol Bordello consists of mostly East European im-
migrants (Eugene Hutz and Sergey Rjabtzev claim to be part Romani); the
core of Balkan Beat Box are Israeli immigrants.31
Some bands use electronic as well as live music, and several band mem-
bers notably Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello and Ori Kaplan of Balkan
Beat Box, are DJs as well as live performers. In 2007, before Balkan Beat
Box became internationally known, Kaplan served as DJ for a monthly
party in Brooklyn in a loft where on another floor a live band such as
Slavic Soul Party played. These dance parties were unadvertised; part of
their cachet came from their underground, word-of-mouth feeling. Typi-
cally more than a hundred dancers, mostly under thirty years of age, gath-
ered until dawn. Kaplan used the word “jump” to characterize the dancing

of clubbers—and I would agree. He means literally jumping up and down
rather than line dancing; there is some solo belly dancing, but most people
“jump.”
These bands overlap with the expanding world of DJs who remix Gypsy
music in dance clubs to crowds of non-Roma in cities all over Western
Europe and the United States (Szeman 2009). The online magazine
Exclaim hailed “the rise of Balkan beats—Gypsy and other eastern Euro-
pean musics updated to a clubbing environment. . . . The anarchic and
romantic sounds of Gypsy and Balkan music allow people of all ages to
stomp to a different drummer”(Dacks 2005). And on the BBC website,
Robert Jackman wrote: “It’s impossible to ignore the soaring resurgence of
Balkan music. Only a dwindling few could turn their backs on a move-
ment which has persuaded European DJs—a breed famed for their un-
shakable faith in the synthesizer and the mullet—to swap their techno
vinyls for fresh, gypsy-influenced flavours” (2007). A cursory glance at the
touring schedules of DJs such as Shantel and Gaetano Fabri (from Bel-
gium) reveals steady work in Western Europe and Turkey. Hutz used to DJ
at Mehanata in New York on Thursdays, sometimes adding videos to his
shows. At a 2006 show at Midway in New York (at the New York Gypsy
Festival), he worked with videographer Al Jerrari (founder of the New
York Gypsy Film Festival) to combine visuals from Kusturica’s and Gatlif’s
films about Roma. DJs elicit an emotional response by employing these
images of Gypsies; perhaps deliberately, they don’t match specific Romani
music to specific Romani communities in their video shows.
Shantel (Stefan Hantel) is perhaps the most famous Gypsy remix DJ/
producer in Europe, having won the 2006 BBC Planet Club Global Award
and produced four Balkan albums, Bucovina Club 1 and 2 (Essay Record-
ings 2004 and 2005), Disko Partizani and Planet Paprika (Crammed Discs
2007, 2009); he has also started to perform live.32 He launched the Buco-
vina Club in Frankfurt in 2001 after discovering his roots in this Ukrai-
nian/Romanian/Moldavian borderland area, although some peg his
Eastern European connection to media hype. According to music writer
Garth Cartwright, Shantel was part of the enormous techno scene in Ger-
many in the 1990s, and as it faded he picked up on the popularity of “Bal-
kan Beats” nights in Berlin, popularized by Bosnian refugee DJ Robert
Šoko.33 A press releases states that the Bucovina Club is “a madhouse with
scenes of drunkenness and fraternization, of anarchy and good vibrations
that sometimes resemble the films of Emir Kusturica” (www.essayrecord-
ings.com/press.htm). Shantel “describes his Bucovina Club nights as wild
parties which absolutely destroy any sense of reserve amongst patrons”
(Dacks 2005). He explains:
You can play a party rocker, a wild Romanian belly dance tune, and
the next one is a ballad, a very sad song, and there is no irritation. It’s
very tense these nights, people screaming and dancing. The audience
is very diverse. We have young generation clubbers and then second,
third generation immigrants from Yugoslavia, born in Germany with

parents from Serbia, Romania and they are exploring their own music
traditions. Then there’s the elder generation; its not a problem when
you come with your parents to Bucovina Club (Dacks 2005).
Whereas New York Gypsy remix clubs attract Eastern European immi-
grants, clubs in Western European attract mostly non-Romani Europeans.
Hutz’s song texts reflect the alienation of being an “other,” whether it is
Gypsy, immigrant, or political refugee: “East European immigrants often
reconstruct their ‘home culture’ by reaching out for their ‘other’—Roma—
identifying as ‘nomads within the United States” (Budur 2007). Similarly,
Ori Kaplan of Balkan Beat Box asserts: “We play an extension of Romani
music. We are all immigrants; we are united in our fascination with immi-
grant cultures.” And his colleague Tamir Muskat concurs: “Gypsy is the
definition of a soul, not a color or place. It’s a take on life” (http://www.
myspace.com/balkanbeatbox, from an interview in SPIN, January 2007).
The Romani material that DJs use is markedly Balkan, mostly brass
bands; Fanfare Ciocarlia, Kočani, Boban Marković, and Mahala Rai Banda
are regularly sampled. In fact, brass bands have recently come to stand for
all Balkan Gypsy music; for example, this is what appears on the website
www.cocek.com: “There isn’t an English word for Čoček although some
refer to it as Gypsy brass.” Of course, this frame obscures a great majority
of Romani bands. As Feld says, “A region of musical variation gets reduced
to one genre, a ‘caricatured image’” (2000a:276).
One of the first remix albums, Electric Gypsyland was released in 2004 to
rave reviews in the rock and electronic music world and was followed by
a European tour featuring many of the DJs on the album. It was produced
by Crammed Discs and sampled tracks from bands produced by that label:
Fanfare Ciocarlia, Kočani, and Mahala Rai Banda, plus Taraf de Haïdouks.
Thus the worlds of production and DJ remixes are tightly intertwined.
Electric Gypsyland 2 (2006) built on this roster of groups, and Gypsy Beats
and Balkan Bangers (Atlantic Jaxx 2006, UK) reissued many remix hits.
The list of DJs who are interested in Gypsy music is growing, and they
come from and perform all over the world, including Mexico. According
to the liners notes of Electric Gypsyland 2: “While some of these pieces stay
close enough to the originals and can be described as remixes, most are
poetic re-inventions, works of pure imagination.” Indeed, one wonders
what is Gypsy about some of the cuts.
The producers of Gypsy remixes appeal to the wider audience of rock
fans rather than the smaller audience of ethnic music fans. Dacks’s inter-
view with Shantel asserts: “The sentiment of ‘this is not world music’
arises frequently. His aim is to portray this music as upfront, direct party
music, as opposed to some half-baked fusion or the object of ethnomusi-
cological study. . . . Essay Recordings’ bio states ‘it’s not happy clappy
multi-culti music’” (Dacks 2005). Marc Hollander, president of Crammed
Discs and project director for Electric Gypsyland, said he welcomed the
potential to “extend the fusion of Balkan energy with electronics under the
banner of world music.” He remarked that he was “pleasantly surprised

that Gypsy music is gaining an unforeseen audience. . . . I never thought it
would be a phenomenon. I was pretty much against the idea of remixing
for a long time. But three years ago we got these requests from electronic
music producers saying ‘Please can we remix . . . Taraf de Haïdouks?’
That’s when we decided to do the Electric Gypsyland album. . . . It’s a wel-
come change . . . for dance music” (Dacks 2005).
One song, “Red Bula,” has taken a winding path to its remix by Balkan
Beat Box on Electric Gypsyland 2. Although its origin is uncertain, by 2000
it was widely performed in Macedonia and Bulgaria. The title is a pun on
the energy drink Red Bull; bul in Romani means “ass.” Audio example
13.4 with text supplement features Ajgara, a band from Šutka, Macedonia,
also known for comedy. It begins with an off-color parody of family greet-
ings that are typically aired on Romani radio stations. Its refrain, “Red
Bul, sexy bul, apogei” (Red Bull, sexy ass, the epitome) has migrated into
many other songs.34 Audio example 13.5 features a version by Kristali with
Macedonian singer Džansever at a wedding in Bujanovac, Serbia; they
sing nonsensical Bulgarian lyrics such as mambo le, dupka do dupka (hole
to hole) and adresa veche znai se, na Vitosha shestnaiset (you already know
my address: Vitosha 16). Finally, video examples 5.52 and 5.60 feature
performances of Balkan Roma in America (see Chapters 5 and 11).
The “Red Bul,” however, that is known by most non-Roma is the Balkan
Beat Box remix of the Romanian band Mahala Rai Banda’s 2004 version,
mixed by Shantel, and produced by Michel Winter and Stephane Karo on
Crammed Discs. “Red Bula” is listed in the public domain. Mahala Rai
Banda’s version is enhanced with a solo by Bulgarian saxophonist Filip
Simeonov (audio example 13.6). Balkan Beat Box’s remix separates sev-
eral tracks and adds electronic beats (audio example 13.7). Ori Kaplan
explained the process to me: “Marc Hollander offered us a few tracks. Red
Bula had potential. We liked it—it has a dixieland vibe, and we thought we
could give it a different kind of pulse. We separated out the tracks, took
out the drums and repeated the vocals. We chopped it up and changed the
structure. On a dead track hidden inside we found an accordion solo; like
a phoenix we revived it from the dead! Tamir added keyboards, but there
was no need to add much.” Kaplan said that he realized what the song
meant only after the remix was made.
Remixes raise questions of ownership and artistry; one journalist aptly
asked: ”Is this just another fad, or is it a sign of the times in New Europe. . . .
And will Gypsies and the other disadvantaged citizens of Eastern Europe
benefit from this attention?” (Dacks 2005). On the one hand, praise
abounds; the online magazine Know the Ledge wrote: “DJ Shantel’s Buco-
vina Club project is probably the most effective portrayal of the wildness
and sheer ecstasy of traditional-modernized Gypsy party music” (Arm-
strong 2005). Similarly, music journalist Robert Christgau asserted that
Gogol Bordello is “the most exciting new alt-rock band in the world”
(2006). On the other hand, critics claim DJs like Shantel are opportunists;
they similarly lament the fact that Gogol Bordello is now seen as the future
of Gypsy music. German Popov, the founder of the band OMFO (Our Man

from Odessa), which released Trans Balkan Express (Essay 2004), deliber-
ately distances himself from “gypsyronica” (Dacks 2005).
The British music magazine fRoots published a scathing review of Elec-
tric Gypsyland 2: “The Balkans and ‘gypsies’ have become the new Cuba,
and we’re now drowning in opportunist ‘Club Global’ Romaxploitation
compilations. Same bands, same tracks, different order. Buyer guide is to
avoid anything . . . containing Gogol Bordello. Enough, already!” (fRoots
2006). Cartwright also weighed in against DJs: “I loathe remix albums. . . .
The European remix album was a bad 90s phenomenon . . . and Electric
Gypsyland’s no exception. The Balkan grooves have been filtered out until
all that’s left is the drudgery of the EU dance floor. In Serbia, Vanjus of
Modern Quartet (who remixed Kočani Orkestar), informed me ‘I fucking
hate folk music so I stripped everything but the clarinet’ of MQ’s effort. His
comment provides a succinct review of the CD” (Cartwright 2005b:209–
210). Cartwright also wrote: “Shantel bears obvious comparison with Bos-
nia’s Goran Bregović—both are non-Romas who have imaginatively
plundered Balkan Gypsy music to create a sound with popular appeal”
(2006a).
But many other writers defend Shantel: “For the moment the modest
and ebullient performer has managed to avoid the traps fallen into by the
likes of Goran Bregović and Emir Kusturica. His plundering of Balkan
Roma music to create popular dance music has been done with deep
respect for the complex music forms” (D. Brown 2006). On the other hand,
Cartwright puts Shantel and Gogol Bordello in the same category as Kus-
turica: all are appropriators who “skim the surface of Gypsy culture with-
out dealing with the deeper artistry of the Romani people. Gogol Bordello
are, then, a brown and white minstrel show” (Cartwright 2005a).35
Respect is something given freely by virtually all appropriators. Many
DJs are effusive in their adoration of their “heroes,” the Romani musicians
from whom they draw: “Everyone, no matter how exoticizing, how pa-
tronizing . . . in their rhetoric . . ., declares their respect for the original
music and its makers” (Feld 2000a:273). On several remix albums, bonus
tracks are devoted to the unmixed sources, as homage or as a mark of
“authenticity.” DJ Russ Jones asserts:
Alongside the young turks with their twisted interpretations the older
guns still know how to rock it. Included here are some killer tracks
from Fanfare Ciocărlia and Kočani Orchestra [sic]. See the guys live
and it will be as riotous as any gig by Gogol or Shantel. The finest of
musicians, . . . you . . . realize they could sit alongside the hottest Bra-
zilian samba sound band or the most swinging jazz outfits and give
them a good run for their money at any party or festival settings
[2006].
For Jones, the mark of a good Balkan Romani band is how close it sounds
to Gogol Bordello or Shantel. Ironically, the appropriators now set the stan-
dards, and it is their sources who must measure up to them. Furthermore,

according to Jones, good Romani musicians must be fusionists according
to the fashions of world music; they should be able to sit in with a Brazilian
band or jazz band.36
Hutz claims a special relationship to Roma because of his Romani
Ukrainian heritage (chronicled in the documentary The Pied Piper of Hut-
zovina): “Some have said we bastardized the culture. The thing is that we
have roots in this culture. These are our personal heroes. This is the roots
of my family—this is where we come from” (Budur 2007).37 Reflecting on
the 2006 New York Gypsy Festival, he asserted: “It’s important to me that
Roma came, not that the magazines thought it was happening. It would
perhaps be the worst closure for me if Roma would give me the anathema”
(2007). Some non-Romani musicians, including Bregović, legitimate their
ties to Romani music through their regional roots.38 Other musicians
make a virtue of their naïveté; they admit they know little about Balkan
Roma, but their genuine interest and admiration is enough. For example,
Zach Condon of Beirut “makes a principle of naivety. His music may not
be authentic—he never pretended it was—but it is never less than sin-
cere.” He said “I’m willing to take the music at face value. . . . I don’t have
to tie in historical and racial and political elements to make it mean any-
thing more to me. Isn’t melody enough?”39 (Lynskey 2006).
For Condon, then, any music is “up for grabs.” Critics might call him a
“sonic scavenger.”40 Like Condon, Hutz “has no desire for border control.
‘Gogol Bordello is about embracing other cultures because the more
sources of joy you have, the better you are. There is no yes or no, no black
and white here. I guess it all goes back to not where you came from but
how deep in your bones does the music really reach. Does it reach that
level of madness or not?’” (2006). Similarly, Hollander advocates “trans-
culturalism—a genuine mash-up of cultures as opposed to multicultur-
alism where groups retreat into and protect their own enclaves.” Hollander
points out that Gypsy music has never been pure and is “by no means
traditional music. They borrow bits and pieces of music right and left”
(Dacks 2005).
These musicians disavow ownership theories of music; they believe that
all music is available to everyone to use as they wish. They celebrate crea-
tivity and reject any hint that artistic or economic exploitation could exist.
The opposite of this camp is the UNESCO and WIPO (World Intellectual
Property Organization) approach, which sees discrete arts belonging to
discrete cultural groups who should have control over them (see Chapter
8). In this model, it is supposedly clear who is taking from whom because
ultimate sources can be identified. Historically, Roma test and ultimately
refute the applicability of both of these two extremes. Their appropria-
tions are from a marginal position; they have never officially had “rights”
to any genre because they have never been in charge of institutions. Now
that non-Roma are appropriating from them, they can’t (and many
wouldn’t want to) fight back.
One strand in the celebratory camp asserts that appropriation is not
problematic because there is no such thing as authentic Gypsy music.

Robert Christgau, for example, writes: “Purity is always a misleading
ideal. With the gypsies, or Roma . . . it’s an impossible chimera . . . real
Gypsy music is a myth” (2006). Similarly, “There is no such thing as Gypsy
music insists DJ Shantel . . . you can only talk about traditional music
from different regions in southeastern Europe” (2006). Like Bregović,
these artists claim that because Roma have appropriated, then appropria-
tions from Roma are unproblematic. They confuse artistry with eco-
nomics. As Lynskey writes: “There is no such thing as Gypsy music. From
Basement Jaxx to Beirut to Gogol Bordello, bands are looking to the Bal-
kans for inspiration, but . . . is this a genuine new musical hybrid or just
cultural tourism? . . . Gypsy music has always been a hybrid, but for cen-
turies the underdogs assimilated the music of the dominant society. Now
they are the ones being assimilated” (2006).
Are DJs and Gypsy Punk bands putting Romani musicians out of work?
Are they being hired instead of Romani musicians? It is certainly cheaper
to hire one DJ or a local punk band than to bring a band from the Balkans.
But DJs have argued with me on this very point. A few do invite guest
Romani musicians. When I asked Ori Kaplan of Balkan Beat Box if he
thought that remixes would take work away from Roma, he answered:
Not at all. We are not competing in any way—we are augmenting the
scene. Audiences have grown. The whole scene is expanding. Would a
Swedish hip hop band take work away from Eminem? Not at all! We
in BBB are a completely different animal—we are Middle Eastern
musicians. Would another band playing new Mediterranean music
take work away from us? No, these bands would play an opening set
for us—they help spread the word. We all spread the word, we tell
audiences what albums to buy—Taraf, Ivo. I don’t see the relevance of
your question.
Kaplan views the market for Gypsy music as continuously growing, so

everyone benefits. Similarly, Hutz says, “Does the bad reggae that’s out
there prevent the good reggae from existing?” Shantel goes even further,
suggesting that the current wave is helping Balkan musicians: “In south-
eastern Europe these bands are totally vanishing away. The success of this
sound helps the younger generation of musicians in the Balkans to con-
tinue the tradition” (Lynskey 2006). Postulating that Romani music is
dying, he claims that he is inspiring a new generation in the Balkans. I
would counter that not only is Balkan Romani music alive, but its vitality
doesn’t depend on him!
How do Roma feel about remixes? It is hard to ascertain their honest
opinions because most are extremely practical and do not want to alienate
possible “collaborators” from whom they may derive future revenues.41
Also note that artistic opinions may diverge from economic decisions.
Feld similarly observes that third-world musicians want more exposure,
sales, and “a greater cut of the action. If their perception is that the same
process that is screwing them over is the process that is eventually going

to give them a larger cut, then how do you tell them to take a smaller cut?”
(1994:315). In New York, for example, Yuri Yunakov is on excellent terms
with Ori Kaplan (his former student) and Eugene Hutz.42
Eugene Hutz is such a polarizing figure in the United States that Romani
activists find him hard to dismiss, even while they criticize his stereotyp-
ical displays. They hope that perhaps his fame can be recruited for ac-
tivism. His biography from the website of the New York Gypsy Festival
asserts:
Eugene comes from mixed Russian-Ukrainian-Romany family, but it

is the Romany side that became his biggest inspiration. Love for
Romany people and music also lead [sic] him to become a Romany
rights activist. Hutz constantly works with his native Ukrainian orga-
nization Romany Jag (Gypsy fire) and is currently translating works
of his friend Gypsy writer and philosopher Vladimir Bambula. “Only
through exploring my relationship with Gypsy culture I understood
my place in the world,” Hutz says.
When Hutz expressed his desire to become more involved in activism to

Šani Rifati of the NGO Voice of Roma, Rifati invited him to perform at the
2008 Romani Herdeljezi festival in California. Several members of VOR’s
board of directors (especially the Romani members) were wary of this in-
vitation, as they were of his biography. But Rifati paired him with Russian
Romani guitarist Vadim Kolpakov rather than let him do his usual Gypsy
Punk show. The event drew Gogol fans who would have never attended a
Romani music festival; even so, Hutz’s antics were offensive to many VOR
volunteers and audience members.43
Cartwright “dismissed Gogol Bordello as a ‘fiddle-driven Sham 69,’” and
he reported that Fanfare Ciocarlia described Shantel’s remixes as “dog-
shit” (Lynskey 2006).44 Cartwright wrote that several Bucharest Romani
musicians shrug off remixes as “for the west” (2005b:210). He also wrote
that Henry Ernst (from Asphalt Tango) is “distrustful of most remix
albums—Electric Gypsyland being an example of a less than satisfying
attempt to turn Taraf de Haïdouks and Kočani Orkestar into café muzak”
Cartwright 2004:31). In 2007 Ernst told me: “In the last ten years Gypsies
built up a lobby through their artistic merits . . . and the next logical step
is that non-Gypsy musicians start to pay attention. . . . Remixes are part of
this observation and a result of the hungry music industry.”
Remember that music is produced and copyrighted by a label, which
decides whether to issue permission for remixing. The revenues go to the
label, which may or may not have a revenue-sharing agreement with its
artists. Asphalt Tango has clearly funneled profits to the musicians of Fan-
fare, but this is not the norm in the recording industry. As Feld writes, the
music business is supported by three pillars: record companies, major
contract artists who have control over their art, and musicians who “are
laborers who sell their services for a direct fee and take the risk (with little
expectation) that royalty percentages, spin off jobs, tours, and recording

contracts might follow from the exposure and success of records with
enormous sales” (2000a:245).
Another strand in the celebratory discourse of appropriators is the feel-
good, peace-making “transcultural” aspect of the music. Bregović, for ex-
ample, sees himself as transcending the conflicts of the Balkans through
Gypsy music. Shantel similarly views his dance club experience as bringing
people together: “It’s only music, you know. It’s to make people happy, not
to fight against each other” (Lynskey 2006). The liner notes to Bucovina
Club 2 expound this ideal:
The incomparable atmosphere and energy is tangible when people

who have never set eyes on each other before end up dancing the
Hora together, when they crash the stage to dance the Cocek along-
side the musicians or to get a shot of vodka from the DJ. The Buco-
vina Club transforms every venue into an extraterritorial zone creating
a dazzling euphoric event that transcends all generational and na-
tional boundaries. Ageism? No sign of it. Racism? No way. On the
contrary: where else can you hear so many Gypsy sounds? How come
Gypsy music is so popular with Shantel and his audience? The answer
is simple: because it combines joy and sorrow so compellingly that
only the most superficial or cold-hearted would fail to be swept along
by it. . . . Tribes of émigré kids, Romanians, Serbians, Croats, Alba-
nians, Ukrainians, and all those who know there is musical life beyond
the increasingly cut-throat mainstream, gather here to celebrate their
occasionally surrealistic boundary-crossing rituals, living out a sense
of togetherness. . . . Forget the pain, forget the misery; celebrate this
day as though it were your last [Trouillet 2006].
I applaud how music and dance can bridge ethnicities, but I wonder
how Trouillet (who heads Essay records) can think that racism has disap-
peared in Western Europe. Perhaps inside some of these clubs Western
Europeans and Eastern European immigrants dance together. But
throughout Western Europe, there are other clubs where only émigrés
gather. Furthermore, there are rarely any Romani patrons in remix clubs;
not only can’t they afford them, but also they can’t relate to the scene.45
Many Roma in Western Europe have a precarious legal, political, eco-
nomic, and social status as refugees or underemployed workers. As dis-
cussed in Chapter 1, Roma face racism and deportation in Western
Europe, and I doubt that the popularity of Gypsy remixes affects this fact.
A romantic fantasy of harmony, however, overlays the club scene.
Among Americans, the fantasy element is especially prominent: Gypsies
are associated with wildness and sexuality, and facts are scarce. Several
years ago, when Alex Dimitrov moved his legendary New York club
Mehanata (the tavern), he proposed renaming it House of Gypsy; this title
was accompanied by a website photograph of a non-Romani woman in a
seductive pose on the stoop of the building. When he contacted me about
writing a letter to support a liquor license for the new location, I told him

that I was offended at his use of a sexual stereotype. Perhaps he dropped
the name and image when I said that the community board might think
the bar was a brothel. His request to me to write about the beneficial mul-
ticultural musical exchanges among immigrants that happen at the club
put me in an awkward position. On the one hand, I objected to the stereo-
types, but on the other hand I knew the club provided employment to
Roma, including Yuri Yunakov, Sal Mamudoski, and Seido Salifoski. After
talking with these musicians, I told Dimitrov about my objections and
wrote the letter. In the end, the stereotypes bothered me more than they
bothered the Roma musicians, a point I have analyzed throughout this
book.
Borat and Beyond
A huge public audience was exposed to Romani music via the record-
breaking movie Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glo-
rious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006; www.borat.com). Its soundtrack
overwhelmingly features Balkan Romani music, with cuts from Esma
Redžepova, Jony Iliev, Kočani Orkestar, Mahala Rai Banda, Fanfare Cio-
carlia, Goran Bregović, and Ivo Papazov (with Maria Karafezieva). The
Atlantic soundtrack album and Borat songs on iTunes are selling quite
well; and DJ Shantel created a Borat tour and promoted the movie in a
video clip (www.essayrecordings.com/vid_mtvtrailer.htm). Why would
Romani music appear in this film, and what effect has this exposure had
on Romani musicians?
The creation of British comedian Sasha Baron Cohen, Borat is a “moc-
kumentary” about a Kazakh journalist documenting American life for the
people in his Kazakh village. The film is a biting satire about Eastern
Europe and the United States: both groups are portrayed as racists. But
whereas Borat may be an equal opportunity offender, denigrating gays,
Blacks, and Uzbeks, his specific targets are women, Jews, and Gypsies. Is
Borat defending these views? I would contend that he is not defending
them but rather attributing them to most East Europeans and some Amer-
icans. Many Western audience members have found the sexist, homo-
phobic, and anti-Semitic remarks offensive, but at least they have a counter
discourse readily available via vocal lobbies. On the other hand, most
American audience members are ignorant about Roma; they have at best
a vague sense of who Gypsies are, and that sense is shrouded in fantasy.
Note that references to Gypsies in the film center around theft (Borat
assumes that a woman running a garage sale is a Gypsy who stole all the
items), magic (he seeks a “jar of Gypsy tears” for protection against AIDS,
and he assumes a garage sale proprietor can cast spells and shrink Barbie
dolls), and violence against Gypsies that seems like fun (he seeks a car that
goes fast enough to kill them). These are stock stereotypes, and because
there is little counter-information available it is possible audience mem-
bers might believe them as well as laugh at them.

One thing audiences won’t notice is that, ironically, the Kazakh village
depicted in the film is Glod, a Romani village in southern Romania. The
primitiveness was staged (e.g., animals, such as cows, were brought inside
homes), but the poverty and marginality were all too real. In fact, the villagers
were outraged when they found out how the footage was used.46 Although
this backstage controversy is invisible to audiences, the soundtrack attracted
global and sustained attention. All the reviewers on Amazon, for example,
comment that the tunes are East European Gypsy, and one states: “The Borat
soundtrack sounds just as you’d expect—imagine Beirut, Balkan Beat Box
and a bit of Gogol Bordello, all with Sacha Baron Cohen as the frontman.
God help us” (ea_solinas January 31, 2007, www. amazon.com). Actually
none of these artists are featured, but this comment shows that virtually all
Gypsy music is now associated with those groups. The BBC reported:
The music from the film includes some of the most rollicking Balkan
and gypsy music ever presented on such a wide scale to the American
public. . . . For those who don’t know much about Balkan or gypsy
music, the soundtrack is an ideal tasting menu [Werman 2006].
Note that in the film, Gypsy music tends to be played when the scenes
depict Kazakhstan, hence backwardness, illustrating the trope of Gypsy
music as symbolic of the exotic other or the primitive marginal.47 For ex-
ample, the film opens with Esma Redžepova singing her signature song
“Čhaje Šukarije” (see Chapter 10), while the viewer absorbs scenes of the
muddy “Kazakh” village. Esma was upset at this use of her song and was
seriously considering suing Cohen. She claimed her recording label did
not know about the intended use of the song when it gave permission.
However, the film properly credits Esma and the label, Times Square
Records/World Connection (2000). In fact, Esma’s album now proudly fea-
tures an advertising sticker proclaiming “In Borat!”
The problem for artists is the way the music industry structures permis-
sions. Cohen needed to ask the label, not Esma, for permission. The label
may or may not inform the artist and may or may not pay her or him,
depending on recording contracts; most do not give rights of distribution
to artists. According to Esma, her Dutch managers negotiated the use of
her song, and she was not consulted. She said she was angry, but royalties
were paid. She decided not to sue perhaps because she did not have a case,
but she received considerable compensation from World Connection.
Contrary to Esma, however, Ivo Papazov did not complain about the use
of his music, and Fanfare Ciocarlia’s members were paid extremely well,
according to their managers/producers. Villagers from Glod attempted to
sue Cohen but failed (see the documentary film Carmen Meets Borat).
Fanfare’s role in the film was unusual in that the band was commis-
sioned to perform a piece new to them. “Born to Be Wild,” whose chorus
is sung in English, is a cover of the classic hit; it was hailed by the BBC as
the “one standout number” (Werman 2006). According to the Asphalt
Tango website: “Three months ago Hollywood knocked on our door and

asked for an unmistakable Gypsy version of the Steppenwolf hit ‘Born To
Be Wild’ to get the pictures of the film ‘Borat’ moving. So Fanfare Ciocarlia
rushed into a studio and pepped up this ageless bikers’ hymne [sic] from
the 70’s in their very own style” (June 2006, www.asphalt-tango.de/news.
html). Henry Ernst explained the process: “The band created their own
adaption of Born To Be Wild after listening for two hours to the original
version. After two days rehearsal and final arrangements we went to a
Berlin studio and we recorded the song. Afterwards we did some addi-
tional overdubs on tour (mostly in hotel rooms).” Fanfare was invited to
perform at the film’s premiere in London, but the trip was cancelled.
According to Ernst, Fanfare members “were compensated on a high
level.” In fact, a BBC report on the film’s music assumes that “with this
soundtrack, the royalties will now flow in for these Romanian gypsy mu-
sicians. They’ll have Borat to thank, even though the ethno-musical con-
nection between Romania and Kazakhstan is thin at best” (Werman
2006). Asphalt Tango had already funneled money into Fanfare’s small
village. According to the documentary film Iag Bari: Brass on Fire (2001),
the first Romani church in Romania was built with this money. Fanfare’s
founder Ioan Ivancea readily admitted that “Henry Ernst’s arrival had . . .
saved Zeci Prajini and encouraged the younger generation to keep
learning music” (Cartwright 2006b and 2005b:222). As opposed to Shan-
tel’s inflated claims about saving Gypsy music (discussed earlier), Alphalt
Tango is an example of non-Romani producers investing in the music and
the musicians.
Concluding Remarks
This book endeavors to combine several strands of inquiry: it analyzes the

relationship of Balkan Romani music to Romani communities, to states,
and to capitalist markets. Transnationalism ties together these three
strands: Romani communities are mobile, music is part of a pan-Romani
political articulation of identity, and Romani music has entered world
music circuits. I have endeavored to confound the linear path that as-
sumes music begins in bounded communities and is then changed by its
use in state and market contexts. For Roma, the community is no longer,
and never was, a bounded site; there are no original singular Romani
homelands, neither in India nor in the Balkans. Rather, Romani commu-
nities are open-ended, transnational, and diasporic, with nodes in mul-
tiple sites such as New York and Dusseldorf, as well as Šutka. Music in
Šutka or Belmont, then, may be as transnational as Shantel’s remixes or
even more so. Rather than looking at Romani communities as authentic
cites of original music, I show how they are the sites of negotiation
between economic and artistic diasporic forces.
Romani communities in the Balkans and the diaspora are dynamic
centers of musical creativity where multiple generations of musicians
interact for a knowledgeable patron base. But we need to be careful not

to romanticize life in these communities. True, new waves of talent are
developing, but the economic conditions are so dire that most musicians
simply cannot make a living. Furthermore, the majority of Roma are not
musicians, and their employment and life trajectories are even more pre-
carious. When we hear of large weddings, we need to remember that
families have saved for years for these events and they will sacrifice in the
future because of their financial outlay. We should not judge the majority
by the minority of famous artists who have steady incomes.
Emerging styles and genres also need to be seen in the political context
of the growing pan-Romani human rights movement, which addresses
past forms of injustice as well as new ones. Most Roma in Europe today
lead a precarious existence thanks to widespread discrimination in all
walks of life and threats of violence, but a select few have become musical
stars. The rising tide of xenophobia in both Eastern and Western Europe
exists side by side with the craze for Gypsy music among non-Roma. How
do these spheres affect each other? Whereas most activists are not directly
involved with music, and most musicians are not directly involved in ac-
tivism, more Roma are mediating the gap. In the Balkans and the dias-
pora, they include Dušan and Dragan Ristić of Kal, Šani Rifati of Voice of
Roma, Esma Redžepova, Yuri Yunakov, and the organizers of Romani
music festivals. Music has always been an area of pride, but it is now tied
to identity politics and festivals.
It is not surprising that musicians avoid the topics of history and discrim-
ination; most non-Roma are fascinated by Gypsies precisely as “timeless”
performers. They want to see Gypsies sing and dance, period; and some
think that music is the totality of their lives. Many admirers presume that
poverty doesn’t bother Gypsies because they have music; as Kirshenblatt-
Gimblett points out, “Spectacle suppresses conflict” (1998:72; see Chapter
12). For centuries, the marketing discourse of Romani music has promised
exoticism, sexuality, passion, wildness, and abandonment; and precisely
because Roma are in a marginal position, they have often promoted these
stereotypes. Roma construct themselves in response to how non-Roma
have constructed Gypsiness. Roma have never been in charge of their own
representational discourse and imagery, and as a result they use the dis-
course available: the stereotypes that sell.48 Thus sometimes they are mar-
keted as authentic, sometimes as hybrid, and sometimes as authentic
hybrids.
Historically, hybridity has been used by nation/states to discredit
Romani music; official institutions claimed that Romani music was not
pure enough to enter the national canon. But in the contemporary fu-
sion music market, Romani hybridity is lauded. For hundreds of years,
Roma have trafficked in border styles; long before the emigrant waves of
postsocialism, Balkan Romani music was hybrid. But the new musical
developments since the 1990s cannot merely be subsumed under old
paradigms. When the Bulgarian socialist state banned kyuchek in the
1980s, something novel happened: Romani music was reconfigured as an
antisocialist countercultural phenomenon, playing and dancing kyuchek

became political, and resistance emerged. After 1989, Bulgarian Romani
music was reconfigured in relation to more commercial media ventures
such as chalga.
So what exactly is new since the 1990s? The rise in popularity of “world
music” has opened up new possibilities for artists from every corner of the
globe. Although this may sound like an inherently democratic move, in
reality only a tiny fraction of Romani musicians benefit directly from the
world music scene; most are ignored and the few that are picked up by
Western production companies benefit less than their producers. Further-
more, their cultural capital may no longer be under their control. As I
discussed in Chapter 3, world music thrives on marketing ethic and racial
difference. Imre writes: “Global popular culture voraciously incorporates
ethnic differences in the pursuit of selling and consuming non-stop enter-
tainment. This process has two sides: it can be seen as liberating and dem-
ocratic, empowering minorities whose voices would otherwise be missing
or stereotyped. At the same time, it implies the appropriation of such
voices and images by corporate multiculturalism and its cultures of simu-
lation which re-trivializes racial difference on a commercial basis”
(2006:661).
The transition from socialism to capitalism has opened up new arenas
for expression and allowed the flowering of previously prohibited genres.
At the same time, it has introduced contested forms of global appropria-
tions. Whereas forty years ago, Hungarian Gypsy string bands stood for
“Gypsy” music in the minds of many Americans and Western Europeans,
today Balkan brass has taken its place. Are Gypsies merely a prop in the
global vocabulary of sound, or are they active players? Ironically, the more
popular Gypsy music becomes, the more non-Roma become involved in it,
with both positive and negative consequences. With remixes, Gypsy music
has become a set of sounds remote from Roma and available to all for ap-
propriation and sampling.49 Roma still operate primarily as musical pro-
viders to non-Romani patrons. The terms of commerce are very often out
of their hands, and sometimes even artistic decisions are out of their hands.
The global market is mediated by record companies, managers, festi-
vals, and clubs; these institutions and sites are all controlled by non-
Roma.50 Only a handful of artists have achieved world acclaim, while
equally talented performers languish for lack of international ties. The
famous bands support whole villages or extended families back home, but
their managers and producers inevitably profit. The majority of Romani
performers have little chance for international fame, but this situation is
somewhat mitigated by a flourishing demand for quality musics in the
Romani diaspora for in-group celebrations. In the parallel world of wed-
dings, circumcisions, and baptisms, good musicians are in demand. The
work is much harder, it may pay less, and is less stable. Some performers
(Kristali, Ćita, Amza) are very well paid; some are not.
The contrast between these worlds is striking. In the international market,
Roma perform for two hours at concerts, festivals, or clubs. Every detail, all
the logistics (hotels, meals, transportation) are arranged by non-Romani

managers. All this may be coordinated with a recording contract (meaning
loyalty to one label), a steady stream of new albums, media events, and
classy websites. Tours are arranged many months in advance. The chance of
becoming passé and out of fashion, however, is very real. In this category,
musicians do give up some autonomy for steady income. But few see it as a
burden. For the most part, they are extremely grateful to non-Romani entre-
preneurs for rescuing them from poverty.
By contrast, in the Romani world performers act as their own agents
and have artistic independence but no financial stability. And because
Romani audiences value novelty and are so discerning, there is fierce com-
petition, which keeps the quality extremely high. Famous artists get hired,
but for every famous artist there are hundreds of struggling musicians.
Some performers, such as Yuri Yunakov, straddle these two worlds: they
play Romani weddings and also have international reputations among
non-Roma. There are also artists who no longer perform for the in-group
world of weddings but rather rely on international work, such as Taraf de
Haidouks; however, a few artists in this category, such as Ivo Papazov and
Esma Redžepova, have sometimes lacked stable Western management
and recording contacts.
It is clear that the contemporary Balkan Romani music scene should
not be judged only by the international stars and their appearances of
success. Neither should we ignore the tremendous impact the stars are
making. The life histories of the mature stars remind us that they all
emerged from communities (whether in Macedonia, New York, or West-
ern Europe) where music is a vibrant part of life; furthermore, emerging
new stars must pass the test of rigorous community standards. But these
communities are not just places of ecstatic music making; in Europe they
are sites of critical neglect and targets of discrimination, and in the United
States they are the sites of social challenges. The arena of “world music” is
not particularly relevant for many Roma, but for the successful musicians
it is quite pertinent. The future could open up more possibilities for
Romani musicians, or else Gypsy music could go out of style in dance
clubs. Regarding the craze for remixes, Lynskey states: “Anyway, in the
long history of Gypsy music this is just a blip. The music is strong enough
to survive any number of reinterpretations” (2006). I hope and believe he
is correct. Although Roma have sometimes been pictured as traditional,
conservative, backward, and generally outside the framework of the mod-
ern, they are quintessentially cosmopolitan. Romani musicians embrace
hybridity and eclecticism as a cultural resource, and thus they reveal to us
a great deal about survival and cultural negotiation.

Notes
Chapter 1
1. In this book, I use Gypsy as an outsider term, although I acknowledge
that it is sometimes used as an insider term. Along with its cognates Gitan
(French), Gitano (Spanish), Yiftos (Greek), and Gjupci (Macedonian, plu-
ral), Gypsy connotes faulty history, i.e., Egyptian origins, and usually has
strong negative connotations. Some groups, however, willingly embrace
the term, e.g., the Gitanos in Spain (Gay y Blasco 2002:174–175) and the
Egjupkjani in Macedonia and Kosovo (Marushiakova et al. 2001; V. Fried-
man 2005). Another common outsider term, Tsigan (and its cognates such
as the German Zigeuner, Italian Zingaro, Turkish Çingene), derives from the
Greek atsingani, a heretical sect in the Byzantine period (Soulis 1961:145).
I use Roma as an umbrella ethnonym (singular Rom, adjective Romani)
because it emerged as a unifying term in the last two decades, as political
consciousness has been mobilized through political parties, conferences,
and congresses (Petrova 2003:111–112). Note, however, that some groups,
such as the Sinti in Germany, the Rudari and Beyashi in Hungary, the Ash-
kalia and Egjupkjani of Kosovo, and the Gypsies and Travelers of England
and Scotland, distinguish themselves from Roma (Petrova 2003:111–112;
Hancock 2002:34; Marushiakova 1992; Marushiakova et al. 2001). See
Chapter 3 for a discussion of identity issues.
2. For example, see recent articles in Time and Newsweek magazines
(Purvis 2002; Brownell and Haq 2007; Bax 2007).
3. The literature on folklore and performance is vast; overviews include
Bauman and Briggs 1990; Fine 1984; Kapchan 1996a and b and 2007,
Bendix 1997. Performance has also been discussed from the point of view
of theater; see Schechner 2006 and Diamond 1996. Anthropologists Victor
Turner (Turner and Bruner 1986) and Clifford Geertz (1973 and 1983)
highlight the dramatic, performative quality of ritual.
4. Kapchan writes: “It has been the task of performance studies to un-
derstand what constitutes the differences between habitual practices and
heightened performance, and how and why these differences function in
society” (1996a:279).
5. Butler’s notion of citationality derives from Derrida. Butler under-
scores the subversive potential that questions original identities: “The no-
tion of gender parody . . . does not assume that there is an original which
such parodic identities imitate. Indeed the parody is of the very notion of
an original” (1990:138). See Chapter 9 for discussion of Bulgarian pop/
folk star Azis’s use of gender transgression in relation to Butler’s theories.
295
6. The literature on blackface and minstrelsy is useful here (see Lott
1993).
7. Kapchan, for example, chronicles the transformation of Moroccan
sacred Gnawa in world music markets, noting “how these changes spiral
back to the local context and affect transformation there” (2007:235).
8. Herzfeld points out that the state is a prime reference point in post-
socialist ethnography (2000). His work on “cultural intimacy” shows the
subtle ways in which the state achieves rapport with citizens despite au-
thoritarian regulations (1997).
9. For reportage on anti-Muslim, anti-immigration, anti-Semitic, and
anti-Romani sentiments Europe, see Stracansky 2009; BBC 2008; Moore
2008; Donadio 2008; Kimmelman 2008a and b; Kulish 2007 and 2008;
Sciolino 2007a and b; Sciolino and Bernard 2007; Erlanger 2008; Minchik
2007, Castle-Kanerova 2001; McCann 2007; Waringo 2004; Ghodsee 2008;
on French deportations, see www.errc.org/cikk.php?cikk=3619; on Danish
deportations, www.errc.org/cikk.php?cikk=3603; and on German deporta-
tions, http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,6197201,00.html.
10. Because of space limitations, I do not focus on Serbia, Greece, and
Albania. My specific focus on Macedonia and Bulgaria is a result of my
historical and practical choices in fieldwork; see Silverman 2000c. The
literature includes documentation of South Serbian Romani brass bands
(Lovas 2003; Babić 2003 and 2004; Hedges 1996), Serbian Romani mu-
sic from Vojvodina (Van de Port 1998 and 1999), Kosovo Romani music
(Pettan 1996a, 1996b, and 1996c, 2001, 2002, 2003), Greek Romani music
(Blau, Keil, Keil, and Feld 2002; Brandl 1996; Theodosiou 2003), and Ro-
manian Romani music (Rădulescu 2004; Beissinger 1991, 2001, 2005, and
2007; Malvinni 2003 and 2004; Marian-Bǎlașa 2002 and 2004; Szeman
2009). See Cartwright 2005b for a personal journalistic portrait of Balkan
Romani musicians.
11. See Saul and Tebutt 2004. The cultural studies journal Third Text de-
voted a recent issue to interdisciplinary approaches to representations of
Roma; see Imre 2008; Gay y Blasco 2008; Iordanova 2008; Hasdeu 2008.
12. There is an emerging field of genetic studies of Romani origins; see
Kalaydjieva, Gresham, and Calafell 2005; Iovita and Schurr 2004.
13. The four major Romani dialects are Vlax, Balkan, Central, and
Northern (Matras 2005:8); the word Vlach refers to Roma who lived in
the southern Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia during
the period of slavery (1300s to 1860s); see Fraser 1992 and Hancock 2002.
14. According to Fraser (1992) and Hancock (2002), nomadism was
more prevalent in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe owing to reg-
ulations preventing settlement in the west. The binary division between
nomadic Roma and settled Roma is somewhat artificial and is in fact
partially an artifact of the scholarly disciplines that have studied Roma
(Van de Port 1998). Whereas much of the literature contrasts nomadic
groups, such as the Olah in Hungary, with sedentary groups such as
Romungre, the on-the-ground situation was and is more fluid (Stewart
1997). The Roma discussed in this book from Macedonia and Bulgaria
are all sedentary.
15. For similar reasons, other Balkan peoples such as Bulgarian Po-
maks, Macedonian Torbeši, and a significant number of Albanians and
Bosnians converted to Islam; see Hupchik 1994.
16. Pentecostalism among Roma has been documented by several
scholars, including Gay y Blasco 1999 and Lange 2003.
296 Notes to pages 5–9

17. For example, one Romani man born in 1930 in Skopje, Macedo-
nia, spoke Turkish, Romani, Macedonian, Serbian, and Albanian (also see
Lindemyer and Ramadonov 2004 for linguistic profiles of Bitola Roma).
See Ellis 2003 for the fluidity of languages and identities of Skopje urban
Muslims. See Victor Friedman’s work (1995, 1999, 2005) for a thorough
analysis of Balkan language interaction.
18. Todorova, discussing whether the Balkans are orientalized in ref-
erence to the rest of Europe, points out that we are not dealing with a
colonial situation (1997); nevertheless, the Balkans are posed as “other”
to Europe, and Roma are posed as “other” to the Balkans (also see Neu-
burger 2004). Ken Lee specifically extends Said’s argument to Gypsies:
“Whilst Orientalism is the discursive construction of the exotic Other out-
side Europe, Gypsylorism is the construction of the exotic Other within
Europe—Romanies are the Orientals within” (2000:132).
19. The term narodi (nations) applied to the constituent peoples of Yu-
goslavia, those who were not a majority anywhere outside Yugoslavia:
Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Montenegrins, Bosnians (Muslims), and Mace-
donians. Nardonosti (nationalities) applied to those who were national
minorities, i.e., they were majority populations outside Yugoslavia: Alba-
nians, Turks, Hungarians, and others. Etničeski grupi (ethnic groups) were
groups of distinctive people who had no nation/state outside of Yugosla-
via, such as Roma. Privileges differed by category; for example, all of the
narodnosti but not the etničeski grupi had the right to education in their
native language; funding for the arts was also better for narodnosti (K.
Brown 2000:137). Despite this schema, separatist ethnic ideologies were
not tolerated in Yugoslavia; to the contrary, they were severely punished.
20. Petrovski, an Eastern Orthodox Rom from Skopje, received his
Ph.D. in folklore in Belgrade and is employed by the Folklore Institute in
Skopje. He has a number of publications (mostly collections) on Mace-
donian Romani customs and songs (1982, 1993, 2001, 2002, 2009) and
has also been active in NGOs. Because money for publishing is so scarce
Petrovski has secured funding for his books through Romani NGOs.
21. For detailed information on these topics, see Silverman 1995a, the
World Bank Reports by Ringold 2000; Ringold, Orenstein, and Wilkins
2004; and Revenga, Ringold and Tracy 2002; and various issues of Roma
Rights, the journal of the European Roma Rights Centre (www.errc.org).
The center submitted this statement to the UN Committee on the Elimina-
tion of Racial Discrimination: “Roma remain to date the most persecuted
people of Europe. Almost everywhere, their fundamental human rights
are threatened. Disturbing cases of racist violence targeting Roma have
occurred in recent years. Discrimination against Roma in employment,
education, health care, and administrative and other services is common
in many societies. Hate speech against Roma, also prevalent, deepens the
negative stereotypes which pervade European public opinion” (ERRC
2002:5).
22. The twelve signatories are Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic,
Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania,
Bosnia and Hercegovina, and Spain; see www.romadecade.org.
23. The Macedonian census of 2002 listed 52,000 Roma, but scholars
agree the actual number is much higher (Plaut and Memedova 2005:16;
Petrovski 2009). Almost all Macedonian Roma are currently sedentary.
See Chapter 8 for an overview of the legal and cultural status of Roma in
Yugoslavia.
Notes to pages 9–11 297

24. The oldest Romani party, the Party for the Complete Emancipation
of Roma of Macedonia (PCER), led by Faik Abdi, was represented in par-
liament from 1990 to 1998; the Union of Roma, led by Amdi Bajram, was
represented in parliament from 1998 to 2000; the Democratic Progressive
Party of Roma is led by Bekir Arif; and the fourth is the United Party
of Roma in Macedonia (see Plaut and Memedova 2005; and V. Friedman
1999). These Romani parties and NGOs have little effect on the larger po-
litical landscape. Strategically, they are neutral with regard to the main
conflict of the nation: the ethnic tension between Macedonians and Alba-
nians. An important Romani leader is Neždet Mustafa; in 1992 he helped
establish Bijandipe (News), the Romani television program on the Macedo-
nian national channel. He was the first general secretary of PCER and the
leader of the United Party of Roma; he served in parliament 2006–2008,
was elected mayor of Šutka in 1996 (when it became a municipality), and
now serves in the national government as minister without portfolio for
the Decade of Romani Inclusion.
25. The 2001 Bulgarian census officially listed only 371,000 (Rechel
2008:79 and 82; Pamporovo 2009). Roma affiliate with several major parties,
including the Bulgarian Socialist Party, the United Democratic Front, and
the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF, the so-called Turkish party),
which was already in existence at the time the ban was enacted; there have
been only a few Romani representatives in government since 1989.
26. See Monitoring the EU Accession Process 2002. See also European
Union 2003.
27. See http://www.sofiaecho.com/2009/02/25/681499_us-report-high
lights-human-rights-problems-in-bulgaria, accessed June 19, 2011.
28. See http://bsanna-news.ukrinform.ua/newsitem.php?id=12811&;lang=
en, accessed June 19, 2011.
29. See http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=109779, accessed
June 19, 2011
30. When Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007, Ataka found
allies in the European parliament. It joined forces with Western Euro-
pean xenophobic and anti-immigrant parties (such as the National Front
in France) to establish the European Union platform “Identity, Tradition,
Sovereignty,” which defends “Christian values” and the “national iden-
tities of the countries.” The platform has received €1 million because it
has a sufficient number of members of parliament. In the 2009 European
Parliament elections, Ataka won two of Bulgaria’s seventeen seats.
31. Marushiakova et al. (2001) estimate that the pre-1999 war popu-
lation of Roma in Kosovo was 120,000–150,000, and that only 30,000–
35,000 remain; today there are far fewer. For accounts of Kosovo Roma,
also see the website of Voice of Roma (www.vor.org), and European Roma
Rights Centre reports at http://www.errc.org/cikk.php?cikk=2271.
32. See Castle-Kanerova 2001 and Graff 2002. Mark Landler’s New York
Times article (2004:4), for example, reported the hysteria of Germans in
reference to the “human tidal wave” of incoming Roma. In January 2007
the Los Angeles Times published an article titled “EU’s Ugly Little Chal-
lenge,” which claimed that for many Western Europeans inclusion of Ro-
mania and Bulgaria in the EU “spells the inclusion of 3 million poten-
tial problems: yet more Gypsies. . . . Yet European newspaper editors are
stumped by how they should address the largest minority on the continent.
Town mayors all over Eastern Europe often avoid the term altogether and
talk instead of ‘whitening out’ their inner cities” (McCann 2007).

33. I approximate that there are several hundred Macedonian Romani
families in New York, numbering several thousand Roma, with half of
them living in Belmont. In the last decade, more families have purchased
private homes in the Pelham Parkway neighborhood. There are also a few
families in the Philadelphia area and Roma from Struga in the Waterbury,
Connecticut, area. Some Macedonian Roma reside in St Louis among a
larger group of Bosnian Roma: http://stlouis.missouri.org/501c/gitana/
roma.htm accessed June 15, 2010.
34. Macedonian Roma may be considered post-1965 “new immigrants”
to New York, according to Foner 2001 and 2005.
35. See Lucassen 2005:143–150 for discussion of the German policy of
recruiting Turkish guest workers.
36. The literature about roles and ethics in ethnographic fieldwork is
vast; see Jackson 1987; Fluehr-Loban 2003; Lassiter 2005; Wolf 1996. For
a discussion of fieldwork dilemmas in socialist and postsocialist states, see
De Soto and Dudwick 2000.
37. This issue has been raised in the debates over representation in
Marcus and Fischer 1986; Clifford 2004; Smith 1999; for the issue in terms
of Roma, see Hancock 1997 and 2002; and Helbig 2007 and 2009.
38. My Balkan Romani fieldwork experiences until 1998 are reflexively
analyzed in Silverman 2000c and 2008a; Silverman 1996c deals with field-
work with American Kalderash.
39. The government policy of Bulgarization intended to turn all minor-
ities into proper socialists. The policy began in the 1970s with the Pomaks
and Roma and was extended in 1984–85 to the ethnic Turks, attracting
international attention; see Poulton 1991. Chapter 7 discusses this policy
in relation to Romani music and culture.
40. In the narrative of this book, all names are pseudonyms unless per-
sons involved are well-known musicians.
Chapter 2
1. One of the earliest written sources about Balkan Romani music is
found in the fifteenth-century archives of Dubrovnik (Gojković 1986:190).
2. For recent scholarly literature on East European and Balkan Romani
music, see Seeman 1990a and 1990b (also see Seeman 2000, 2002, and
2007 for Turkish Thrace); Petrovski 2002; Kovalscik 1985, 1987; Sárosi
1978; Kertesz-Wilkinson 1992; Lange 1997a, 1997b, 1999, 2003; M. Stew-
art 1989, 1997; Dimov 2001; Peycheva 1993, 1994a, 1994b, 1994c, 1995,
1998, 1999a, 1999b, 2008a, 2008b, 2008c, 2009; Peycheva and Dimov
1994, 2002, 2005; Beckerman 2001; Van de Port 1998, 1999; Gojković
1986; Vukanović 1962, 1963, 1983; Pettan 1992, 1996a, 1996b, 1996c,
2001, 2002, 2003; Jakoski 1981; Blau, Keil, Keil, and Feld 2002; Brandl
1996; Radulescu 2004; Beissinger 1991, 2001, 2005, 2007; Malvinni 2003
and 2004; Helbig 2005, 2007, 2009; Rasmussen 1991, 1995, 1996, 2002,
2007; Marian-Bălașa 2002, 2004; and the bibliographies in Silverman
2000b and Kertesz-Wilkinson 2001.
3. Reprinted in Djordjević 1984:38–39, cited in Pettan 2002:223.
4. In 1859 Franz Liszt claimed that what was called “Gypsy music”
was in fact created by Roma, not Hungarians. Hungarians were, then,
merely patrons for the Romani genius. Liszt wrote: “Hungarian songs as
they are to be found in our villages . . ., being modest and imperfect, can-
not command such respect as to be generally honored . . ., whereas the

instrumental music as it is performed and spread by Gypsy orchestras,
is capable of competition with anything in the sublimity and daring of
its emotion, as in the perfection of its form, and, we might say, the fine-
ness of its development” (quoted in Sárosi 1978:142). Critics, most notably
Bartók, countered, “What people (including Hungarians) call ‘Gypsy mu-
sic’ is not Gypsy music but Hungarian music; it is not old folk music but
a fairly recent type of Hungarian popular art music composed, practically
without exception, by Hungarians of the upper middle class. But while a
Hungarian gentleman may compose music, it is traditionally unbecoming
to his social status to perform it ‘for money’—only Gypsies are supposed
to do that” (1931[1976]:206).
Liszt erringly dismissed the rich Hungarian rural peasant repertoire
(which was collected a half-century later), romanticized about eastern
survivals among Roma, and defended Roma as creative interpreters of
urban songs. The opposite camp reproached Roma for inhibiting devel-
opment of Hungarian creativity. For example, Spur wrote that Romani
music “dammed the source of the far more valuable national folk song,
and caused it to remain hidden in the isolated life of the village. . . . Such
critics, the followers of Bartók and Kodály, turn off their radio set when-
ever a Gypsy orchestra is playing” (1947:130).
5. Note that there are female exceptions; see Chapter 10.
6. One common pitfall is attributing Indian scales to Roma with little
documentation to substantiate the claim. Some scholars assert that the Ro-
mani scale is the Bhairava scale, which they define as “a 12-note Oriental
chromatic scale” (see Acković 1989 and Fonseca 1995:106, the latter citing
Hancock). On the contrary, the Bhairava rag (a hicaz pattern from the first
degree repeated from the fifth degree) is not common in Romani music. In
addition, Hancock (2002:72, as well as Fonseca 1995) attributes stick danc-
ing among Roma in Hungary to the Romani migration from India. How-
ever, neither author accounts for the widespread performance of stick danc-
ing among non-Roma in other locations (e.g., England and South Africa).
Finally, Fonseca and Hancock attribute the vocal performance of rhythmic
syllabics found in Hungary among Roma to Indian origins; again, this genre
is also performed by non-Roma in Scotland and other locations. Indeed, it is
difficult to attribute these far-flung musical styles and genres to Romani ori-
gins. These authors stretch musical interpretations to strengthen Indian ties
(see Chapter 3). See below for further discussion of so-called Gypsy scales.
7. Bulgarian ethnomusicologist Vergilii Atanasov voiced this opinion to
me and other colleagues (Buchanan 2006:266).
8. Although I do not discuss Serbian brass bands in this book, in Chap-
ter 13 I do mention that in world music marketing Balkan music is often
assumed to be synonymous with Romani brass band music; I am now
researching this issue. See Babić 2003 and 2004 and Hedges 1996 for his-
torical information.
9. For example, in Chapter 7 I discuss the fact that Bulgarian wedding
musicians play for Bulgarians, Turks, Pomaks, and Roma. In Chapter 11
I illustrate this point with the life history of the Bulgarian wedding mu-
sician Yuri Yunakov, who added performing for Armenians, Albanians,
and Macedonian Roma to the those groups when he emigrated to New
York. Many other musicians, including non-Roma, can illustrate this
principle.
10. For example, when Ivo Papazov (see Chapter 7) incorporated the
theme from the movie The Pink Panther into his kyuchek “Pinko” in the

late 1970s, fellow musicians admired not only his whimsicality but also his
skillful execution. (Pinko was recently rerecorded on Papazov’s 2008 album
Song of the Falcon. Kyuchek is discussed in the next section of this chapter.)
Similarly, Boban Marković incorporated a theme from Mozart’s Symphony
No. 40 into his “Mundo Čoček,” and Fanfare Ciocarlia released “007” on
its 2005 CD Gili Garabdi (Hidden Songs), based on the theme from James
Bond; this album includes a version of Duke Ellington’s jazz classic “Car-
avan.” (Although the liner notes for the CD claim thousands of former Ro-
mani slaves fled Romania for the American south, living in mostly black
neighborhoods, the tie between jazz and Romani music is at best hypothet-
ical.) Bulgarian wedding musician Ivan Milev is known for his quotes from
classical and popular music; for example, his 2006 CD has quotes from
Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik and several genres of American popular
music. A game that some wedding musicians play in jam sessions is to take
a piece of classical or popular music (such as “Für Elise”) and convert it
into a kyuchek or a Bulgarian dance rhythm such as a rŭchenitsa.
11. Activist Mihail Georgiev of the Romani Baht (Romani Luck) Foun-
dation was the organizer of the CD project. When he visited my home in
1994, he expressed interest in my commercial recordings of Romani mu-
sic from the 1950s and 1960s, and I later gave him copies. He graciously
thanked me in the CD notes.
12. “The Gypsy scale” has been defined by Central European writers
as a scalar pattern with augmented seconds between the third and fourth
degrees and sixth and seventh degrees. This scale is found in early ver-
bunkos (a Hungarian recruiting dance) and is not common in the Balkans
(Silverman 2000b). Another common mistake is to attribute Indian scales
to Roma; see note 6 above.
13. The word mane refers to the Turkish and Greek vocal genre amanes,
a free-rhythm vocal improvisation using makams where the singer vocal-
izes on the word aman, a pan-Balkan expression of emotion.
14. According to Seeman, the 9/8 Roman oyun havası rhythm became
emblematic of Romani communities through Turkish marketing strat-
egies of the 1960s (2002:276, 2007). Seeman discusses the types of 9/8 in
2002:278–279. Video example 5.12 shows a line dance in 9/8.
15. The tune is taken from a well-known kyuchek, “Leski Karuchka” (His
Cart), and the text claims Barack Obama as “one of us”: “You are so cool, you’re
from our tribe. Dark-skinned brother, you’re our cousin.” See www.youtube.
com/watch?v=QXvgis02xwk, accessed February 15, 2009. Victor Friedman
reminded me of a similar connection to African Americans when Muharem
Serbezovski wrote a song in praise of Muhammad Ali several decades ago.
16. Patrons in one region often do not like the styles from another re-
gion. Papazov, for example, told me that he sometimes had a hard time
pleasing north Bulgarian patrons.
17. Currently Serbian singers such as Mile Kitić, Šaban Šaulic, Dra-
gana Mirković, and Marina Zivković are the source of many Bulgarian and
Macedonian Romani songs. A website with a partial list of Balkan covers
is www.bgpopfolk.free.fr.
18. In Chapter 6, I discuss the gendered dimensions of beauty contests.
In 2008 the first festival of brass music was organized in Kumanovo.
19. Elsie Dunin, personal communication; also see Dunin 1997.
20. In 2002, Lolov was honored with an anniversary concert produced
for Bulgarian National Television. Attention to Romani music is rare on
national television, but Lolov regularly played Bulgarian as well as Romani

music, so he retained his reputation during socialism. Todor Kolev (a fa-
mous actor) hosted the event; classical and ethnic Bulgarian clarinetist Pet-
ko Radev spoke; Petŭr Ralchev (wedding music accordionist) performed
with tŭpan accompaniment; and many other guests lauded Lolov’s musical
contributions. For a discussion of Lolov’s life, see Peycheva 1999a and 2008.
21. See Chapter 7 for discussion of prohibitions during socialism, and
how Roma sometimes resisted them. See Chapter 8 for an examination
of the Stara Zagora festival. Peycheva refers to this period as the “media
emancipation” of Roma (1995:13).
22. During this time, Romani song titles on album covers were
routinely mangled by these Bulgarian-run record companies; Nikolai
Gŭrdev’s song “So Grešingjom” (What Did I Do Wrong?), which has
the chorus Da li Panda Roveja (Do you still cry), was translated into
Bulgarian as “Golyamata Panda” (The Large Panda; also see Peycheva
1995). For a discussion of piracy and the mafia, see Dimov 2001 and
Kurkela 1997.
23. Many tavernas with Greek music opened in the early 1990s in Bulgar-
ia. Kalin Kirilov reported that many of his fellow student tambura players
in the Plovdiv Academy switched to bouzouki to find work; but since the
hand position is so different for bouzouki, some of them had a hard time
switching back to tambura to pass their examinations. See Chapter 8.
24. Using Hungarian examples, Anikó Imre discusses how Roma use
rap to create a modern Romani sensibility and to enter the pop market.
Furthermore, the representational tropes of rap tend to reinforce a ghetto
image that may promote stereotypes (2006, 2008). She writes: “The most
radical way in which global entertainment culture has mediated the post-
socialist situation of Romany minorities in eastern Europe is by turning
the ghetto, the place of the urban underclass, the very site of Romani
segregation, into the site of profitable entertainment” (2006:663). Using
the term Ludic Ghetto, Imre notes that some rappers in Hungary and the
Czech Republic artfully play with stereotypes while criticizing racism
(2006:664). Note that the Czech Romani rap band Gipsy.cz represented
the Czech Republic at Eurovision in 2009 (see Chapter 8).
25. I would like to thank Sani Rifati and Rečko Ismail for insights into
tel o vas. The oldest talava songs were sung in Albanian or Romani.
26. See the websites of the European Roma Rights Centre (www.errc.
org) and Voice of Roma (www.vor.org) for more information about the
displacement of Kosovo Roma as refugees in the aftermath of the Yu-
goslav wars and the plight of Roma who live in Kosovo. Džansever and
Ćita improvise talava in Dusseldorf for Kosovo Roma, see: www.youtube.
com/watch?v=NssFw766sJQ&;feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL accessed
January 1, 2011.
27 See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTFn3S-1vIA, accessed
December 15, 2010.
Chapter 3
1. There is, however, significant literature on the African diaspora in
music, including Gilroy 1993 and Garofalo 1994; the Caribbean musical
diaspora has been documented by Ramnarine 2007a.
2. Pnina Werbner, drawing on Brah (1996), writes: “Conventionally,
diasporas derive their imaginative unity from time-space chronotypes
of shared genesis, homelands, sacred centers and cataclysmic events of

suffering (dispersion, genocide, slavery)” (2002b:11). These “homings”
(Brah 1996) are articulated through commemorations and utopian vi-
sions. Thus ideologies of a shared past and a common destiny link dias-
pora communities (Werbner 2002b:11).
3. For example, Lemon demonstrates the patriotism of Russian Roma
(2000), Theodosiou discusses the sense of local belonging of Epirot Greek
Roma (2003), and Gay y Blasco emphasizes the Spanish emplacement of
Gitanos (2002). Contrary to Safran, many Roma believe they are or will
be accepted by their “host countries.” See Toninato 2009 for a discussion
of the tension between grassroots, scholarly and activist approaches to
diaspora.
4. Caroline Brettel reminds us that “anthropologists have worked at
both ends of the migration process, beginning in the country of origin and
asking what prompts individuals to leave particular communities, and
then what happens to them in their place of destination, including if
and how they remain connected to their places of origin” (2003:1; see
specific family trajectories in Chapters 4 and 5).
5. “Because of the fact that the very phenomenon of diaspora has pro-
duced a multiplicity of Chinese cultures, the affirmation of Chineseness
may be sustained only through recourse to a common origin or descent
that persists in spite of widely different historical trajectories, which re-
sults in the elevation of ethnicity and race over all of the other factors—
often divisive-- that have gone into the shaping of Chinese populations
and their cultures. Diasporic identity in its reification does not overcome
the racial prejudices of earlier assumptions of national cultural homo-
geneity but in many ways follows a similar logic, now at the level not of
nations but of off-ground ‘transnations’” (Dirlik 2002:97).
6. Basch, Glick Schiller, and Blanc (1997) and others have distin-
guished among (1) transnational cultural studies that focus on the growth
of global communications, media, consumerism, and public cultures; (2)
globalization, which focuses on recent configurations of space such as the
growth of global cities; and (3) transnational migration studies that ex-
amine the actual social interactions migrants construct across borders.
My work focuses on the third area. Another useful term is “transborder,”
coined by Lynn Stephen (2007) to articulate processes on both sides of the
U.S.-Mexican border.
7. In 1964 Milton Gordon wrote: “The individual who engages in fre-
quent and sustained primary contacts across ethnic group lines, partic-
ularly racial and religious, runs the risk of becoming what, in standard
sociological parlance, has been called ‘the marginal man’” (56).
8. According to Werbner (2002b:120): “The powerful attraction of di-
asporas for postcolonial theorists has been that, as transnational social
formations, diasporas challenge the hegemony and the boundedness of
the nation-state, and indeed, of any pure imaginaries of nationhood.”
9. Jonathan Friedman similarly writes: “Hybridity is founded on the
myth of purity” (1997:82–83).
10. Dirlik writes of the danger in postcolonial and postmodern writings
of focusing on identity at the expense of power. These writings focus on
language as a discursive marker for registering and reaffirming difference,
but they often fail to address broader networks of domination and exploi-
tation (2000:188).
11. See Marushiakova et al. 2001 for a discussion of why Egjupkjani and
Ashkalia in Kosovo do not employ the label Roma. See Gay y Blasco 2002

for a discussion of Gitanos and their identity labels in reference to religious
mobilization. See Okely 1997 for a discussion of the politics of labels in
the United Kingdom. Today, activists try to recruit all these groups into the
Romani human rights movement; see Boscoboinik 2006.
12. Another excellent overview of postcolonial theory in relation to mu-
sic is found in Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000.
13. Mirga and Gheorghe contrast a transnational minority that seeks
rights within a nation/state framework to a transnational minority that
seeks rights on a wider, i.e., European scale (1997). Some Romani groups,
such as the Sinti of Germany, see themselves as a legitimate historic Ger-
man minority; they reject the label Roma.
14. The International Romani Union (IRU) is a pan-Romani politi-
cal organization that has sponsored congresses every few years since
1971 (see Acton and Klimova 2001; Klimova-Alexander 2005, and Bara-
ny 2002). Its legitimacy has been called into question by some Romani
leaders. Since 2004 the European Roma and Travellers Forum (associated
with the Council of Europe; www.ertf.org) has gained a respected place in
Romani politics.
15. The few scholars who contest the Indian origin of Roma are often
treated as traitors by activists. For example, Judith Okely (1983) and Leo
Lucassen, Wim Willems, and Anna Marie Cottar (1998) suggest Gypsies
might have an indigenous tie to Western Europe. Okely’s historical claims
are much more tentative than Lucassen; nevertheless she has been vilified
by Romani and non-Romani activists (Okely 1997). From the point of view
of linguistics, there is no question that Romani is an Indic language that
separated from the rest of Indic at some point during the Middle Indic
period and therefore indisputably arrived in Europe from India (Victor
Friedman, personal communication).
16. Indian names were also popular in the 1970s among non-Roma.
According to Garth Cartwright, Bosnian singer Indira Radić’s father (a
communist party member) named her deliberately after a strong Indian
woman (personal communication). Indian music was also popular in
Greece in the 1970s. Greek covers were released of songs from Hindi films;
see Abadzi and Tasoulas 1998. In the 1990s the Bulgarian Romani band
Kristal released Maika India (Mother India [Bulgarian]), and the wedding
band Orfei released Mafia ot India (Mafia from India [Bulgarian]. Bulgar-
ian chalga singers Sofi Marinova and Azis have also used Indian motifs;
see Chapter 9.
17. Serbezovski’s disk (RTB EP 16 306) cites the tune as “Indijska Nar-
odna” (Indian folk; Serbian; arranged by B. Milivojević). Slobodan Ilić
probably made the first recording; for an Ilić remake with the older vocals,
see www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lqKhplhPNk, accessed October 20, 2009.
Ethnomusicologist Jane Sugarman tried in vain to find the original tune,
supposedly from the film Dosti (Hindi, friend, released with the English
title The Blind and the Lame). She and Svanibor Pettan concurred that B.
Milivojević wrote the song from the general sound of the Indian film score,
with lyrics based on the plot of the film (Pettan 2002:240; East European
Folklife Center listserv, November 29, 1997). The film is the story of two
poor boys, one lame, one blind. Ramo Ramo continues to be covered,
including Sasho Roman’s “Oy Sashko” in Bulgarian and Keba’s (Dragan
Kojić) “Idem Idem Dušo Moja” (I’m going, my dear; Serbian, 2004).
18. Serbezovski’s velvety vocal style captured audiences all over Yugo-
slavia. He was one of the first Yugoslav singers to adopt the practice of

making song “covers,” for example taking the Turkish song “Allah Allah”
and recording it in Serbian as “Bože Bože” (God, God; in both languages).
He currently lives in Germany and has become a writer; his early life his-
tory was published in German (Serbezovski 1995, originally Šareni Dia-
manti [Colorful Diamonds], Sarajevo 1983). In 1997, he performed at a
New Year’s party for the New York Macedonian Romani community (see
Chapter 5, photograph 5.22 and video examples 3.1 and 5.47), and in 2007
he performed in Bulgaria. His songs are still loved by the older generation
from Macedonia and Serbia.
19. The 1970s recording opens with a dazzling unaccompanied clarinet
solo by Medo Čun (see Chapter 2 for his family’s history and other perfor-
mances in video examples 10.3, 10.5, and 10.6), and the accompaniment
is a rhythmic pattern that Balkan Roma associate with India (number 3 in
Figure 2.1, discussed in Chapter 2). For Balkan Roma, pentatonic scales
have come to symbolically represent India, perhaps because there seems
to be a significant amount of pentatonicism in Indian film music. In Ra-
mayana the scale is minor and five degrees of the scale are emphasized: 1,
3, 4, 5, and 7. In other pieces titled “Indiiski” (Indian), major and mixolyd-
ian (major with a lowered seventh degree) scales predominate, often with
a pentatonic framework.
20. It has a 4/4 slow rhythm, number 5 in Figure 2.1, and is in the phry-
gian mode. Many other versions have been released.
21. Gelbart’s version is from the German CD set L’Epopee Tzigane/Road
of the Gypsies, (Network 24756, 1996). A similar version is referred to as
“the canonical text” of the International Romani Union by Marushiakova
and Popov (1995 2:13–14, 20).
22. Serbian and Macedonian versions include “Pilem Pilem” (I drank
and drank; Rromano Centar, Opre CD 002, 1995) and “Djelem Djelem”
(Kočani Orkestar, L’Orient est Rouge, Crammed Discs 1997/2006 CRAW
19), plus many YouTube versions. Šaban Bajramović recorded the song
on Mostar Sevdah Reunion (Times Square TSQCD 9029) and other al-
bums. Lyrics and mp3 files of the song can be found on the websites
http://www.reocities.com/~patrin/gelem.htm and www.unionromani.org/
gelem.htm (both accessed June 17, 2011). The version in the 1967 film
can be found at www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQD6rWRiYVk, accessed
December 13, 2009.
23. Dirlik continues: “so that it is often unclear whether the objection is
to essentialism per se or to the politics, in which case essentialism serves
as a straw target to discredit the politics” (2000:188).
Chapter 4
1. Gurbet, from Turkish, is a term and concept used in South Slavic
languages, Albanian, and Romani.
2. I owe much insight to Jasmin and Aiše, who were very open with me
in talking about the community and assessing traditional values.
3. Community members jokingly referred to her as one of “the original
Mayflower people.”
4. Being the super (superintendent) of a building means receiving free
rent in exchange for doing maintenance and repairs. Many Romani fam-
ilies (as well as other Balkan families) seek this type of arrangement. Even
middle-class families will hold on to their superintendent role to save
money on rent.

5. See Foner 2000:127–141 for a discussion of immigrant women’s work
issues in New York.
6. Revitalization of Islam needs to be seen in a larger context; similar
phenomena are happening in Macedonia and in other places in the Bal-
kans. I am currently conducting research on this topic.
7. Unlike Balkan Roma, Kalderash typically do not work alongside non-
Roma; they tend to be self-employed and marry at an earlier age (Suther-
land 1975; Gropper 1975; Silverman 1988 and 1991). However, as Gropper
and Miller point out, Kalderash also negotiate multiple identities, engag-
ing in “selective multiculturalism” (2001).
8. Occasionally they call themselves Horahane, which means Muslim in
Romani and Turkish.
9. According to Gropper and Miller, “a Rom may self-identify differ-
ently depending on the person to whom he is talking” (2001:87). I am
currently doing research on identity issues among young Roma.
10. This comment arose when I distributed to Romani consultants a
draft of my article on fieldwork with Roma (Silverman 2000c). All the
other Roma I consulted didn’t object to my using the real name of the
neighborhood. However, from ethical concerns, I use pseudonyms except
where Roma have public reputations as musicians.
11. Roma say that Americans in general are neither curious nor well
informed about European geography. Before the breakup of Yugoslavia,
many Belmont Roma told non-Romani Americans they were Yugoslavs.
But in the 1990s, Yugoslavia became a synonym for violence, Macedonia
declared independence, and thus the label Yugoslav faded. Roma some-
times strategically withhold speaking about their ethnicity and American-
ize their names: for example, Severdžan is John, Tair is Tommy, Ferhan is
Freddy; Nermin is Nancy, etc.
12. KUD stands for Kulturno Umetničko Društvo, Cultural Artistic
Group (see Chapter 6).
13. Nevertheless, there are several community members who, for vari-
ous reasons, have never married. Although homosexuality may be a factor,
it is not discussed openly, as most Roma are homophobic; on the other
hand, families do not ostracize someone even if he or she is perceived as
outside the community norms. Divorced men and women usually remarry.
14. Much of what I am describing about family and community life is not
unique to Roma and can be compared to other Balkan ethnic groups. There
is a huge cross-cultural literature on the topic of negotiation of female power;
for the Middle East, see Nelson 1974. See later in this chapter, the next chap-
ter, Sugarman 2003 and Silverman 1996b for female knowledge about ritual.
15. Leila claimed that “ninety-nine percent of the time that’s the only
objective—to get to America. And then once they come here, it becomes an
issue.” The zet in one failed Belmont marriage could not adjust to America
and became abusive to the bride’s entire family. He was sent back within
a few months, and the bride remarried a local man. On the other hand,
many marriages of this type work out well.
16. The uneasy relationship of human rights to culture has been dis-
cussed widely in the anthropological literature; see Cowan, Dembour, and
Wilson 2001; Abu-Lughod 2002; and Goodale 2006.
17. Eminova expanded her prototype virginity surveys to organizations
in Novi Sad, Serbia; and Pecs, Hungary, with successful results. In addi-
tion to tackling the issue of virginity, a goal of the project is to teach edu-
cated Romani women computer skills for future research and networking;

see http://www.advocacynet.org/resource/492, accessed June 17, 2011 and
Eminova 2005. Furthermore, the virginity issue is only one of many re-
garding female subordination that European Romani women activists are
addressing; see European Roma Rights Centre 2000, Plaut and Memedova
2005 and http://www.advocacynet.org/page/irwn, accessed June 17, 2011.
18. I am exploring this topic in my current research on youth and edu-
cation in the Romani community.
19. There is a huge literature on the domestic-public split, which
emerged as a concept in the early anthropology of women (Lamphere and
Rosaldo 1974; Lewin 2006; di Leonardo 1991). I am exploring this issue in
my current research with Romani youth.
20. See Roma Portraits (1998), a series of short documentaries by young
Bulgarian Roma, supervised by Asen Balicki. By contrast, many scholars
have noted the focus on place and religion in Native American filmmaking
(Leuthold 1998:183; Worth and Adair 1972).
Chapter 5
1. For example, in his memoir, Serbezovski recounts his circumcision
celebration in Topana, Skopje, in the 1950s, where the absence of his
father (who had abandoned the family for a mistress) almost ruined the
event. His uncle filled the role of his father, but emotions were noticeable
and raw (1995). Similarly, at a New York wedding there was almost a
fight between the in-laws because of an old schism. At another wedding,
a female guest was upset with the order in which families were called
up to lead dance lines (see Chapter 6); to protest, she did not attend the
blaga rakija.
2. Creative solutions are devised to save money on celebrations. Rel-
atives who are musicians may be asked to play, and they often perform
just for tips. Sometimes ceremonies are combined; a wedding in 1990 in
Šutka, described later, was deliberately combined with a circumcision.
The contracted musicians charged a combined fee, and the costumes (and
even the meals) did double duty.
3. In the Bulgarian language there is a proverb that states “the Gypsy
will throw all his money for a wedding and the next day he will not be able
to buy bread for his children” (Marushiakova and Popov 1997:149).
4. Roma Portraits is the outcome of a 1997 video workshop in Sliven,
Bulgaria, where Balicki trained young Roma to film subjects of interest to
them in Romani communities.
5. Her precarious and transitional status is manifested in the myriad
ways she is protected from the evil eye; for similarities to ethnic Macedo-
nian weddings, see Silverman and Wixman 1983.
6. See Petrovski 2001 and 2002:18–20 for a discussion of songs texts.
There is, of course, a distinction between the numerous songs that de-
scribe weddings and the few songs which are sung at weddings for ritual
purposes, such as Oj Borije see below.
7. The role of Roma in keeping rituals active (or even newly adopting
them when they have died out) among the majority populations has been
noted by several scholars (see, e.g., Popov 1993). Sugarman (1997) docu-
mented multiday weddings among Prespa Albanian Macedonians in the
early 1990s, but currently they have shorter weddings.
8. The literature on Balkan weddings includes Sugarman 1997; Ivanova
1984; and Kligman 1988.

9. For a description of Macedonian Romani weddings, see Petrovski
1993 and 2002; Dunin 1971 and 1984; Seeman 1990b; and the Macedo-
nian television film “Romska Svadba” (1992; see next note). For Bulgarian
Romani weddings see I. Georgieva 1966 and Marushiakova and Popov
1997:144–150.
10. Amdi Bajram, the founder of the textile factory Šuteks in Šutka, was
a Romani representative to the national parliament during the 1990s. Be-
cause he was well known and wealthy, his son’s 1992 wedding, which had
hundreds of guests, was filmed for Macedonian television and broadcast
as “Romska Svadba.” Gjulizar Dželjadin, a respected family friend, nar-
rated the wedding for the film; I interviewed her several times about ritual.
11. Gjulizar is referring to Kalderash Roma who practice the custom of
brideprice, that is, the groom’s family paying the bride’s family a sum of sev-
eral thousands of dollars. It is probable that the brideprice was once wide-
spread among many groups of Roma but has survived only among the Kal-
derash (Marushiakova and Popov 1997:144). Most groups still have at least
a symbolic buying (or bargaining) for the bride; see later discussion in this
chapter. See Sutherland (1975) for brideprice among American Kalderash;
Marushiakova and Popov 1997:144 for Bulgarian brideprice customs; and
Brunwasser 2011 for a description of a Kalajdži bride fair in Stara Zagora,
Bulgaria. Among Bulgarian Kalajdži the current average brideprice is $5,000.
In the United States among Kalderash the price for a virgin can reach $10,000.
12. The days of the week are sometimes modified (e.g., henna cere-
mony starting on Thursday), but the sequence of the events remains the
same in Macedonia; however, in New York, the sequence often changes
(see below).
13. Henna is used throughout the Middle East and South Asia in Mus-
lim and Hindu communities. Unlike in South Asia, where it is applied in
intricate designs, in the Balkans it is smeared on the hands and feet of
women merely for the color. In Macedonia and Bulgaria, henna is associ-
ated with Muslims, but in many parts of Greece henna is used in Eastern
Orthodox weddings.
14. Michelle Rosaldo’s classic article, which explains female subor-
dination as a result of the domestic-public split, claims that women are
identified with the domestic sphere (defined as the sphere of mothers and
children) and men with the public, leading to hierarchy (1974). This ar-
gument has been challenged by scholars for many reasons, for example
regarding slippage between domestic and private (MacCormack and
Strathern 1980; Ortner 1996). The domestic, rather than being marginal
and excluded from politics, is the site of important decision making
regarding family budgets, marriage choices for children, and reputations.
As for gender geography, the spatial segregation during celebrations has
been described in terms of the “inside” women’s world and the “outside”
men’s world. This concept of space is shared with non-Romani Muslims
of the region (Sugarman 1997), but it must be noted that the inside female
world spills out into public space during rituals (Silverman 2003).
15. According to zurla player Muzafer Mahmud (see the next note),
there was a special melody (alaj, procession) for getting the bride, but it
declined in Skopje around 1960. In 1990, Mahmud only knew three ritual
melodies, one for the kana and two for waking up the boy the morning
after his circumcision.
16. Muzafer Mahmud was the resident zurla player at Radio Skopje
from the early 1970s and made dozens of recordings. At his daughter’s

henna ceremony, his brother, cousin, and brother’s grandson played. He
comes from a long line of zurla and tapan players. In Šutka there are
about ten families of performers. For comparative information about
Greek Macedonia, see Blau et al. 2002; for Bulgaria, see Peycheva and
Dimov 2002.
17. After her wedding, Ramisa ended up living around the corner from
her parents. For Romanian comparisons of how the bride is made to cry,
see Kligman 1988.
18. See Dunin 1971 for a description of this ceremony in an old com-
munal bathhouse.
19. In the 1980s in Macedonia, women started using hairdressers as a
status symbol. In the 1990s upswept hairstyles were common, with white
flowers and beads interwoven in the hair. Romani women patronized cer-
tain hairstylists who knew how to design these styles. Before styling, a
woman had to put on her white underblouse (worn under the jacket of her
šalvari) because the volume of the hairstyle would not allow the under-
blouse to be slipped over the head.
20. In the Balkans, written invitations are rarely used; rather, sponsor-
ing families invite people face-to-face with formulaic language by visiting
their homes. See later discussion for contrast to American weddings.
21. The bajraktar role is common in Skopje but not in Prilep. It seems
to be more prevalent among the Džambazi subgroup of Roma than among
other groups. The bajraktar is a very well-respected, trusted male member
of the community, and his whole family is treated royally during the wed-
ding both by the groom’s and the bride’s sides. He and his family give and
receive lavish gifts. In fact, many of the gifts he receives (such as shirts)
are pinned to the flag itself. The flag is decorated with fruit on the end
of its pole, greenery, and red ribbons. At a double wedding I attended in
Šutka in 1994, there were two bajraktari, one with the Macedonian flag
and one with the Romani flag, signifying two levels of identity. Accord-
ing to Gjulizar Dželjadin: “He has to be from a good family, married only
once.” According to Aiše, the flag is so important that “if it falls to the
ground, you have to sacrifice an animal immediately”; Aiše also explained
that “the bride’s family tried to steal it, so it must be guarded!”
22. Temana is a Turkish term for a symbolic hand gesture indicating
respect. See Ellis 2003:128.
23. In the early 1990s in Bulgaria, it was fashionable among wealthy
Macedonians, Turks, and Roma to rent a helicopter to transport the bride.
24. The mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationship is the most im-
portant and most precarious in the time period after the wedding. The
bride is subordinate to her mother-in-law as well as to the males of her
new family. She has to get along with her mother-in-law, who may be very
demanding. On the other hand, the mother-in-law may be her greatest ally,
even against the males of the family. See Sugarman 1997, Kligman 1988,
and Ellis 2003 for analyses of Prespa Albanian, Romanian, and Turkish/
Albanian urban Macedonian female-to-female relationships, respectively.
25. Džumaluk comes from Cuma, which is the Turkish word for Friday.
According to Seeman, before World War II the taking of the bride occurred
on Thursday and the džumaluk occurred on Friday (1990b:42).
26. Interestingly, Kalderash Roma in the United States hold their
weddings midweek and still get large attendance. One reason Kalderash
have weddings midweek is that they do not plan them far in advance;
banquet halls are simply not available on weekends at the last minute.

Kalderash can attend midweek because they tend to be self-employed
and thus have more control over their schedule. Also, because their chil-
dren are less integrated into the school system, they have no qualms
about keeping a child out of school for several days because of a wed-
ding. This is not true for Macedonian Roma, for whom school is often
very important (see Chapter 4).
27. The parents of the groom entered first, followed by the parents of
the bride, followed by close relatives.
28. The event typically begins with the mother of the bride leading the
dance line with the decorated bottle of rakija.
29. The family does not speak Romani; rather, they speak Turk-
ish and Macedonian in addition to their primary language, Albanian.
In fact, they do not refer to themselves as Roma, but everyone else in
the community accepts them as Roma, and they are intermarried with
Roma. For a 2010 release of Ramiz’s sons’ band, see www.youtube.com/
watch?v=uykObURJNns, accessed January 1, 2011.
30. See Leibman 1974 and Sugarman 1997 for a discussion of the Pre-
spa song, instrumental, and dance repertoire.
31. Ilhan is referring to violent incidents that occurred in the 1990s in
New York night clubs, where Bosnian Muslims, Albanians, and Serbs con-
gregated. I witnessed several such fights at these clubs.
32. Severdžan’s wife also loves to dance. The whole family, including
the parents and both brothers’ children, were invited to teach at a week-
end dance workshop for Americans in Maryland. Yuri Yunakov and Seido
Salifoski were among the invited musicians. In Chapter 4, I discussed
how the two brothers tried unsuccessfully to organize a dance group with
Roma from Belmont.
Chapter 6
1. Portions of this chapter are reprinted from Silverman 2008b with
permission from McFarland & Company Inc.
2. Community members refer to dances by names that are not stan-
dardized. When a leader requests a song or dance, there is sometimes mis-
communication, and the leader might refuse to dance until the musicians
play the “right” melody. From the point of view of musicians, this can be
very frustrating because they sometimes have to guess several times what
the leader wants.
3. Mahala means neighborhood in Turkish and the Balkan languages, but
its use implies that it is a low-class Turkish or Romani neighborhood. Manele,
from the Turkish amane, means an instrumental or a vocal free-rhythm im-
provisation. These terms are also used for the accompanying music, which
may also be referred to as musică orientală (oriental music); see Chapter 9.
4. The film Iag Bari: Brass on Fire (by Ralf Marschalleck, HS Media
Consult, 2002) features several performances with these female dancers.
5. Markovic’s Vranje suite (by Ensemble Djido, Bogatić, Serbia) can
be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpiDsHdxKt8&;feature=related,
accessed December 12, 2010. The poster remarks: “Boiling Gypsies temper-
ament with the accompaniment of tambourine and drums contribute to the
value of this spectacle (sic).” Kolo introduced a new Vranje choreography
in the 1990s, but it retains many of the stereotypical movements (see www.
youtube.com/watch?v=gKp8PbTR5hQ&;feature=related accessed Decem-
ber 11, 2010) (Alexander Markovic, personal communication).

6. Sugarman recalled a regional dance competition in the early 1980s
where an amateur Romani group from Kumanovo performed, ending
their choreography with a mock drunken fight. Neither the performers
nor the jury nor the folklorists seemed concerned that thus was “feeding a
negative stereotype” (Sugarman, personal communication).
7. See Hancock 2008 and Hasdeu 2008 for discussion of how the female
Gypsy body is portrayed in museums and literature.
8. For example, the Bulgarian Romani wedding band Trŭstenik’s 1990s
cassettes are titled Gol Kyuchek (Naked Kyuchek) 1 and 2 and feature
bare-breasted women.
9. See as examples the videos MP 31003: Volim Te/U Zemlji Baro-Than
(I Love You/In the Great Land [refers to India; Serbian/ Romani]) and
MP 31005 Romano Horo/Čhaje Šukarije (Romani Dance/Beautiful Girl). In
Chapter 10, I discuss Esma’s video collaboration with Toše Poeski, which
features stereotypical dance scenes.
10. Sonneman reports that Roma sometimes defend romantic images
of themselves because they elicit sympathy from non-Roma (1999:129).
11. I would like to thank Lozanka Peycheva for updating me on this
phenomenon (personal communication). Clips from the 2007 Stara Za-
gora festival, including dance groups, are often aired on the Sofia cable
television station Gypsy TV (www.gypsytv.tv).
12. See Helbig 2005, 2007, 2008, and 2009 for discussion of the role of
Romani NGOs in music activism in Ukraine.
Chapter 7
1. Some ideas in this chapter and the next were first presented at the
conference Cultural Circulations, at the Ohio State University, 2005. I
would like to thank the participants, especially Amy Shuman, for their
comments. Some concepts were further developed in Silverman 2007a
(reprinted with permission from the publisher).
2. See Chapter 11 for a discussion of how and why Yuri Yunakov
changed his name.
3. Although not widespread, there were some notable instances of resis-
tance among Pomaks, for example, in the village of Ribnovo in the Pirin
region.
4. Of course, the teaching and practice of the Qur’an was prohibited, as
was the teaching of Eastern Orthodoxy, the majority religion; however, the
ban against Islam was enforced more severely. For example, there were
virtually no working mosques in villages, whereas there were a few work-
ing Eastern Orthodox churches in villages and quite a few in towns.
5. Verdery (1996) and Gal and Kligman (2000a and b) have written ex-
tensively about the private-public dichotomy in socialist societies.
6. Tsiganski Pesni (Gypsy Songs) BHA 11087 omits the Romani titles of
songs; rather, songs are translated (often mistranslated) into Bulgarian. The
same policy applied to Turkish music. Other early 1980s Balkanton releases
of Romani music include Tsiganski Pesni, BHA 10183; Ivo Barev /Asiba
Kemalova: Tsiganski Pesni, BHA 10645; Ibro Lolov: Tsiganski Pesni, BHA
10890. These albums often featured famous wedding musicians.
7. This celebration (izprashtane na voinik) is sponsored by the parents
of the soldier and can be as elaborate as a wedding.
8. See N. Kaufman 1989; D. Kaufman 1990; Buchanan 1991:522–529.
Non-Roma also played a major role in the history of wedding music. For

example, Atanas Milev, the father of Ivan Milev, was one of the founders of
the influential band Pŭrvomayskata Grupa (May First Group, referring to
the town named after International Workers’ Day). I would like to thank
Ivan Milev for many fruitful discussions about the history of wedding music.
9. In the 1970s there were often two accordions and no bass guitar; the
bass was introduced a few years later. The drum set is sometimes modified
to include bongos or indiyanki (roto-toms).
10. Ironically, tambura is a traditional village instrument only in the
Pirin region. It was physically modified to become a chordal instrument
and accepted into the canon of national traditional instruments by the
ensembles in the 1960s (Buchanan 2006:151).
11. Pravo horo is in 2/4 meter (often 3+3), rŭchenitsa is in 7/8 meter
(2+2+3), paidushko is in 5/16 meter (2+3), and krivo horo is in 11/16 me-
ter (2+2+3+2+2). Another common rhythm is 7/8 (3+2+2), identified with
Macedonia and Pirin (see rhythm number 10 in Figure 2.1).
12. Nikolai Kaufman observed, “The most important feature of this mu-
sical genre is improvisation. . . . Different from folk orchestras composed of
traditional instruments which strictly play pieces of composed multi-part
music, the groups . . . play more freely, often without knowing how long a
piece will take, how it will be built, who will solo—how it was at the dance
(horo)” (1987:79). Here Kaufman favorably compares the spirit of the
wedding bands to the spirit of the horo, the traditional village dance event,
where dancers and musicians communicated constantly; he distinguishes
it from the more formal, stilted, and formulaic atmosphere of ensemble
music. See Buchanan 1991 and 2006 for thorough discussion of ensemble
style, and Rice 1994 and 1996 for comparison of wedding, ensemble, and
village styles. Indeed, wedding music shares many characteristics with the
horo: it is village-based, is open-ended in terms of length (with some horos
lasting four to five hours), and thrives on dancer reaction. Todor Todo-
rov, for example, describes Bulgarian accordionist Ivan Milev as an “artist
who grasps the audience and leads them to react violently to every one of
his gestures” (1986:7). There is, then, a great deal of performer-audience
interaction in wedding music, and both dancers and listeners alike are en-
ergized, especially when the musicians improvise. In comparing weddings
to concerts, clarinetist Ivo Papazov stated: “In truth, a wedding is equal
to a dozen concerts. There a person can create. . . . A great deal of music
is introduced into a wedding, and in a concert you lack this thrill.” Saxo-
phonist Yuri Yunakov concurred: “You can’t compare a wedding with any
other performance. At weddings people have gathered for joy, they know
each other. On the concert stage it is more like an examination.”
13. The full version is at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_FgpZ87R_M,
accessed January 2, 2011.
14. Papazov is known as Ibryam by most fans; other wedding musicians
are also known by their first names or nicknames (which are sometimes
based on their village or town).
15. Art Pepper is an American jazz saxophone player of the bebop era.
Alan Stivell is a harpist who played a large role in the Celtic revival. Joan
Baez is a prominent singer in the folk revival.
16. This act of contagious magic, whether accidental or purposeful,
bonded him to the instrument. If this incident ever happened, however,
the thread could have been from a zurna, not a clarinet, since his father
played both. Ivo also related that when a male child was born, the parents
put a clarinet in the cradle, also illustrating contagious magic.

17. This quote is taken from the BBC (British Broadcasting Corpora-
tion) Bulgarian web site www.bbc.co.uk/bulgarian/news/story/2005/03/
printable/050306_papazovbbc.shtml, accessed March 10, 2008.
18. See biographies of wedding musicians in Bakalov 1992, 1993, 1998;
and Peycheva 1999. Note that Ivo’s wife, Maria Karafezieva, is a well-
known performer of the Bulgarian vocal repertoire of wedding music.
19. See the full version at www.youtube.com/watch?v=leA_UQ6GJUI&;
feature=related accessed January 2, 2011.
20. Gaida player Maria Stoyanova is an exception to this pattern. See
Rice 1994:268–271; also see Chapters 6 and 10.
21. In 1985, Trakiya charged 1,300 leva for a one-night soldier send-off
party. Also see N. Kaufman 1989.
22. In the 1980s the category of wedding musician was somewhat mot-
ley, including hundreds of lesser-known performers of doubtful ability.
These imitators contributed to the mass phenomenon by disseminating
the core repertoire.
23. This sometimes causes conflict, for at the end of a wedding there are
often drunken men demanding “one more song.”
24. In the western Thracian area around Plovdiv and Pŭrvomai, a dec-
orated box is used to collect tips. If the collected amount is less than the
agreed sum, the sponsors pay the musicians the difference; if it is more,
the musicians keep the difference.
25. The label was used by the socialist government for wealthy families
who resisted collectivization of land.
26. For example, Popularni Trakiiski Klarinetisti (BHA 11188, Popular
Thracian Clarinetists) includes Petko Radev, Nikola Iliev, Nikola Yankov, Hari
Asenov, Ibryam Hapazov, and Yashko Argirov; the first three are Bulgarians,
and the last three are Roma (although no ethnicity is revealed on the album).
27. Arrangers are indeed paid per arrangement; see Buchanan 2006 for
a full discussion of obrabotki.
28. The first studio was established in 1980 in Plovdiv. By the mid-1980s
every major city had one or several studios.
29. The proprietors of the studios often traveled to events to record,
sometimes plugging into the amplification equipment and paying the
musicians a modest state-set fee. Many fans also recorded at events, but
musicians received no compensation. Proprietors were state employees
who worked on a percentage system, which in 1985 was 50 percent. In
one Sliven studio, the average monthly intake in 1985 was 1,000 leva,
which means the proprietor received 500 leva or $250. He boasted he had
even made 900 leva, or $450 a month, occasionally. This proprietor was a
Romani drummer who gave up wedding work because studio work was
easier. Thus the world of the studios and the world of wedding musicians
intersected; the proprietors were often extremely knowledgeable about
wedding music, and they had their fingers on the pulse of popular taste.
Chapter 8
1. The Plovdiv Folk Jazz Band, composed of jazz musicians, had a style
much closer to jazz than to folk or wedding music, For connections be-
tween folk and jazz, see Levy 2009.)
2. This sentiment is still current in Bulgaria. Later in this chapter I dis-
cuss the 2005 controversy about Romani singer Sofi Marinova’s role in the
competition leading to Eurovision.

3. The 1994 festival cost 1 million leva ($17,000), and prizes were ap-
proximately $30 each, equivalent to about two weeks’ salary in a factory.
The Haskovo regional government contributed one-quarter of the 1994
festival funding, but the rest had to be raised from private firms. In 1994
there were 40,000 audience members, but by 1996 there were only 4,000.
In 1996, for the first time, Bulgarian television and radio did not broadcast
the event; they demanded a huge subsidy from the sponsors to defray their
expenses, and when the sponsors refused they did not attend. The spon-
sors had a hard time raising even the prize funds. After 1996 the festival
was abandoned.
4. Ivo composed “Celeste” earlier and named it after a popular televi-
sion series. It was later recorded on the album Panair/Fairground (2003);
see later discussion.
5. Trakiya Folk was held in 1994 (Dimitrovgrad), 1995 (Haskovo), 1999
(Stara Zagora), 2000 (Stara Zagora), and 2003 (Plovdiv).
6. There is am emerging literature on nostalgia for socialism; see
Berdahl 1999.
7. I will deal with Trakiya in detail because its trajectory is unique.
Some wedding performers have become active in the growing Romani
music scene and in the chalga scene. Others have been featured as guests
in international Romani productions; Yashko Argirov and Slavcho Lam-
bov, for example, appeared in the Hungarian production Gypsy Spirit,
which toured Europe and North America (see Chapters 6 and 12). Filip
Simeonov appeared with the Romanian group Taraf de Haidouks and re-
corded with them on the album Band of Gypsies (Nonesuch; see Chapter
13). Note that there are newer wedding bands that command solid reputa-
tions, such as Orkestŭr Plovdiv and Folk Palitra (folk palette, Bulgarian).
8. As early as the 1980s Kanarite were known as a “well-behaved band.”
According to Rice, Stoev insisted that members arrive on time, wear iden-
tical white jackets, and refrain from smoking and drinking on the job. In
1988, their Romani clarinetist Nesho Neshev complained to Rice about
how reserved the music was (Rice 1994:246).
9. See full version at www.youtube.com/watch?v=74NS_VpYbZs&;
feature=related, accessed January 2, 2011.
10. In the Iraq war, Bulgaria was known as a staunch ally of the United
States.
11. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMEFyAk6Y-0, accessed January 2,
2011.
12. Another type of Romani festival is emerging in the United States
with the work of the NGO Voice of Roma (www.voiceofroma.com); their
Herdeljezi festival is run by both Roma and non-Roma and tries to com-
bine education and entertainment. The lack of an organized Romani com-
munity in the United States has been an impediment to connecting with
and attracting more Roma. On the other hand, the festival has received
state and national grant funding for its pioneering efforts to bring the cul-
ture of an invisible minority to the attention of the American public.
13. Despite the official rhetoric, kyuchek is the main dance genre found
on stage and off stage at the Stara Zagora festival. See Chapter 6 for a
discussion of kyuchek, and video example 2.5 for the music and dance at
the festival.
14. Jury members have included, for example in 2007, Romani singers
Nikolai Gŭrdev, Ivo Barev, and Sasho Roman along with Bulgarian folk-
lorist Lozanka Peycheva, as well as Malikov.

15. The Elit Center is associated with the chitalishte (reading room or
cultural center) of the Krasna Polyana district. Recent activities have in-
cluded shows for the holiday of Christmas and Vasilitsa (St. Basil’s Day, a
Romani holiday after New Year’s), dances, and political speeches. These
activities have been led by Sali Ibrahim, a Romani poet who directs the
center. The center also sponsored Romane: International Magazine for Ro-
mani Culture, Literature, and Art, whose first issue appeared in 2005. See
www.chitalishteelit.piczo.com.
16. On the other hand, scholarly study now includes the culture, mu-
sic, and history of Roma and other ethnic groups. Pioneering Bulgarian
scholars writing on Roma include Lozanka Peycheva, Ventsislav Dimov,
Antonina Zhelyaskova, Ilona Tomova, Elena Marushiakova, Vesselin Pop-
ov, Rosemary Statelova, Claire Levy, Ivalyo Ditchev, Alexey Pamporovo,
etc. (see Valtchinova 2004 and Silverman 2008a).
17. In 2001, when an American visitor asked Prof. Slavchev of the Acad-
emy of Musical Arts in Plovdiv if the musics of Jews, Roma, Turks, and
other minorities were included in the curriculum, he said no, but there
were restaurants in town where one could hear these musics (Henry Gold-
berg, personal communication). For the past several years, a summer pro-
gram for foreigners has been organized at the Plovdiv Academy (www.
folkseminarplovdiv.net). Instruction on clarinet, violin, and accordion is
featured in this program; however, it is not officially part of the regular
curriculum. It is ironic that the rubric “folk music” includes these instru-
ments for foreigners but not for Bulgarians.
18. There are some exceptions: at a 2005 concert celebrating European
accession, students from the Shiroka Lŭka High School performed one
wedding song; the rest of their program included solo and arranged village
music. A new folk dance curriculum track has been introduced in Shiroka
Lŭka, but this too excludes Romani and Turkish dance.
19. Note the contrast between the place of Romani music and the place
of Pomak music in contemporary folk festivals. Unlike Romani music, Po-
mak music is now embraced at festivals and draws enthusiastic audiences.
Pomaks now wear their Muslim costumes freely and sing texts that include
Muslim names and references to Muslim celebrations. Why the difference
between Romani and Pomak music? Pomaks are Bulgarian-speaking, and
thus, their folklore is configured by scholars as purely Bulgarian with a
Muslim overlay. Thus it can be embraced in the domain of folk. But note
that when Pomaks do perform, their ethnic label is neither announced
nor printed in written programs (Ditchev 2004). The label Pomak has be-
come a contested term; Bulgarian Muslim (Bulgaro-mohamedanin) is pre-
ferred. Although the rise of Pomak ethnic consciousness is not the topic
of this book, I note that escalation of Pomak Muslim religious identity
receives financial support from countries such as Libya and Saudi Ara-
bia (for mosque building, teaching of Arabic language, and distribution of
Qur’ans; see Ghodsee 2009). Whereas rich Muslim nations have an inter-
est in the Pomaks and Turks of Bulgaria as potential allies, they have less
interest in Roma. Pentecostals, however, are interested in Roma.
20. Ditchev is referring to an innovative Romani educational integra-
tion project initiated by the NGO Drom in Vidin and funded by the Open
Society Institute. Integrated educational projects now operate in several
locations around the country.
21. The July 2006 training was supported by the Democracy Commission
Small Grants program of the American Embassy. The participants were

exposed to Romani culture and folklore; an additional aim of the seminar
was also to stimulate teachers to diversify their way of teaching and more
actively engage both children and parents. The teachers dedicated a day
of the week to the culture of each ethnicity and invited parents to present,
see www.amalipe.com/index.php?nav=projects&;id=8&lang=2, accessed
June 18, 2011. Textbooks were prepared for the classes, e.g., Stories from
the Fireplace (for grades two through four) and Roads Retold (for grades
five through eight), although the Bulgarian Ministry delayed in disbursing
the necessary funds for their distribution. The folklore texts are organized
according to classic generic categories such as fairy tales, calendrical and
family feasts, and song texts, attributed to various groups of Bulgarian
Roma. The books tend to treat folklore as a collection of items to be classi-
fied and categorized. In reality, Romani scholars and Roma alike agree that
Roma in Bulgaria cannot be divided into neat groups (Marushiakova and
Popov 2001). In addition, Romani folklore items are compared to Slavic
Bulgarian variants and West European variants such as those from the
Grimm brothers. I suggest this framework seeks to legitimize Romani folk-
lore by showing that its structural features are similar to Bulgarian folklore.
In spite of these small caveats, this project is a welcome sign of support of
Romani folklore by the state.
22. Note that this designation is accompanied by a monetary award
plus international prestige. See www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.
php?pg=00103, accessed June 10, 2010.
23. These Albanian-speaking Roma refer to themselves as Egjupci or Egj-
upkjani (Egyptians); see Chapter 1. Historically they are Roma who moved
up the social scale by adopting the Albanian language and distancing them-
selves from the stigmatized label Roma. In a 1955 film of the wedding, these
Romani musicians are featured prominently; see www.europafilmtreasures.
eu/PY/262/see-the-film-galichnik_wedding, accessed October 25, 2010.
24. Note that the descriptive part of the application is based on Kličkova
and Georgieva’s 1951/1996 study, which also minimizes the role of Roma.
25. Compare this to Giguère’s research, which deals with Spain’s unsuccess-
ful 2005 application to UNESCO to have Flamenco declared a Masterpiece of
Intangible Cultural Heritage. She found that the ownership of Flamenco was
contested and that the role of Gitanos was minimized (2008).
26. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfXNtcNG2SE, accessed
December 15, 2010.
27. Trifonov’s impact on Bulgarian cultural life is considerable. His show
is watched by Bulgarian émigrés, by Macedonians and Serbs. He not only
is a singer, song writer and arranger, but he produces concerts, tours, a re-
ality TV show, and contests for talented singers. He is acutely aware of and
promotes ethnic diversity in Bulgaria and is closely tied to Bulgarian folk
music, wedding music, and Romani music. One of his projects was a tele-
vised dance contest (Dance with Me) in which one category of competition,
Oriental Dance, included Gypsy Dance, Belly Dance, North Indian Dance,
Arabic dance, and several more. The grand prize was a red Ferrari, and in
February 2007 it was won by a Romani dancer. See www.slavishow.com.
28. Some writers said Sofi and Slavi looked static, like statues, and
didn’t dare hold hands; many others wrote racist comments on internet
forums and in YouTube commentaries. Activist organizations responded;
the NGO Romani Baht (Romani Luck) in Sofia called on public officials to
denounce the anti-Romani backlash.

29. The votes were tallied by cell phone; Slavi accused the producers
of the winning group, Kaffe, of purchasing 50,000 leva worth of SIM
cards and distributing them to people who voted for Kaffe (see Standart
February 15, 2005).
30. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvHF8SK6dHY, accessed March 20,
2010.
31. However, by June 2008 the Roman Star music contest, devoted
exclusively to Roma, was launched in Turkey; see www.medyakafe.com/
haber.php?haber_id=6366, accessed July 20, 2008.
32. I would like to thank Nick Nasev for this information; also see www.
zvezdegranda.com accessed June 15, 2010.
33. This was a nonmusical ambassadorial post. See www.romea.cz/eng-
lish/imdex.php?id=detail+detail+2007_517, accessed October 30, 2007.
Chapter 9
1. Audiences for chalga shows have reached 27,000 fans, for example,
at the 2006 Planeta Prima show in Varna. Some authors use pop/folk as
a broad category under which they place wedding music, pop music,
chalga, and other contemporary fusions (Buchanan 2007; Dimov 1995).
Several authors emphasize the continuity of chalga from the nineteenth
century (D. Kaufman 1995; Levy 2002; Vŭlchinova-Chendova 2000). The
scholarly literature on chalga is quite extensive, encompassing works in
Bulgarian (Dimov 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2001; Peycheva 1995,
1999a, 1999b; Peycheva and Dimov 1994; Kraev 1999; Ivanova 2001) and
in English (Rice 2002; Statelova 2005; Levy 2002; Kurkela 1997 and 2007;
Apostolov 2008; and Buchanan 2007). There are also hundreds of Bul-
garian newspaper articles, some scholarly, some journalistic, and some
merely descriptive. See bibliographies in Dimov 2001 (the definitive book
of its era) and Statelova 2005.
2. For a discussion of arabesk as a controversial genre in Turkey, see
Stokes 1992 and 2003.
3. These festivals started in the early 1990s; see Buchanan 1999, 2006,
and 2007:436-452.
4. As mentioned in Chapter 2, čalgija in Macedonia refers to improvi-
sational urban Turkish-influenced music that was prominent until World
War II and performed mainly by Roma. In Bulgaria at the end of the nine-
teenth century the word chalgadzhii meant professional urban musicians
(mostly Roma) who performed the repertoires of various ethnic groups in
both urban and rural settings (Vŭlchinova-Chendova 2000). By the 1970s
it referred to wedding musicians who could improvise. Peycheva writes
that “among Romani musicians, chalga is used to mean our music, free,
virtuosic, impressive, masterful, celebratory, beautiful” (1999b: 64). Ac-
cording to Seeman, professional wedding Romani musicians in Turkey
call themselves çalgici (2002:264–266).
5. Bulgarians code Turks as more religious Muslims than Roma (only
half of whom are Muslim). Some Bulgarians believe that Turks are fanat-
ical Muslims, and are thus conservative in dress, dance, and treatment of
women. The xenophobic Attack party reflects these racist views (see later
discussion; Cohen 2005; and Kanev 2005).
6. All album and song titles in this chapter are in Bulgarian unless
otherwise noted.

7. Toni Dacheva is a member of an Eastern Orthodox Romani group
known as sivi gŭlŭbi (grey doves; Bulgarian; Marushiakova and Popov
1997:96); Slavka Kalcheva and Nedyalka Keranova are also alleged to be
from this group.
8. Remember, however, that just as chalga looks toward MTV for
models, MTV has also looked to world music for new ideas.
9. Other Romani male singers such as Valentin Valdes and Kondyo
were popular in the 1990s. In 2005 Kondyo was arrested for sex-trafficking
offenses and sentenced to three years in prison; after prison, his career
continued. Newer male Romani singers are Erik and Iliyan.
10. They may constitute a marked form of in-group communication for
those who can understand the multiple languages. This would privilege
Roma and Turks over Bulgarians, inverting the usual power hierarchy.
Linguist Traci Lindsey at the University of California, Berkeley, is doing
research on this topic. Also see Azis and Sofi Marinova’s duet, discussed
in this chapter.
11. In fact, the chalga production company Payner also runs a cosmetic
surgery business. Along with commercialization of the female body is the
expectation of sexual services with many female jobs. Some women desire
to become high-class prostitutes, secretaries report harassment at work,
and some chalga stars provide sexual services for money. The image of the
mutresa (well-kept woman) is rampant in the media; see Ranova 2006. In
2007 it was common on unmoderated websites (for example, those asso-
ciated with the mainstream newspaper Standart) for recruiters to commu-
nicate openly with sex workers about services they offered.
12. See www.bg-fen.com and www.chalgatube.com for chalga gossip,
news, music reviews, and interactive discussions.
13. In 2004 Matt Pointon wrote in a British travel magazine: “Listen
not to the intelligent and educated Bulgarians who deride this peasant/
Tsigani/stupid form of entertainment. Instead gather some friends, a fine
carafe of rakiya, a mouth-watering salad and turn up the CD player. Get up
on your table, click your fingers, move every part of your body, feel proud
of that beer belly and then kiss the person next to you, be it a scantily-clad,
bad-perm-sporting young maiden, or an overweight, transvestite Gypsy.
It’s a pleasure that’s divine and one that can only be had in Bulgaria,” See
http://travelmag.co.uk/?p=611, accessed June 19, 2011.
14. In Las Vegas in 2005 for example, Gloria performed lip synching to
her own CD. There was no live music, and the show was basically a visual
spectacle. In 2006 in Chicago, Azis performed several songs live to a sold-
out crowd. In 2010 I heard Poli Paskova in Portland, Oregon, singing live
for four hours to her CDs (karaoke style).
15. Exceptions include Neilna’s 2008 song Nyama Nashi, Nyama Vashi
(Neither mine nor yours) in which she playfully urges listeners to forget
their political differences and have a good time (http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=yGOtNGhLAmo, accessed June 18, 2011). Other exceptions are
Slavi Trifonov’s texts and Sofi Marinova and Ustata’s 2010 song (discussed
later in this chapter).
16. It is true that late at night chalga predominates on Planeta TV, but
on their website a greater variety of genres can be heard and seen.
17. Emilia, one Payner’s top stars, has been featured on the cover of the
Bulgarian edition of FHM (For Him Magazine) and in several revealing
photo spreads in the fan magazine Nov Folk. The gong in the video “Zabra-
vi” is engraved with E for Emilia, but it also looks like the sign for the Euro.

Note that the narrative is not literal, but an abstract oriental flavor is very
clear. The full version is at www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqBbAtRyJTc, ac-
cessed January 2, 2011.
18. See www.bg-fen.com, accessed June 10, 2010.
19. The text of “Edinstveni” is by Georgi Milchev-Godzhi; he wrote the
music with Evgeni Dimitrov and Slavi Trifonov. (See www.youtube.com/
watch?v=M8u6XqhExts, accessed June 20, 2010). In the (nonnarrative)
video of the song, Sofi and Slavi are dressed in business suits, pictured
(separately) in an airplane and in winter coats in a snowstorm.
20. Rap singers sometimes satirically comment on chalga in their
texts; in “Tochno Ti” Ustata sings about Sofi’s duet with Slavi in the
song “Edinsteveni.” For discussion of why rap’s ties to African-American
culture resonate with Roma, see Chapter 2 and Imre 2006 and 2008. In
2009 Sofi and Ustata were awarded a prize for general quality in music
by Fen TV.
21. “Ljubovta e Otrova” was produced by Slavi Trifonov. He had used
the theme of war in his earlier videos, for example in staging the clip for
the old Macedonian favorite 7/8 song “Yovano Yovanke” (Oh Yovana).
22. Kalin Kirilov called my attention to the use of rock-style guitar
chords with a bit of distortion, also characteristic of Serbian turbofolk.
23. Cartwright explained that this is a quote from an interview in Nov
Folk magazine that was released to coincide with his huge 2003 stadium
concert.
24. www.youtube.com/watch?v=whi99J4B_2Q, accessed August 25,
2010.
25. He said: “On my first wedding night Desislava [chalga star] partici-
pated. . . . I wanted a little bit of that female happiness that all women try
to get. Because I’m a girl in my soul—I didn’t choose that—I was born that
way” (Nov Folk 2007:32).
26. Volanis is a Greek Romani singer from Thessaloniki. The same
song became very popular in Israel in 2002. One version is in Hebrew
and Greek, performed by Moshik Afia and Shlomi Saranga; another ver-
sion is performed by Lebanese vocalist Fadl Shaker in Arabic; another is
in Turkish disco style, performed by Serdar Ortac; finally, a Romanian
version is performed by Romani manele star Adrian Minune, or Adrian
the Wonder Boy (Eva Broman, East European Folklife Center listserv,
March 10, 2007).
27. Azis also sang the Macedonian slow song “Zajdi Zajdi Jasno Sonce”
(Set, bright sun) at the end of his 2003 Sofia stadium concert; Ceca and
other Serbian turbofolk singers routinely perform this song to prove they
can really sing (Garth Cartwright, personal communication).
28. Stokes analyzes these two singers in relation to concepts of mo-
dernity and reminds us that they cannot be assumed to be critical of
existing categories (2003). In Pakistan today, a transvestite occupies an
acceptable place as a TV host, a similar role to Azis’s role as a singer. The
Pakistani host dares to bring up taboo subjects, and somehow these topics
become more acceptable because a nonmainstream person brings them
up (Masood 2007).
29. The temple pictured is Khajuraho, in North India, and it is in-
deed known for its erotic Hindu sculptures. There are other temples
pictured in this video as well as shots of Tibetans praying at a Buddhist
sacred site. I would like to thank Ron Wixman for help identifying this
temple.

30. For references to the lawsuit over the immorality of this song, see http://
planetbollywood.com/Film/Khalnayak/ accessed June 20, 2010. I would like
to thank Francis Fung and Farrukh Raza for help in researching this song.
31. Butler writes: “Sexual difference . . . is never simply a function of
material differences which are not in some way both marked and formed
by discursive practices” (1993:1).
32. See bell hooks 1991.
33. I am using the word gaze in the sense in which it has been used by
cultural and film studies. The normative gaze is assumed to be a male, that
is, looking at females as sexual objects; this replicates the unequal power
relationship between the sexes (see Gamman and Marshment 1988).
34. For cogent analyses in English, see Rice 2002; Statelova 2005; Levy
2002; Kurkela 1997, 2007; Apostolov 2008; and Buchanan 2007. Nick Nas-
ev suggested to me that to many members of the middle class, who saw
their status drop after the fall of communism, chalga represents the evils
of capitalism.
35. Balkanika was started by Victor Kasamov, the owner of Bulgarian
Ara Audio-Video; advertising brings in “65% of Balkanika’s income, with
the rest coming from on-screen sales of ring tones or fortune-telling and
romance-forecasting services” (Brunwasser 2007).
36. Sugarman shows how the Kosovar commercial folk/pop industry is
involved in the ideological work of defining a specific Albanian national
modernity (2007).
37. Ditchev writes “the new identity debate in the 1990s was largely
dominated by the question of whether or not to be Balkan” (2002:235).
The issue of European Union membership has heightened these issues.
38. Kiossev writes of the “dark intimacy” of acts of identification, as in
“we’re all just Balkan shit” (2002:182 and 189). Herzfeld’s concept of cultural
intimacy can be fruitfully applied here (1997). Kiossev writes: “Balkan cul-
ture domesticates the official codes of national representation . . . through
the multiple uses, misuses, and flexible appropriations performed by
social actors in everyday life. Popular amusements in the Balkans produce
ironic self-images and display them in semi-public spaces of insiders’
‘collective privacy’. . . . It also often scandalously perverts these negative
auto-stereotypes into positive ones, with a peculiar emotional ambivalence”
(2002:189–190).
39. Here is a post on an internet forum: “The success of Attack doesn’t
come from anywhere else than the fact that they behave like strong men.
Nobody likes the mangali [derogatory name for Roma, meaning a black
pot], everyone thinks they should be ‘neutralized’ but nobody’s doing any-
thing about it, they just keep watching them reproduce. Then suddenly
along comes this guy . . . and says “let’s wipe them out” and you think,
“that’s easy, all I have to do is put a check in the little box, and I’ve solved the
problem.” The high Romani birthrate (in comparison to the low Bulgar-
ian birthrate) is indeed causing hysteria in some circles. On October 9,
2006, the Minister of Health Radoslav Gaidarski announced a proposed
legislative change to ban births by women under the age of eighteen. He
further said that the measure would be directed mainly to girls of minority
origin. According to the newspaper Sega (Now), Gaidarski told journalists
that if the birthrate among Roma is not limited, then the mortality rate in
Bulgaria would become among the highest in Europe, since many of these
children do not survive to adulthood. Gaidarski also suggested that a meet-
ing of the health ministers of Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia

(countries where large populations of Roma live) should be held to tackle
the social problems of these groups. Although the health minister feebly
tried to frame the demographic issue in terms of the welfare of Roma, the
underlying message was that there are simply too many of them. Another
example of racism surfacing in high places occurred in October 2006,
when a Bulgarian observer in the European Parliament, from the Attack
party, commented on the nomination of a Hungarian Romani woman for a
human rights prize by writing an e-mail to all MEPs: “In my country there
are tens of thousands of gypsy girls way more beautiful than this honor-
able one. In fact, if you’re in the right place at the right time, you even can
buy one (around twelve or thirteen-years-old) to be your loving wife. The
best of them are very expensive—up to 5000 euros a piece. Wow!”
Chapter 10
1. A number of ideas in this chapter appear in Silverman 2003 (reprint-
ed with permission, ©2003 University of Chicago) and Silverman 2011c
and 2011b, this last volume being from the conference Interpreting Emo-
tions in Eastern Europe, University of Illinois, Fisher Forum, 2008.
2. Sugarman writes that “until recently, no south Albanian women
from Macedonia had ever performed at an event as a professional singer”
(1997:369). On the 1999 Gypsy Caravan Tour, of thirty Romani musicians
only one was female, and she was the wife of a participant. The 1999 CD
Gypsy Queens (Network 32843) was an attempt to highlight the contribu-
tion of women to Romani music.
3. Sugarman reports that an ethnic Albanian female singer in Chicago
from Kosovo “endured a few years of gossip from community members”
(1997:342).
4. This ideology exists among non-Roma of the Balkans as well. I collected
a number of stories of Bulgarian women whose parents, mothers-in-law,
or husbands prohibited them from joining professional ensembles in the
1960s because it was shameful.
5. They include Lisa Angelova and Zlatka Chinchirova from Bulgaria,
who performed with their fathers; and Natalia Borisova from Bulgaria and
Ramiza Dalipova and Esma Redžepova from Macedonia, who performed
with their husbands. When Zlatka’s father, Hasan Chinchiri, and Esma
Redžepova’s husband died, their careers were already launched. A simi-
lar pattern exists for Bulgarian Eastern Orthodox Slavic vocalists. Most
Bulgarian wedding singers, notably Maria Karafezieva, Ruska Kalcheva,
Binka Dobreva, and Pepa Yaneva, are in bands with their husbands. The
same pattern can be found among Hungarian Roma; in the group Kalyi
Jag, the only female participant, Agnes Kunstler, is the wife of male par-
ticipant Jozsef Balogh. Sugarman also reports that the few female Prespa
Albanian singers are in bands with their husbands (1997:342). For Middle
Eastern parallels, see Van Nieuwkerk 1995:68 and 128.
6. Teodosievski and Redžepova1984 is an autobiographical book with
photographs, newspaper clippings, and testimonials.
7. Van Nieuwkerk claims that in Egypt there is a hierarchy, with night-
club entertainers at the bottom, wedding entertainers a little higher, and
concertizing entertainers at the top (1995:122–132).
8. See Chapter 6 and Teodosievski and Redžepova 1984:137 and 194. Es-
sentializing and racist press quotes from the 1960s and 1970s include: “She is
a Gypsy girl, hot blooded, happy as a bird! For her money means a new hat,

a ticket for the movies, a new dress, nothing more” (138); “Esma has a lovely
dark complexion, it would be a wonderful advertisement for suntan creams
and lotion; it has the shade of well-baked bread” (141); “this music reveals
the Gypsy philosophy, the simple philosophy and wisdom close to all colors
and tongues” (143); “Gypsies are a strange people—they live in their own way
from their very birth. . . . Music is the soul and philosophy of Gypsies, simple,
clear and deep. Music is their first and eternal occupation” (141).
9. Acton termed this the “artistic collusion between the oppressed and
the oppressor” and illustrated his point with materials from Lemon’s book
on Russian Romani performers (2000) and Van de Port’s book on Serbian
Romani musicians (1998) (Thomas Acton, Patrin listserv, April 18, 2001).
10. Stevo wrote that the idea of using young drummers arose almost by
accident when their usual drummer could not attend a concert; he was vis-
iting the home of a possible replacement drummer and spotted his young
son, Enver Rasimov, playing the tarabuka. Enver became their trademark
young performer (Teodosievski and Redžepova1984:39-40). When he was
married off at a young age, he was replaced with another young drummer
because a precedent was firmly established.
11. The longer films are Krst Rakoc (Rakoc’s Cross; Macedonian), Sko-
pje '63, So Sila Tatko (How are you, father?), and Zapej Makedonijo (Sing,
Macedonia! Macedonian); her shorter music videos were compiled and
released by RTS (Radio Television Skopje) under the series titled Putevima
Pesme: Esma Ansambl Teodosievski (Song Paths; MT 31001-5). There are
many recent video clips of Esma performing Čhaje Šukarije on YouTube;
for example, a 2006 video of her performing a lip-synched version of Čhaje
Šukarije on BTR Skopje (one of the Romani TV channels) is at www.you-
tube.com/watch?v=IglS8eJayUY, accessed June 10, 2010. The video in-
cludes greetings in Romani and Macedonian, from Roma in Germany to
Roma in Macedonia and vice versa, and it gives a telephone number and
price to order greetings.
12. In Chapter 3 I chronicled this process. Yugoslav Roma, for example,
gave their children Hindu names, and musicians used Indian themes in
their čočeks.
13. An exception is keyboardist Elvis Huna, who met Esma through her
adopted son, Simeon Atanasov, with whom he served in the army.
14. Two other performers were awarded diplomatic passports several
years ago, pop singer Toše Proeski and rock guitarist Vlatko Stefanovski.
Nick Nasev (a long-term fan of Esma) pointed out that of the three artists,
Esma had the most solid international reputation, but the government
delayed her passport for years. He felt that the state preferred certain am-
bassadors to others (personal communication).
15. http://www.blic.rs/stara_arhiva/kultura/22531/Pozitivne-emocije-i-
cisto-srce, March 27, 2002, accessed July 19, 2011; also see Cartwright
2005b:111.
16. In Chapter 13 I discuss how western recording contracts have had
an impact on Balkan Romani musicians.
17. They include Nasvali me so Iljum (I fell ill), available on her website,
and Pomegu Dva Života (Between two lives [Macedonian], KMP: KA005).
18. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2ewdetNASI, accessed Decem-
ber 15, 2010.
19. I thank Nick Nasev for these observations. In Chapter 8 I discussed
similar controversies related to contests in Bulgaria, Turkey, Hungary, and
the Czech Republic.

20. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aDYAfA_plQ, accessed May 30, 2010.
21. http://www.esctoday.com/news/read/15114, accessed May 30, 2010.
22. This song can be found on the albums mentioned in note 17. The
text is by Oskar Mahmut, the arrangement by Simeon Atanasov, and the
melody by Esma.
23. The whole song can be found at http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=ZzQukXu0ARE, accessed June 19, 2011.
Chapter 11
1. Fieldwork with Yunakov spanned the mid-1980s to the present and took
place in Bulgaria and New York City, and on multiple tours. Portions of this
chapter are reprinted from Silverman 2009, with permission of the publishers.
2. According to Seeman, dahli may come from dagli, the label used in
Erdine, Turkey, for zurna and tŭpan families who came to Turkey from the
Yambol, Bulgaria, region in the nineteenth century. In Turkish, the word
means mountain folk (2002: 260).
3. The ensemble Yunakov describes is similar to the urban Macedonian
čalgija ensemble discussed in Chapter 2.
4. See www.ctmd.org/pages/enews0509yunakov.html, accessed December
15, 2010.
5. See John and Jean Comaroff 1993:34 and Ortner 1995:174. As noted
in Chapter 7, domination as well as resistance needs to be interrogated
and its pluralities revealed.
6. I know of no wedding musicians who resisted the name changes.
Whereas many Turks and a small number of Roma resisted the name
changes, Roma in general did not resist.
7. In 2001 Yunakov purchased a condominium and, because of finan-
cial pressure, took a nonmusical job; he registered his own corporation
and purchased a van. For the last decade, he has worked as a driver but
continues to perform music at night and on weekends. Yunakov has al-
ways been the primary income producer in his family; he is extremely
hard-working, and at one time he was supporting at least eight people.
8. He also introduced Merita and Raif to Americans involved in the Bal-
kan Music and Dance Workshops sponsored by the East European Folk-
life Center, which facilitated their being asked to teach at the workshops.
9. Like many Balkan musicians, Yunakov cannot afford a stable booking
agent; the Center for Traditional Music and Dance (www.ctmd.org) and Har-
old Hagopian of Traditional Crossroads (www.traditionalcrossroads.com)
have served in that role, and when he first emigrated I did so informally as
well. For the most part, Yunakov handles his own bookings, which has dis-
advantages and advantages.
10. Turks also notice that he is from Bulgaria, has not lived in Anatolia,
and is Romani. It is obvious that Yunakov could never be fully accepted by
Armenians and Albanians because of language and religious differences,
not to mention racism.
Chapter 12
1. As mentioned in Chapter 8, world music emerged in the late 1980s
in Europe and America as a marketing category (Taylor 1997; Feld 1994).
Portions of this chapter are reprinted from Silverman 2007b with permis-
sion from the publishers.

2. Kusturica’s films include Time of the Gypsies; Underground; and Black
Cat, White Cat. They all prominently feature Romani music, and many of
the Romani performers became famous as a result (see Iordanova 2001,
2002, 2003a, 2003b). See Chapter 13 for analysis of the role of Goran
Bregović, the music collaborator with Kusturica for Time of the Gypsies
and Underground.
3. Roma-sponsored festivals such as the Khamoro festival in the Czech
Republic, Šutkafest in Skopje, and Romfest in Bulgaria (discussed in
Chapter 8) serve overt political functions, but their cultural displays are
sometimes just as stereotypical as non-Romani-sponsored events. The
Guča brass band festival in Serbia is sponsored by the regional admin-
istration and by private Serbian sponsors, all non-Roma. Although south
Serbia is not the focus of this book, I underscore that the issue of rep-
resentation deserves to be examined at Guča. Serbian music garners in-
ternational fame, but several participating Romani musicians have com-
plained about discrimination at Guča in the 1990s.
4. Gypsy Spirit, directed by Hungarian choreographer Zoltan Zsurafski,
featured the Budapest Dance Ensemble (composed of non-Roma) perform-
ing dances from India, the Balkans, and Hungary (http://centrummanage-
ment.org/gypsy-spirit/, accessed June 19, 2011; see Chapter 6 for a discus-
sion of Gypsy dance suites). Romani musicians participated in the band.
5. Hedgehogs are traditional food for Travelers.
6. See Chapter 1; see Clark and Campbell 2000 for media coverage in
England.
7. This can be seen a number of times in the film Iag Bari.
8. Tony Gatlif, director of Latcho Drom, was scheduled to film the
events but he took ill; he sent his daughter instead. The resulting film No
Man Is a Prophet in His Own Land is found on the DVD The Continuing
Adventures of the Taraf de Haidouks (2006); also see Chapter 13.
9. At this point, Esma launched into a proud narrative of how tolerant
Macedonia is toward Roma. As mentioned in Chapter 10, Esma is very
patriotic; other Roma are similarly loyal even to states that have not pro-
tected their freedoms (see Lemon 2000).
10. The masterful Kalman Balogh Gypsy Cimbalom Band was promi-
nently featured, with guest Romani musicians from Bulgaria Yashko Ar-
girov and Slavcho Lambov. Yashko and Slavcho were extremely grateful
for the opportunity to tour, but they complained of the low salary; indeed,
several Bulgarian musicians turned down the offer to tour with Gypsy
Spirit because the compensation was so poor.
11. According to Dušan, the purpose of the Amala school is “to promote
Romani music and culture, to teach it to non-Roma, and to provide jobs
for local Romani musicians. When they see non-Roma, especially western
people, interested in their music, they start to feel more pride in their
culture.” Dušan served as a board member of Voice of Roma and also
published the collection Rromani Songs from Central Serbia and Beyond
(Ristić and Leonora 2004).
12. Cartwright documented the widespread discrimination of Roma-
nian musicians in his report for Free Muse (Cartwright 2001); also see
Cartwright 2007.
13. Note that condescension was not typical of all the managers I met.
Winter’s relationship to Taraf also needs to be seen in the light of the fact
that his managerial partner, Stephane Karo, is married to a relative of a
Taraf member, and is thus considered adopted family. The managers of

Fanfare Ciocarlia, Henry Ernst and Helmut Neumann, are also married to
Romani women from the Taraf village of Clejani; these managers are very
respectful of their clients.
14. Zirbel’s research with “Gypsies” from Egypt who perform at Euro-
pean festivals supports this claim: “Most groups either did not realize or
were just not interested in what they . . . signified for audiences” (1999:86).
Exceptions to this observation are Dušan and Dragan Ristić, discussed
earlier in this chapter, who are also activists.
15. Imre discusses Hungarian Romani pop singer Gyozo Gaspar, leader
of the band Romantic. His reality television show portrays his family as
stereotypically childish, loud, argumentative, materialistic, and unable
to lead a civilized life: “The show seems to confirm nothing but Gypsies’
inability to function as hard-working citizens” (2006:335). Gaspar seeks
to fulfill expectations that non-Roma have of Roma, thereby making him
unoffensive.
16. As discussed in Chapter 3, the question of unity is also an important
political issue; to build a human rights movement, Roma have to establish
unity based on something tangible.
17. For discussion of appropriation and music, see Born and Hesmond-
halgh 2000 and Chapter 13. I am currently researching this topic.
Chapter 13
1. In 2002, Taraf de Haidouks won the BBC Radio 3 Planet Europe
Award; in 2006 Fanfare Ciocarlia won the award and Gypsy-inspired
DJ Shantel won the BBC Club Global Award; in 2005 Ivo Papazov won
the BBC Planet Audience Award; in 2007 Gogol Bordello won the BBC
Planet Americas award and Balkan Beat Box was nominated in the Club
Global category; in 2008 French guitarist Thierry (Titi) Robin, known for
Gypsy fusions, was nominated in the Europe category, and Balkan Beat
Box was nominated in three categories (Newcomer, Club Global, and Cul-
ture Crossing); in 2006 Taraf and its label Crammed Discs won the Edison
Award in Holland (equivalent to a Grammy).
2. For example, Jony Iliev’s album Ma Maren Ma (Don’t Beat Me) was on
the European world music charts for two months in 2003; Fanfare Ciocar-
lia’s Gili Garabdi (Secret Songs) was in the top twenty for two months in
2005 and in April it was number one; the Serbian Romani band Kal’s (Black)
album Kal was on the charts for four months in 2006 and was number three
in the annual list; its Radio Romanista was number two in March 2009;
Mahala Rai Banda’s Ghetto Blasters was number two in November 2009,
and the remix album Electric Gypsyland 2 was on the top of the charts in De-
cember 2006 after two months in the top twenty. In 2007 Fanfare Ciocarlia’s
Queens and Kings was and was voted among the top ten world albums of
2007 by the British magazines Songlines, fRoots, and Mojo, and the French
magazine Mondomix (www.asphalt-tango.de/news.html). Here are the al-
bums in the top twenty of the European world music charts at some point
in 2008 to 2010: Kal’s Radio Romanista, Shantel’s Disko Partizani and Planet
Paprika, Kočani Brass Band’s The Ravished Bride, the DJ compilations Bal-
kan Beats 3 and Balkan Grooves, Balkan Beat Box’s Blue-Eyed Black Boy,
Boban and Marko Marković’s Devla, and the CD compilation accompanying
Cartwright’s book Princes Among Men (www.wmce.de). Note that although
sales were good for these albums, they never approximated the sales of the
top pop and rock albums. Henry Ernst remarked that Joni Iliev’s album sold

poorly, and that although Gili Garabdi sold 41,000 albums in two years this
was very low in comparison to pop acts (personal communication). Appro-
priation of Romani music into the popular music realm is the subject of my
current research project.
3. For example, after the 1999 Gypsy Caravan tour, Robert Browning
of the World Music Institute wanted to develop the potential musical rela-
tionship between the Rajasthani and the Flamenco artists in preparation
for the 2001 tour. He secured a commissioning grant from the Rockefeller
Foundation for the piece Maharaja Flamenco; it was performed in the
2001 tour, but the collaborative project seemed to neither excite audiences
nor lead to future work.
4. The creativity of Asphalt Tango was recognized by their WOMEX and
World Music Charts Europe Top Label Award in 2006; in 2009 they were
honored as one of WOMEX’s top twenty labels. Asphalt Tango’s roster of
Romani artists includes Fanfare Ciocarlia, Kal, Jony Iliev, Esma Redžepova
and as of 2009 Mahala Rai Banda (see www.asphalt-tango.de). The West-
ern European companies Asphalt Tango, Piranha, Essay, Divano Produc-
tions, and Crammed Discs currently dominate the Romani music market.
5. The Macedonian brass band Kočani has also collaborated with several
groups as a result of its managers’ efforts. Kočani played with two Italian
jazz combos: Kočani Orkestar meets Paola Fresu and Salis Antonello: Live
(Manifesto 2005); and Harmana Ensemble and Kočani Orkestar: Ulixes (Ma-
teriali Sonori 2002). Kočani, unfortunately, has suffered because of an ugly
split between its founder Naat Veliov and Crammed Discs (more specifi-
cally, Stephane Karo and Michel Winter of Divano Productions), regarding
money (Cartwright 2005:136–138). Now there are two bands: Kočani Orke-
star whose name is registered in Belgium by Crammed Discs and which is
managed by Divano Productions, and King Naat Veliov and the Original
Kočani Orkestar which records on the small German label Plane.
6. One video (accessed January 2, 2011), for example, shows Alyosha
performing Godzila with Orkestar Universal on Veselina TV in Bulgaria.
7. The popularity of Taraf and Fanfare may be due to the Romanian me-
ters (mostly 2/4 and 4/4) being more accessible to non-Romani audiences
than southern Balkan meters (such as 11/16, 7/16, and 9/16); however,
all Balkan Romani groups now perform 2/4 or 4/4 kyuchek/čoček/manele.
These two groups achieved their popularity in part thanks to the efforts
of their managers and record producers. Note that Ernst, Neumann, and
Karo are all married to women from Clejani, Taraf’s village. This cements
their ties (and also their obligations) to Romania and the musicians.
8. On the 1999 North American Gypsy Caravan tour, Taraf accordionist
Ionitsa asked Neshko Neshev to play Ionitsa’s accordion “for good luck.”
He was clearly in awe of Neshko’s playing.
9. Similarly, the two Bulgarian musicians on the 2004 Gypsy Spirit tour,
Yasko Argirov and Slavcho Lambov, were grateful for the work but com-
plained of low pay and short performances (see Chapter 12). We might
think that all Roma-Roma relationships would be less problematic than
non-Roma–Roma ones, but this is not the case. Although Romani Routes, a
division of the NGO Voice of Roma that arranges tours in the United States,
aims to avoid the exploitation that non-Romani managers might impose on
Romani musicians, sometimes it is accused of the very same exploitation.
10. Taraf’s most famous collaborators are the Kronos Quartet (Caravan
album from 2000; see Broughton 1999). I too had a role in this collabo-
ration: after several phone conversations with violinist David Harrington

about Romani bands that might be suitable for collaboration with the
quartet, I suggested Taraf because of its string base.
11. Beissinger asserts that earlier manele (called manea and performed
in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Phanariot or Greek-run court in Ro-
mania) possibly resembled the contemporary genre in rhythm but dif-
fered from it in many ways (also see Garfias 1981 and 1984). She writes
(2005, 2007) that Romanians in the 1980s forged the genre from musics
covertly imported from Serbia and Bulgaria (also see Voiculescu 2005). I
posit that Romanians themselves may overemphasize the linear unbro-
ken connections from the eighteenth century so that manele seems more
home-grown, and thus legitimate. The same recasting occurred in Bul-
garia, where scholars emphasized the historical roots of wedding music
to legitimize it.
12. Ziff and Rao define cultural appropriation as “the taking—from a
culture that is not one’s own—of intellectual property, cultural expressions
or artifacts, history and ways of knowledge and profiting at the expense of
the people of that culture” (1997:1 and their footnote 1).
13. The literature on ownership of culture is vast; recent scholarship on
UNESCO initiatives to copyright culture examines the legal and theoreti-
cal frameworks of this debate (M. Brown 2004; Kurin 2004, Kirshenblatt-
Gimblett 2004).
14. See Gojković 1977 and Djordjević 1984 (1910). In his discussion of
culture and appropriation, Samson states “almost axiomatically, Rom mu-
sics from all over the region” can be subsumed in the category synthetic
(2005:44).
15. This is related to the professional role and the requirement to
provide music that the patron knows and desires. Samson and Pettan
remind us that Kosovo Roma have appropriated to remain neutral in a
war. Samson writes: “Kosovo Rom musicians deliberately adopted trans-
national idioms, including Western popular music, if not to promote a
universalist ideology then at least to maintain ethnic neutrality at a time
of prevailing ethnic tension and dispute” (2005:46; also see Pettan 1996b
and 1996c).
16. In the United States, for example, Macedonian Romani drummer
Seido Salifoski (see Chapter 5) performs with the Zlatne Uste Brass Band,
Serbian Romani accordionist Peter Stan performs with Slavic Soul Party,
and clarinetist Catherine Foster was trained by and performed for many
years with Yuri Yunakov. Zlatne Uste has been particularly sensitive to eth-
ical issues. They routinely credit the sources of their music, they encourage
local Balkan Roma to attend their events, and the proceeds of their annual
Golden Festival have been donated to NGOs working for peace and justice
in the Balkans.
17. At the Portland showing of the film When the Road Bends: Tales from
a Gypsy Caravan, a tribal dance representative proudly announced that his
troupe was “keeping the Gypsy spirit alive.” On the other hand, dancers
such as Artemis (Elizabeth Mourat) and Helene Ericksen have done field-
work in Romani communities and educate their students about the po-
litical situation of Roma (www.serpentine.org/artemis/artemis.htm; www.
helene-eriksen.de/). Tribal dancer Kajira Djoumahna has interviews with
Esma and activist Šani Rifati on her website (www.blacksheepbellydance.
com/writings/files/rom.html).
18. Bregović collaborated on Time of the Gypsies and Underground. See Ior-
danova 2002, Gočić 2001, and Malvinni 2004 for a discussion of Kusturica.

19. Graceland (1986), a collaboration among Paul Simon, Ladysmith
Black Mambazo, and others, won awards, sold millions of copies, and
even figured in the anti-apartheid movement. Simon’s lyrics contributed
to the project, and he clearly respected his collaborators, paid them well,
toured with them, and donated to political causes. But in terms of owner-
ship, Simon’s name appeared above the title and he copyrighted the music
(Feld 1988). In the end, perhaps “musicians fill the role of wage laborers”
(2000a:242).
20. Deep Forest’s 1992 multimillion-dollar-selling album features digi-
tally sampled and manipulated African sounds mixed with synthesized
tracks. The liner notes are stereotypical romanticizations, but they ask
listeners to contribute to a Pygmy Fund (which has received little money;
Feld 2000a:271). As mentioned in Chapters 3 and 12, world music is often
tied to soft social altruism, in part to make fans feel good. But the real
money being made is in record sales, and “hardly any of this money circu-
lation returns to or benefits the originators of the cultural or intellectual
property in question” (274).
21. Feld asks if we should believe Peter Gabriel when he says he wants
to make third-world artists as famous as he is, and when Youssou N’Dour
gives him special thanks (1994:271). Feld asked Charles Keil: “How do you
respond to Joseph Shabalala when he says that without Paul Simon La-
dysmith Black Mambazo would have never gotten a record contract with
Warner Brothers?” CK: “I would tell Joseph to be content with Shanachie
Records. . . . If that is the price to pay for keeping Warner Brothers and
Paul Simon from having the copyright and ownership rights to those
grooves, it is worth it.” SF: “I don’t think you can say that to third-world
musicians. You just can’t. . . .” CK: “Everybody is hoping that they are go-
ing to make money because of this ownership principle of music, but they
never do. All the musicians with the exception of Michael Jackson end up
poor” (Keil and Feld 1994:315).
22. The list of Romani artists and groups who have recorded Erdelezi
includes Serbian singer Džej, Macedonian performers Muharem Serbezov-
ski and Kočani, the Bulgarian band Džipsi Aver, the French band Bratsch,
and the Hungarian singer Mitsou. Non-Romani singers of Erdelezi include
Albanian vocalist Merita Halili. Bregović rerecorded Erdelezi in collabora-
tions with Greek performers Giorgos Dalaras and Alkisti Protopsalti, with
Polish singer Kayah, and with Turkish pop star Sezen Aksu (who recorded
a whole album of his songs; see Stokes 2003).
23. The Magdolna version can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=t-H47c3xnZo, accessed June 19, 2011.
24. The paper wrote: “Balkan music is a volatile concoction. Though
instantly identifiable, it can also be difficult to define. Selling it outside the
region is even harder” (www.ftd.de/karriere_management/business_eng-
lish/149236.html). Bregović’s website contains this press excerpt: “The
fashion of reviving all sorts of popular music in most spectacular manners
has recently set its heart on the musical world of the Gypsies. It’s been
sixty years since the Belgian guitarist Django Reinhardt conducted, for
the first time, an orchestra, becoming thus the greatest reviver of Gypsy
music. Today a number of names join him in this enterprise, but no one
does it with the intelligence of the Yugoslav Goran Bregović. The result of
his inventions resembles no other. He is light years from them, both by
means but even more by his ingenuity” (Luis Martin, ABC, April 25, 2001,
www.goranbregovic.co.yu, accessed January 2, 2011).

25. Note that despite his notorious reputation among Roma, Bregović
has always been able to hire Romani musicians. We can benignly suggest
that perhaps he pays musicians well, or else, cynically, that Romani musi-
cians are desperate for work. In either case, his ownership and copyright
practices have not changed. In his 2009–2011 tours, however, he seemed
to employ fewer Romani musicians. The lineup included a string quartet,
a male vocal sextet, a five-piece brass band, two Bulgarian female singers,
and lead singer and percussionist Alen Ademović (whose father, Ninoslav,
does many of Bregović’s arrangements).
26. I would like to thank the late Mirjana Laušević for several fruit-
ful conversations about Bregović and for drawing my attention to several
published interviews with him.
27. For example, “Hybridity can rebound from its discursive origins
in colonial fantasies and oppressions and can become instead a practi-
cal and creative means of cultural rearticulation and resurgence from the
margins” (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000:19). Postmodernists tend to see
a “resolution of issues of appropriation into unproblematic notions of
crossover and pluralism.” Aesthetic pluralism is then divorced from extant
socioeconomic differences and “held to be an autonomous and effective
force for transforming those differences. The aesthetic is held to portend
social change; it can stand . . . for wider social change” (21). Hutnyk cri-
tiques this stance of postmodernists (2000; see Chapter 3).
28. African Americans are a useful comparison as a marginal group
with musical power. Monson’s statement that “African-Americans invert
the expected relationship between hegemonic superculture and subcul-
ture” (1994:286) could apply equally to Roma. But is this another from of
exploitation? Has the socioeconomic position of blacks improved as a re-
sult of their music becoming popular throughout the world? Simon Jones
(a celebratory scholar) asserts that when white British youths adopt black
musical styles they are implicitly rejecting racism (1988). Others, however,
focus on how black music never lost its imputed exoticism and primitive-
ness even when taken into white commercial forms (Born and Hesmond-
halgh 2000:22–23). In jazz, white musicians have tended to receive greater
rewards; similarly, in rock, “its white stars have generally been paid much
more attention than black innovators” (23).
29. Keil, for example, is concerned that mediated musics, because of their
frozen electronic form, are separated from communities (Keil and Feld 1994).
30. Perhaps the earliest critic of commercial forms of recording and
appropriation was Alan Lomax, who warned of a cultural gray-out, a ho-
mogenization of the world’s music toward Western forms. Similarly, the
New York Times music critic Jon Pareles wrote in his 1988 article “Pop
Passports—At a Price”: “When Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel and Talking
Heads sell millions of records using Jamaican reggae and South African
mbaqanga, the sources deserve a piece of the action. But to reach the
world audience how much will these musicians have to change—and for
better or worse?” (cited in Feld 1994:267).
31. Although some writers have grouped the bands together, there is
also dissention among them. When Beirut band leader Zach Condon told
New York magazine that “half of what makes that band [Gogol Bordello]
work is the fact that the singer [Eugene Hutz] dresses crazy,” Hutz re-
torted: “To me, that’s digging your open grave. For us, the whole move-
ment was about getting people to think about authenticity rather than the
ironic plastic crap we’ve been force-fed for generations. Then, of course,

there’s people who are simply in it for fashion” (Lynskey 2006). On the
other hand, Ori Kaplan of Balkan Beat Box claims to be inspired by Hutz,
with whom he performed for three years in Gogol Bordello, and Kaplan
and Tamir Muskat of Balkan Beat Box collaborated with Hutz and Oren
Kaplan on the JUF (Jewish Ukrainian Friendship project).
32. Although Shantel himself has never claimed to be Romani, the liner
notes to the album Gypsy Beats and Balkan Bangers by DJ Russ Jones
clearly state “he was captivated by his Gypsy heritage” (2006). Gypsy
wannabes do liberally populate the club scene. Non-Romani dancers at
the New York Gypsy Festivals often dress in versions of the fantasy Gypsy.
The outfits of musicians and dancers in Gypsy Punk bands also reinforce
the image of a circus (see Chapter 12).
33. I would like to thank Garth Cartwright for many comments on this
chapter. On his website, www.bealkanbeats.de, accessed January 2, 2011,
Šoko reports that as early as 1990 he was DJ’ing using Balkan music at the
Berlin Mudd Club; his April 2007 performance in Paris featured “Gypsy
Punk, electrogypsy, hiphop, Klezmer, Balkan and Gypsy, Reggae, tradi-
tional, gypsy, hungary, brass bands of the Balkans [sic].” Šoko also has
several albums titled Balkan Beats (Dimova 2007). I am currently conduct-
ing research on the DJ scene in Western Europe.
34. For example, a video in Greek and Romani was released by Payner
in Bulgaria by Sakis Coucos. The refrain is also used in the Turkish/Bul-
garian/Romani song “Yak Motoru” (Light the motor, Turkish), sung by
Habibi and Malki Kristalcheta (The Young Crystals) on Payner. Versions
by Paultalia of Kyustendil and Kristali of Montana, Bulgaria, are on www.
cocek.com. A Romanian manele version was released by Brandy.
35. Indeed, parallels can be drawn with American minstrel shows
where whites enacted stereotypes of blacks, and sometimes even blacks
wore blackface (see Johnson 2003 and Lott 1993).
36. For example, at the 2000 British Barbican Gypsy festival, Fanfare
Ciocarlia was paired with Transglobal Underground, a multi-ethnic Lon-
don electronic fusion group that has its own issues of appropriation (see
Hesmondhalgh 2002).
37. Similarly, Feld reports that when he asked African-American jazz-
man Herbie Hancock if he had any moral concerns when he copied a
central African phrase on a remake of his hit “Watermelon Man,” Han-
cock answered, “It’s just a brothers kind of thing” (Feld 2000a:257). With
Hancock and the fusion group Zap Mama (composed of urban Africans
and hyphenated African-European musicians), there is the issue of “the
place of condescension, even subjugation within a sphere overtly marked
by inspiration and homage.” Hancock and Zap Mama are not critiqued for
cultural theft the same way that Europeans and Americans are; they are
even hailed as “cultural ambassadors.” “Nonetheless, the power differen-
tials separating cosmopolitan African Americans, Afropeans, and Africans
from their forest pygmy muses cannot be elided” (270).
38. For example, Tamir Muskat of Balkan Beat Box explains: “Our con-
nection to the Balkans, blood wise, is both of our families came from Eastern
Europe. . . . The beginning of our Balkan Beat Box experience was falling in
love with bands like Taraf de Haïdouks, Fanfare Ciocărlia, so many others.
That just started the whole thing for us. . . . And then incorporated into what
we do and mixing it with all this beautiful Mediterranean music we grew up
on, from Turkey to Greece to Egypt, Morocco, and tons of other places. That
would be part of why we use the name. The other part is just so much love

to our music, kind of a nonsense approach, not to take it too serious. We
are not only necessarily dealing with Balkan music. We are and we will deal
with music from all around the world. So don’t take it too serious there.”
http://www.essayrecordings.com/essay_bbb.htm, accessed January 2, 2011.
39. Spin magazine wrote: “Condon may hail from Albuquerque, call
Brooklyn his home, and choose Lebanon’s capitol for his nom-de-plume,
but this teenager sounds straight up Balkan. His orchestral gypsy dirges
feature a string of somber horns that sound fueled on the tears from a torn
Soviet Bloc” (www.Spin.com/articles/beirut June 23, 2006, accessed June
10, 2010). In fact, Condon has recently abandoned the Balkans and has
more recently collaborated with a Zapotec Mexican brass band.
40. I would like to thank my colleague John Fenn for this term.
41. A few Roma collaborated in Shukar Collective’s album of electronic
remixes, Urban Gypsy (2005, Riverboat Records). Producer Marc Hol-
lander realizes that in all remixes “electronics are added by a producer
rather than a member of the band, which distinguishes it from fusion
from within, though this too can be very satisfying for all participants”
(Dacks 2005). He, as well as Dacks, still seems to emphasize the fairness of
the process: “In the end, call it world fusion or party music, all parties are
concerned to make sure each project is an equitable work situation and
generates goodwill amongst the participants” (Dacks 2005).
42. As I mentioned in Chapters 11 and 12, Yuri appeared with Eugene
at the 2005 New York Gypsy Festival and the 2008 Herdeljezi festival. Yuri
was projected to appear with J.U.F. on the album Balkan Gypsy Reggae-
ton (www.myspace.com/jewishukrainianfreundschaft, accessed June 10,
2010), although it appears that this project has been shelved as Balkan
Beat Box and Gogol Bordello have become more famous. Yuri told me this
relationship with Hutz was “good for business.”
43. I am currently researching new manifestations of and reactions to of
Gypsy Punk and the DJ scene. Also see Stankova 2009 and Szeman 2009.
44. In response to these accusations, Shantel said of Cartwright: “I think
he is racist. Who is he to judge this is wrong and this is right?” (Lynskey
2006). Actually Cartwright is by no means against fusions; he admires musi-
cians “who listen with open ears and wish to share music” and differentiates
them from “those . . . who simply lust after pop fame.” For example, he thinks
the Beirut album is “very much a student effort . . . to bring Balkan brass
into a pop-rock setting;” he admires the Hawk and a Hacksaw album The
Way the Wind Blows, which was recorded in Zece Prajini with members of
Fanfare laying down brass; “it’s eerie sounding and not imitation, more using
the Rom musicians to colour a folk rock canvas” (personal communication).
45. Roma also can’t afford to buy western albums. As I discussed in Chap-
ter 12, Macedonian Roma attending Gogol Bordello performances at the
2005 New York Gypsy Festival were baffled by the music and offended at
the visual spectacle. They stood on the side and either laughed or sneered.
46. According to a British Daily Mail article, the Roma of Glod:
. . . eke out meagre livings peddling scrap iron or working patches of
land. . . . Just four villagers [out of 1,000] have permanent employ-
ment in the nearby towns . . . while the rest live off what little welfare
benefits they get. . . . But now the villagers of this tiny, close-knit com-
munity have angrily accused the comedian of exploiting them, after
discovering his new blockbuster film portrays them as a backward
group of rapists, abortionists and prostitutes, who happily engage
in casual incest. They claim film-makers lied to them about the true

nature of the project, which they believed would be a documentary
about their hardship, rather than a comedy mocking their poverty
and isolation. Villagers say they were paid just £3 each for this hu-
miliation, for a film that took around £27 million at the worldwide
box office in its first week of release. Now they are planning to scrape
together whatever modest sums they can muster to sue Baron Cohen
and fellow film-makers, claiming they never gave their consent to be
so cruelly misrepresented [Pancevski and Ionescu 2006].
Villager testimonies show just how marginal these Roma were: “‘Our region
is very poor, and everyone is trying hard to get out of this misery. It is outra-
geous to exploit people’s misfortune like this to laugh at them.’ When a Hol-
lywood film crew descended on a nearby run-down motel last September,
with their flashy cars and expensive equipment, locals thought their lowly
community might finally be getting some of the investment it so desper-
ately needs.” The filmmaking process replicated the very prejudice it seeks
to mock. Indeed, when the non-Romani local vice-mayor was asked whether
the villagers felt offended, he replied: “They got paid so I am sure they are
happy. These gipsies will even kill their own father for money.” Moreover,
Sasha Cohen “insisted on traveling everywhere with bulky bodyguards, be-
cause, as one local said: ‘He seemed to think there were crooks among us.’”
Finally, no villagers have seen the film since they can’t afford a trip to the
nearest movie theater, 20 miles away (Pancevski and Ionescu 2006). This
echoes the situation with expensive western albums that feature Balkan Ro-
mani music: Balkan Roma can’t afford to buy them. The Mail article re-
ported that one actor from Glod said: “It was very uncomfortable at the end
and there was animal manure all over our home. We endured it because we
are poor and badly needed the money, but now we realise we were cheated
and taken advantage of in the worst way.” Another said: “All those things
they said about us in the film are terribly humiliating. They said we drink
horse urine and sleep with our own kin. You say it’s comedy, but how can
someone laugh at that?” Another actor said: “What I saw looks disgusting.
Even if we are uneducated and poor, it is not fair that someone does this to
us.” A local official helped the crew but he claims he was never told what
sort of movie it was, and that the crew failed to get a proper permit: “I was
happy they came and I thought it would be useful for our country, but they
never bothered to ask for a permit, let alone pay the official fees. I realise I
should have taken some legal steps but I was simply naive enough to believe
that they actually wanted to do something good for the community here.
They came with bodyguards and expensive cars and just went on with their
job, so we assumed someone official in the capital Bucharest had let them
film.” The production company that facilitated the filming claims the crew
donated computers and TV sets to the local school and the villagers, but
villagers have denied this. “The school got some notebooks, but that was it.
People are angry now, they feel cheated” (Pancevski and Ionescu 2006).
47. According to Borenstein (2006), Borat is both indebted to and a par-
ody of the films of Emir Kusturica, and this is why the song “Erdelezi”
is featured so prominently. Borenstein sees the “over-the-top squalor and
old-country festivities” as similar to the film Time of the Gypsies.
48. This situation is similar to performers from other marginal groups;
see Taylor 1997, 2007. As Feld observes, Central African Pygmies “are dis-
empowered precisely because they have never gained control over how they
are discursively represented” (2000a:262). Similarly Johnson discusses the
construction of “blackness” and its appropriation by whites (2003).

49. Taussig aptly writes: ”Once the mimetic has sprung into being, a
terrifically ambiguous power is established: there is born the power to
represent the world, yet that same power is a power to falsify, mask and
pose. The two powers are inseparable” (1993:42–43).
50. In commenting on third-world musicians, Keil claims corporations
and privileged people profit the most from collaborations: “With the high-
quality recording and distribution and all the rest, ninety percent of the
money winds up going to white people . . . who are already in positions of
power: the gatekeepers, the copyright holders, and the distributors” (Keil
and Feld 1994:317). But Feld says the same moves that are being read as
“cannibalizing” from an ethical point of view are also read as “empower-
ing in various third-world locations” (315).
Notes to page 293 333

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Index
Page references in italics indicate illustrations.
Abdi, Faik, 170, 298n24 “Alo Taxi,” 30, 133

accordion, 131, 132 Alyosha (Aleksei Atanasov
Acton, Thomas, 47, 50, 257–58, Stefanov), 34, 36–37,
322n9 271–72, 326n6
Ademović, Alen, 329n25 Amala Festival (Ukraine), 163
Ademović, Ninoslav, 329n25 Amala Summer School (Valjevo,
adet (custom of), 76, 77 Serbia), 255, 324n11
aesthetic pluralism, Amalipe (Veliko Tŭrnovo,
329n27 Bulgaria), 169
African Americans amanes, 36, 301n13
identity of, 55–56 Amanet, 102
as a marginal group with America for Bulgaria Foundation,
musical power, 329n28 169
and minstrel shows, Amet: “Belgiiskite Vecheri,” 181
330n35 Amza Tairov, 35, 37, 166, 271
and Roma, 35, 45, 122 Amzoski, Severdžan, 100
Ahmeti, Muharem, 36, 188 Ana-Maria, 184
Aida, 224–25 Andreya, 183
Ajvazi, Nešo, 64, 101, 104 Angelite, 270
Akana ka khela (now So-and-So Angelov, Mitko, 224
will dance), 86–87 Angelova, Lisa, 321n5
Aksu, Sezen, 328n22 animal trainers, 25
Albania Ansambl Teodosievski. See
Albanian influence in Esma—Ansambl
Skopje, 28 Teodosievski
Albanian style in Romani Ansel, 122
music, 35 anthems, 48, 50, 51, 169, 173, 188,
as Decade of Roma Inclusion 190, 211, 261
signatory, 297n22 Anti-Discrimination Act
Macedonians vs. Albanians, (Bulgaria), 12
298n24 Antonio El Pipa Flamenco
modernity in, 320n36 Ensemble, 235, 243
Albanian music, 231–32 anxious account of appropriation.
Ali, Muhammad, 301n15 See celebratory vs. anxious
Ali, Salif, 16, 17, 135, 136, 142, account of appropriation
202, 233–34 Appadurai, Arjun, 42–43,
“Allah Allah,” 304–5n18 81, 268
appropriation, 273–75, 279, and modernity, 54, 248, 251–52
327n12, 327nn14–17, and nationalism, 163–64, 251
329n27, 329n30 of the past, nostalgia for, 246
arabesk, 177 search for, 22
Arabic music, 231 as a social construction, 53
“Arabski,” 30 and tradition, 53, 247–48
Ara/Diapason, 34, 179 See also heritage and the
Ara TV (Bulgaria), 34 Bulgarian socialist state;
Aretxaga, Begoña, 129, 147 purity
Argirov, Yashko, 136, 313n26, autoexoticism, 258
314n7, 324n10, 326n9 Azirov, Menderes, 68, 103–4,
Arif, Bekir, 298n24 310n32
Armeanca, Dan, 270 Azirov, Sabuhan, 104
“Iag Bari,” 273 Azirov, Severdžan, 64, 68–69,
Armenian diaspora, 39 103–4, 119, 232, 310n32
Armenian music, 231 Azis (Vasil Boyanov), 188–94, 270
arranged marriages, 71, 87 “Antigeroi,” 191–92, 319n29
Artemis (Elizabeth Mourat), autobiography of, 188–89
327n17 clothing/image of, 190
artistic collusion between discrimination experienced by,
oppressed and oppressor, 189
258, 322n9 “Dnevnik I Praznik,” 193
artistic/cultural adoration, 246, “Edin Zhivot Ne Stiga,” 193–94
253 gender ambiguity/transgression
Asenov, Hari, 313n26 by, 188, 189–90, 191, 192–
Ashkalia, 295n1 93, 197, 295n5, 319n25
Asphalt Tango, 216, 218, 270–71, “Hajde Pochvay Me,” 190
287, 290–91, 326n4 homosexual wedding of,
assimilation, 8, 66, 252 189–90, 319n25
“Astargja o horo,” 85 “Hvani Me,” 190
Ataka party. See Attack Indian motifs used by, 304n16
Atanasov, Simeon, 211, 212–14, influence of, 194
216–17, 249, 254, 322n13, influences on, 191
323n22 “Kak Boli,” 193
Atanasov, Vergilii, 300n7 “Kazvash che me Obichash,”
Atanasovski, Pece, 203 185
atsingani, 295n1 Kralyat, 191
Attack (Ataka; Bulgaria), 12–13, live performances in Chicago
163, 184, 197, 298n30, by, 318n14
317n5, 320n39 and Marinova, 188, 193–94
Aura, 169 musical background/upbringing
authenticity of, 189
clothing as conveying, “Nakarai Me,” 193
250–51 “Ne Kazvai Ljube Leka Nosht,”
conceptions of, 54, 237 191
of the ghetto, 248 Night Show, 191
of Gypsy music festivals, “No Kazvam Ti, Stiga,” 193
246–49 “Nyama,” 192–93
and hybridity, 46, “Obicham Te,” 190
215, 292 oriental stereotype used
in instrumentation, 248 by, 194
marketing of, 241, 244–52, popularity of, 188–89, 197,
250–52, 257 319n23
366 Index
at Romfest, 166 Balogh, Jozsef, 321n5
shock value in his Balogh, Kalman, 160, 263,
performances, 190 324n10
“Teb Obicham,” 193 banja (bath ceremony), 91
“Tochno Sega,” 194 “Barack Obama Kyuchek,” 30,
versatility/talent as a singer, 301n15
190–91 Barbican: The 1000 Year Journey
“Zajdi Zajdi Jasno Sonce,” (London, 2000 and 2005),
319n27 242, 245, 259, 330n36
Barev, Ivo, 314n14
babina (party for a newborn), 83 Baro Bajrami or Šeker Bajram
Babuš, 36 (big or sweet festival), 83
Baez, Joan, 134, 312n15 Bartók, Béla, 300n4
bajraktari (flag bearers), 81, 93, Basch, Linda, 41, 303n6
309n21 Basement Jaxx, 280
Bajraktarović, Mirko, 10 bass guitar, 312n9
Bajram, Amdi, 88, 93–94, 215, bath ceremony, 91
298n24, 308n10 bathhouses, 91
Bajramović, Šaban, 51, 188, 270, BBC (British Broadcasting
305n22 Corporation), 290
“Djeli Mara,” 276 BBC (British Broadcasting
bakshish (tips), 138 Corporation) Radio
Balgova, Magda, 173 3 award, 161
Balicki, Asen: Roma Portraits, 84, bear leaders, 25
307n4, 307n20 beauty contests, 33, 120–21, 170,
Balkana, 150 301n18
Balkan Beat Box, 280, 325n1, Beirut (band), 280, 329n31,
330n31, 330–31n38 331n44
Blue-Eyed Black Boy, 325n2 Beissinger, Margaret, 327n11
“Red Bula,” 283 belly dancers
Balkan Beats 3, 325n2 association with prostitutes, 108
Balkan Beats music, 3, 20, 43, in Bulgaria, 121, 122–23
269, 281, 330n33 and çengi dancing, 108
Balkan culture/identity, 195, and čoček/kyuchek dance,
320nn37–38 98, 112, 116, 118, 119–20,
Balkan Fever (Vienna), 242 121–23
Balkan Grooves, 325n2 commercial success of, 123
Balkanika (cable television as exotic/oriental others, 116,
channel), 183, 195, 121, 123
320n35 exposed skin of, 32, 98, 112
Balkan Music and Dance non-Romani, 275
Workshops, 104, 105–6, stomach movements of, 32
212, 234 tribal, 275, 327n17
Balkan Roma. See Roma, Balkan Turkish, 231
Balkan Romani dialect, 296n13 wedding guests’ reactions to, 98
Balkanton, 130, 146, 147–48, 152, Belmont (Bronx, New York)
311n6 Balkan/Macedonian Roma in,
Balkan Traffic Festival (Belgium), 13–14, 299n33
242 education in, 66
Balkanturist (Bulgaria), 139 identity/ethnicity in, 66–71
Ballet Troupe of Macedonian as an Italian neighborhood,
Television, 32–33, 119–20, 13–14
208 male/females roles in, 79
Index 367
Belmont (continued) Bowers, Jake, 245, 253
as multigenerational, 64–65 Boyarin, Daniel and Jonathan,
music/dance as emblematic of 39, 40
Romani identity, 4 Boyd, Joe, 149–51, 160, 161, 229
musicians in, 99–106, 310n32 Brah, Avtar, 302–3n2
Muslim practices in, 65–66 Brandy, 330n34
Roma’s contact with relatives in brass bands, 25, 300n8
Macedonia, 59 See also Boban Marković
weddings in, 95–99, brass music festival (Kumanovo,
309–10nn26–28 Macedonia, 2008), 301n18,
work and family life in, 63–66 (Guča, Serbia), 324
young male dancers in, 112–13 Bratsch: “Erdelezi,” 328n22
Yuri Yunakov in, 229–31 bratstvo i jedinstvo (brotherhood
Beranče (a line dance), 114 and unity), 10, 210
Beyashi, 295n1 Bregović, Goran, 275–80,
Bhabha, Homi, 42–43 324n2
Bhairava scale/rag, 300n6 Balkan music revived by, 277,
Bijandipe (Macedonian television 328n24
program), 33, 298n24 “čhaje Šukarije” 275
bijav (celebration), 86 criticized as an appropriator,
See also weddings 275–78, 284, 329n25
Bijelo Dugme, 275 “Erdelezi,” 218, 277
“Djurdjevdan”/“Erdelezi,” 277 Karmen with a Happy Ending,
Bikov, Sasho, 36–37 278
Bikova, Yuliya, 184 “Kustino Oro,” 278
“Bingo,” 30 “Mesečina,” 276
Bistijani, 33 musical background of, 275
Bitola (Macedonia), 14, 62, 70, on the peace-making aspect of
102, 114 music, 288
Bitolska Gaida (a line dance), reputation/success of, 276–77
114, 120 on the Roma, 278–79
Black Cat, White Cat (Kusturica), Romani language used by, 279
324n2 Roman musicians employed by,
black market, 146, 147 329n25
blackness, white appropriation of, Tales and Songs from Weddings
332n48 and Funerals, 276
blaga rakija (sweet brandy) ritual, Time of the Gypsies, 327n18
75–76, 95, 99, 310n28 Underground, 275–76, 327n18
Blagica Pavlovska, 101 Brestovica, 157
Blanc, Cristina, 41, 303n6 Brettel, Caroline, 79, 303n4
blaxploitation movies, 258 Briggs, Charles, 54, 55–56
blue color, 92 Brody, Lauren, 233
Bocina, Aco, 216, 270 Brown, Catherine, 111
Bojadžiev, Duke, 216 Browning, Robert, 236, 247, 256,
Boni, 184 259, 261–62, 326n3
Borat (Cohen), 269, 270, 289–91, Bryceson, Deborah, 59
331–32nn46–47 BTR (Macedonian television
Borenstein, Eliot, 332n47 station), 33, 170, 218
bori (bride), 85 Buchanan, Donna, 129
See also weddings Bucovina Club (Frankfurt),
Borisova, Natalia, 321n5 281–82
Bosnia and Hercegovina, 297n22 Budapest Dance Ensemble, 118,
bouzouki, 302n23 243, 324n4
368 Index
Bugarsko (a line dance), 114 Cappadocia, Rufus, 105
Bulgaria Caramel, 174
belly dancers in, 121, 122–23 Cartwright, Garth, 189, 217–18,
brideprice customs in, 273, 281, 284, 287, 304n16,
308n11 319n23, 331n44
communism’s fall in, 151 Princes Among Men,
as Decade of Roma Inclusion 325n2
signatory, 297n22 čeiz (bride’s trousseau), 90
democracy in, 152 celebrations, transnational,
economic crisis in (1990s), 19, 83–106
151–55 babina (party for a newborn),
European Union membership 83
of, 6, 12, 165, 172, Baro Bajrami or Šeker Bajram
298n30 (big or sweet festival), 83
in the Iraq war, 159, 314n10 circumcision, 83, 89, 307nn1–2,
recording industry in, 33–34, 308n15
146–48, 152, 155, 302n22, combined, 307n2
313nn26–29 engagement parties, 88, 96
Romani population in, 12, getting the bride, 93–95, 97,
297n25 309n21, 309nn23–25
Romani rights in, 12–13, 196 guest musicians at, 93, 96
socialist, 10, 16–17, 33, 119, henna and bath ceremonies,
164, 227, 292–93, 299n39, 88–91, 96–97, 308n13,
302n21 (see also heritage 308–9n16
and the Bulgarian socialist Herdelezi (St. George’s Day)
state) (Herdeljezi, Erdelezi),
western currency/goods in, 146 32, 33, 83–84
See also Sofia home videos of, 80
Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, igranka (dance party), 91–93,
196 309nn19–20
Bulgarian language, xiii, xiv Kurban Bajrami (festival of
Bulgarian Ministry of Education, sacrifice), 83
169, 316n21 of life-cycle vs. calendrical
Bulgarian Socialist Party, events, 83
298n25 money spent on, 84,
busking, 236 307nn2–3
Butler, Judith, 5, 192, 194, 295n5, musicians in Belmont, 99–106,
320n31 310n32
Butler, Ljiljana, 270 overview of, 83–85
patriarchal values in rituals, 94
cable television, 34, 311n12 Ramazan (fasting month), 83
čačak (a line dance), 114 tensions surrounding, 84,
Cafe Antarsia, 268 307n1
çalgı (instrumental music or a Vasilica (St. Basil’s Day), 83
musical instrument), 177 weddings, generally, 83–85,
çalgici (wedding Romani 307nn2–3 (see also wedding
musicians in Turkey), music; weddings)
317n4 women’s vs. men’s roles in,
čalgija, 156, 160, 162, 179 86–87, 98, 308n14
See also chalga celebratory vs. anxious account
Cani company, 232 of appropriation, 279–80,
capitalism, 44–45, 151–52, 153, 285–88, 329n28, 329n30
155–56, 293 “Celo Dive Mangasa,” 49
Index 369
çengis (professional female popularity of, 156, 177, 183,
dancers), 107–8, 112, 123 195, 317n1
Center for Interethnic Dialogue and rap, 122, 186–87, 319n20
and Tolerance Amalipe retro, 181
(Veliko Tŭrnovo, Bulgaria), in Romani, 185, 187
169 Romani elements in, 184–85,
Center for Traditional Music and 195–96
Dance, 235, 323n9 as social critique, 181
Central Romani dialect, 296n13 stars of, 182–83, 184, 318n14
čest (honor) vs. sram (shame), style, text, and imagery of,
109–10 180–81, 318nn7–10
Ceyhan, Ali, 235 taksim/mane in, 180
Chaje Shukarije (album), 216 terminological issues regarding,
See also Redžepova, Esma 178–79, 179
čhaje Šukarije, 31, 35, 209–10, at the Trakiya Folk festival, 152
216, 275–76, 290, 322n11 travel magazines on, 183, 318n13
See also Bregović, Goran and trends in (2000–), 182–85,
Redžepova, Esma) 318n11, 318nn13–14,
chalga (Bulgarian pop/folk 318–19nn16–17
music), 19, 177–97 variety in, 183, 195
“Ballads MegaMix,” 184–85 videos vs. texts of songs, 192
Bulgarian folk songs sung by See also Azis; Kristal;
chalga singers, 158–59, Marinova, Sofi
162–63 chalgadzhii (professional urban
costumes for performers of, musicians), 317n4
159, 162–63, 180 chetvŭrtŭk pazar (Thursday
critics of, 115, 163, 177, 181, market), 137
194, 195–96, 320n34 children of adulterous
defenders of, 194–95 relationships, 110
definition of, 317n4 Chinchiri, Hasan, 27, 33, 137–38,
erotic elements of, 182, 191, 321n5
318n11 Chinchiri, Tome, 137–38
folk elements of, 178–79 Chinchirova, Zlatka, 321n5
history/origins of, 31–32, Chinese diaspora, 40, 303n5
177–78, 317n1, 317nn3–4 chitalishte (reading room or
influences on, 177, 195 cultural center), 315n15
kyuchek rhythms/style in, Chow, Rey, 43
177–78, 184, 194 Christgau, Robert, 283, 286
and kyuchek’s association with Cibula, Jan, 50
belly dancing, 121, 178, 180 čifteteli, 28
live vs. studio-recorded, 182, “Ciganski čoček,” 209–10
318n14 Ciganski Pesni, 311n6
mainstream, 183–84, “Ciganyhimnusz,” 50
194, 271 čintijani (wide, billowing pants), 87
male singers of, 181, 188, 318n9 See also dimije, šalvari
and morality/ethnic politics, circumcision, 83, 89, 307nn1–2,
194–97, 320–21nn34–39 308n15
and MTV, 180, 318n8 Ćita, 35–36, 271
nationalistic/patriotic elements clarinet, 131, 132, 135, 223–24
of, 184–85, 195 Clarinet All-Stars, 105, 235, 266
orient evoked in, 177–78, 180, Clark, Morgan, 233
184, 195–96 class distinctions, 152
pop elements of, 178–79 Clifford, James, 52, 53, 54–55
370 Index
The Cobra (film), 49 appropriation, 273–75, 279,
čoček/kyuchek dance, 27 327n12, 327nn14–17,
as artistic/civilized, 115 329n27, 329n30
and belly dancing, 112, 116, Borat, 269, 270, 289–91,
118, 119–20, 121–23 331–32nn46–47
body movements in, 112 collaboration, 270–73,
Bulgarian, 119, 121–22 326–27nn3–11, 333n50
in diaspora Balkan Romani (see also individual
communities, 112–15, musicians)
310n2 Gypsy Punk and DJ remixes,
line dances, 114 5–6, 280–89, 294,
manele/mahala (dance), 116, 329–30nn31–42, 331nn44–
310nn3–4 45
by men, 112–13 overview of, 269, 325–26nn1–2
names of dances, 310n2 transnationalism, 291
oro, 114, 115 See also Bregović, Goran
Ottoman roots of, 107–8, 116, 123 Columbia Artists, 118, 253
and pravo horo, 144 Comité Internationale Tsigane
as professional dance, 116–23, (London, 1971), 50
310–11nn5–6, 311nn8–9, Condon, Zach, 285, 329n31,
311n11 3301n39
recordings of, 148 copyright/pirating, 155, 287
rhythms of, 114 See also appropriation;
for ritual vs. entertainment, 113 DJ remixes
as social dance among corruption, 152, 155–56, 173, 227
non-Roma, 115–16, cosmopolitanism, 44, 181, 195
310nn3–4 Costi, 183
as a solo dance, 112–13, 115–16, Cottar, Anna Marie, 304n15
120 Coucos, Sakis, 183, 330n34
at the Stara Zagora festival, Council of Europe, 11, 50, 304n14
314n13 Cowan, Jane, 109
stomach flick in, 113–14, 119 Crammed Discs, 282, 283, 325n1,
at Šutkafest, 170 326nn4–5
as Turkish vs. Romani, 164 creativity, interpretations of, 22
at weddings, 115 Croatia, 297n22
by women, 112–15 crosses, 184
čoček/kyuchek music, 98 cultural/artistic adoration,
Bulgarian ban on, 119 246, 253
eclecticism in, 133 cultural intimacy, 127, 129, 145,
“Leski Karuchka,” 301n15 147, 296n8, 320n38
meters used in, 29, 112, 114 cultural politics of postsocialist
scales used in, 27–28 markets/festivals, 19,
after socialism, 151 149–75
spread of, 27 Bulgarian wedding music
styles of, 30 (1990s), 149–55, 313n1,
tunes for, 30, 49, 133 314n3, 314n5
See also chalga; manele (music) Bulgarian wedding music
Cohen, Sasha Baron: Borat, 269, (2000–), 155–63, 313n2,
270, 289–91, 331–32nn46– 314nn7–8
47 copyright/pirating issues, 155
collaboration, appropriation, and Macedonian UNESCO
transnational flows, 20, application, 170–72,
269–94 316n22, 316nn24–25
Index 371
cultural politics (continued) women’s vs. men’s, 87, 98
music idol contests, 172–75, See also belly dancers; čoček/
316–17nn27–29, 317n31, kyuchek dance; Phralipe
317n33 dance parties (Brooklyn), 280–81
official views of Romani music, Daniela, 159
167–69, 315–16n21 Darriau, Matt, 105
overview of, 175 Decade of Roma Inclusion, 11,
Romani representation of 169, 297n22
Bulgaria, 150, 166, 172–75 Declaration of a Nation, 47
Romfest, 34, 122–23, 152, Deep Forest, 276, 328n20
163–67, 185, 189, 311n11, Delall, Jasmine: When the Road
314nn13–14 Bends: Tales of a Gypsy
Šutkafest, 50, 120, 169–70 Caravan, 213, 259, 327n17
cultural reification, 40 Demir, Ibro: “Aj Leno, Lenorije
Čun, Medo, 169, 211, 305n19 Čhaje,” 211
“Čhaje Šukarije”, 31, 35, 209 Demirov, Rifat, 100
Čun, Muamet, 31, 32, 93 Demirović, Zvonko, 186
Čun family, 31, 32 “Stranci,” 49–50
Čuperlika/Kjuperlika, 118 Democracy Commission Small
Czechoslovakia, 10 Grants program (American
Czech Republic, 173, 174, 297n22 Embassy), 315–16n21
Democratic Alternative
Dacheva, Toni, 158–59, 180, 184, (Macedonia), 215
318n7 Democratic Progressive Party of
Dacks, David, 282, 331n41 Roma (Macedonia), 298n24
dahli, 223, 323n2 Denev, Vasil, 136, 160
Daily Mail, 331–32n46 Depp, Johnny, 254
dajre (type of drum), 31 Derrida, Jacques, 295n5
Dalaras, Giorgos, 328n22 Dervisoski, Šaban, 103, 105
Dalipova, Ramiza, 321n5 Desislava, 158–59, 185, 190,
dance, transnational, 19, 107–23 319n25
at bath ceremonies, 91 Diamond, Elin, 5
Čuperlika/Kjuperlika, 118 diaspora, hybridity, and identity
dance contests, 316n27 conceptions of diaspora,
igranka (dance party), 91–93, 39, 302–3n2
309nn19–20 diasporic identity in reification,
order of dance leaders, 40, 303n5
86–87, 98 and displacement/emplacement,
Ottoman roots of professional 40, 41–42
Balkan dancers, 107–8, essentialized identities, 51–53
116, 123 (see also essentialism)
segregated dancing, 110, and exoticism, 46
112, 120 and ghettos/marginalization,
self-stereotyping in, 118, 41–42, 45–46, 303n7
121–22, 123, 311nn9–10 Hall on, 238
sexuality and dance, and homelands, 8, 39–41,
109–12, 115 66–67, 302–3nn2–3 (see also
social relations displayed via, 80 Indian homeland)
stigma of professional female identity politics and the Romani
dancers, 109, 115, 119, rights movement, 44,
123, 218 47–48, 304n11, 304nn13–14
at weddings (see under Indian origins, 8
weddings) and migration, 40, 303n4
372 Index
music in the Romani rights Dule, 101
movement, 49–51, Dunin, Elsie, 32, 110, 112, 113,
304–5nn16–22 116–17, 119
overview of, 39–40, 221 Dŭrzhavna Atestatsionna
and the Roma label, 44, Komisiya (State Certifying
303–4n11 Commission; Bulgaria), 139
tensions/modalities within Dŭrzhavno Obedinenie Muzika
diasporas, 41 (State Music Society;
transnationalism and hybridity, Bulgaria), 139
41–44, 303n6, 303–4 Džafer, 36–37
nn8–11 Džajkovski, Kiril: “Raise Up Your
world music and hybridity, Hand,” 216
44–47, 151, 239 (see also Džambazi, 309n21
Romani music as world Džansever, 186, 271
music) “Astargja o horo,” 85
diasporic Romani communities. “Romani Čhaj Sijum,” 113
See Belmont; Šutka Džej, 328n22
di Leonardo, Micaela, 86 “Dželem Dželem,” 50–51, 169,
dimije (wide, billowing pants), 87, 188, 211, 261,
204, 208–9, 217 305nn21–22
Dimitrov, Alex, 235, 265, 267, Dželjadin, Gjulizar, 75, 88,
288–89 308n11, 309n21
Dimitrov, Evgeni: “Edinstveni,” Džemaloski, Trajče,
172–73, 186, 319n19 98, 232
Dimitrov, Kiril, 271 Dženo, 173
Dimitrovgrad (Bulgaria), 314n5 Dzhambazov, Marin, 30
Dimov, Ventsislav, 26, 33, 166, Dzhamgyoz, Halil, 135
315n16 Džipsi Aver, 34–35, 122
Dinkjian, Ara, 231 “Erdelezi,” 328n22
Dirlik, Arif, 40, 42–44, 46–47, džumaluk (first visit of bride’s
52–54, 303n5, 303n10, family to groom’s home),
305n23 95, 309n25
Ditchev, Ivaylo, 167–68, 196, džumbuš (type of lute), 31, 49
315n16, 315n20, 320n37
Divano Productions, 272, 326n4 Eastern Orthodoxy, 311n4
Djordjević, Tihomir, 21 East European Folklife Center,
Djoumahna, Kajira, 327n17 104, 105–6, 212
DJ remixes, 5–6, 280–89, 294, The Economist, 6
329–30nn31–42, 331 Egjupci or Egjupkjani, 295n1,
nn44–45 316n23see also Gjupci,
Dobrev, Matyo, 16, 136, 145, Egypt, hierarchy of entertainers
160, 167 in, 321n7
Dobreva, Binka, 321n5 Ekstra Nina, 158–59, 182
domazet (live-in son-in-law), Electric Gypsyland/Electric
74, 306n15 Gypsyland 2, 282–83, 284,
domestic-public split, 78, 89, 109, 287
111, 307n19, 308n14 Eleno Mome (a line dance), 114
Dosta, 50 Elfman, Danny, 254
Dosti (film), 304n17 Elit Center for Romani Culture
double cooptation, 196, 257 (Sofia, Bulgaria), 166,
drag and gender, 192 315n15
Drom, 105, 315n20 Ellington, Duke: “Caravan,”
drum set, 312n9 301n10
Index 373
elopement, 74, 77 European Roma Rights Centre
Emilia, 159, 183 (ERRC), 11, 297n21
“Zabravi,” 184, 318–19n17 European Union
Eminova, Enisa, 76, and Balkan identity, 320n37
306n17 Bulgaria’s membership in, 6, 12,
Encyclopedia of Gay 165, 172, 298n30
Folklife, 190 platform of, 298n30
Enev, Dragiya, 144 and the Romani human rights
engagement parties, 88, 96 movement, 11
ensemble dance groups, European Year of Equal
166, 171 Opportunities (Czech
See also čoček/kyuchek dance, Republic), 174, 317n33
as professional dance; and Eurovision, 172–74, 186, 187,
individual groups 216–17, 302n24, 313n2,
Erdžan, 36, 218, 271 316–17nn28–29
Erickson, Helene, 327n17 Eva Quartet, 159
Erik, 318n9 evil eye, 92, 94, 307n5
ERIO (European Roma “Evro,” 30
Information Office), 11 Evroroma, 188
Erkan, 173 Exclaim, 281
Ernst, Henry, 237, 250, 270, 287,
291, 324–25n13, 325–26n2, Fabri, Gaetano, 281
326n7 families, transnational, 19,
ERRC (European Roma Rights 59–81
Centre), 11, 297n21 bride’s reputation/virginity,
Ersoy, Bülent, 191, 319n28 74–77, 95, 306–7n17
Esma—Ansambl Teodosievski, definition of transnational,
31, 205, 209, 211. See also 59
Redžepova, Esma early emigration stories, 61–62,
Esma’s Band: “Džipsi Denz,” 217 305nn3–4
essentialism identity issues surrounding,
of appropriation, 274 66–71, 306nn7–11
Clifford on, 54–55 marriage in, 71–74,
and collective identity, 53 306nn13–15
demonization of, 52, 305n23 men’s role in, 77–78
and ethnic/cultural identity, 54, migration narrated in song,
243, 262 59–60
and multiculturalism, 18 Muslim practices by, 65–66
strategic, 51–52, 213–14 superintendent roles for free
ethics, individualistic vs. rent, 305n4
collective, 66 travel and keeping in touch with
ethnogenesis, 47 relatives, 60–61
ethnography, 15–17 videos used in the diaspora,
etničeski grupi (ethnic groups), 10, 79–81, 307n20
297n19 women’s power/knowledge in,
European Gypsy Festivals, 242, 71, 77–79, 88, 94, 109–10,
252, 266 306n14, 307n19
European Parliament, 13, 197, work and family life, 63–66
298n30, 321n39 Fanfare Ciocarlia, 287, 330n36
European Roma and Travellers “007,” 301n10
Forum, 11, 304n14 awards received by, 325n1
European Roma Information Baro Biao, 250
Office (ERIO), 11 in Borat, 290–91
374 Index
“Born To Be Wild,” 290–91 instruments, 131–32,
clothing of, 250–51 312n10 (see also
collaborations by, 270 specific instruments)
Gili Garabdi, 270–71, 301n10, schools for, 167, 315nn17–18
325–26n2 turbofolk, 177, 178–79, 319n22,
“Godzila,” 270–71 319n27
in the Gypsy Caravan tour, and wedding music, 132–33,
236, 243, 262 140, 156, 160, 162, 167,
Hollywood party performances 226, 312n12, 315n18
by, 254 See also chalga
managers of, 324–25n13 Folk Palitra, 314n7
manele dancers who tour with, Folk Panair, 153
116, 310n4 folk (new) vs. narodno
peasant image of, 249–50 (traditional) music, 178–79
popularity of, 269, 326n7 Foner, Nancy, 299n33
poverty of, 213 Fonseca, Isabel, 300n6
Queens and Kings, 270, 273, fortune tellers, 218–19, 258
325n2 Foster, Catherine, 233,
success of, 270 327n16
theatrical framing by, 247 Framework Program for Equal
Feld, Steven, 274, 276, 279, 282, Integration of the Roma in
286–88, 328n21, 330n37, Bulgarian Society, 12
332n48, 333n50 Fraser, Angus, 296n14
Fen (Bulgaria), 34 Friedman, Jonathan, 303n9
Festival Internazionale di Musica Friedman, Victor, 48, 301n15
Romani (Italy), 242 Frigyesi, Judit, 22
festivals. See Gypsy festivals and fRoots, 284
individual festivals Frula, 117–18
festivals, dance groups at. fusion genres, 5–6, 18, 166.
See čoček/kyuchek dance, See chalga; Gypsy Punk
as professional dance; and
individual groups Gabriel, Peter, 276, 328n21,
Festival Tzigane (France), 242 329n30
Filipovska, Jagoda, 93 gaida (bagpipe), 23, 31, 128
First World Festival of Romani Galičnik Wedding
Songs and Music (Macedonia), 170–72, 175,
(Chandigarh, India),211, 316n23
214 Gandhi, Indira, 211
First World Romani Congress Gardjian, 100
(London, 1971), 48, 50 Gaši, Džemailj, 36, 37
See also International Gaši, Nehat, 36
Romani Union Gaspar, Gyozo, 325n15
flags, 48, 51, 106, 309n21 Gatlif, Elsa, 250, 324n8
Flamenco Gatlif, Tony, 281, 324n8
dance, 180, 261–62, 265–66 Latcho Drom, 49, 151, 242,
as heritage, 316n25 243–44, 247, 258–59,
music, 35, 243, 259, 326n3 260, 275
Folk Kalendar, 153 Gaxha, Adrian, 216
Folklore TV, 162 Gaytandzhiev, Gencho, 168
Folklorna Grupa Trabotviše, Gay y Blasco, Paloma,
119 303n3
folk music gaze, 192–93, 320n33
Greek, 177 Gazoza, 33
Index 375
Gelbart, Petra, 50, 51, 305n21 gurbet/pečalba (working abroad),
gender 59, 103, 305n1
and dance, 87, 98, 109–15, 120 Gŭrdev, Nikolai, 314n14
(see čoček/kyuchek dance) “So Grešingjom,” 302n22
and drag, 192 Guy, Will, 47
inside world of women vs. Gypsies
outside world of men, authenticity of, 46
111, 308n14 conceptions/stereotypes of,
parody of, 5, 295n5 3, 67–69, 117–18, 123, 195,
and performance, 5, 192, 295n5 207–8, 217, 292, 311n6,
See also Azis; domestic-public 321–22n8
split; women fictional Gypsy musicians in
Georgiev, Lyudmil, 136 Western culture, 3, 7
Georgiev, Mihail, 301n11 hypersexualized female Gypsy
Georgiev, Nikolai, 154 body, 121, 123
Georgieva, Milica, 171, 316n24 orientalization/exoticization of,
“Germaniya,” 30 116, 292, 297n18
Gheorghe, Nicolae, 47, 304n13 as refugees, 14–15
Gieva, Anka, 206 vs. Roma, 295n1
Giguère, Hélène, 316n25 use of term “Gypsy,” 195, 255,
Gilroy, Paul, 42, 43, 46–47, 295n1
55–56, 246 See also Roma, Balkan
Gio Style, 26 Gypsy Caravan tour (1999)
Gipsy.cz, 174, 302n24 American response to, 263–64
Gipsy Festival (Holland), 242 caravan concept in, 258–59
Gipsy Kings, 26, 34–35 communication/camaraderie
Girgis, Mina, 259 among participants in,
Gitan/Gitanos, 48, 295n1, 316n25 260, 262
Gjupci, 66, 295n1 diversity vs. unity in, 260–62
Glick Schiller, Nina, 41, 303n6 “Dželem Dželem” rejected as
global imaginaries, 42–43 finale piece, 51
Glod (Romania), 290, 331–32n46 educational component of, 252
Gloria, 158–59, 179, 182, 318n14 exoticized marketing of, 244
Gnawa, 296n7 female musicians in, 321n2
Gočić, Goran, 253 finale for, 261–62
Gogol Bordello, 235, 264, 266, groups in, 235–36, 243, 260
280, 283–84, 325n1, marketing/publicity for,
330n31, 331n45 236–37, 249–50
Multi kontra culti vs. Irony, 265 program notes for, 255–56, 259
Gojković, Adrijana, 21 reception of, 260–62
Golden Wheel Film Festival, 170 vs. Romfest, 163
Goodman, Benny, 135 sponsorship of, 243
Gordon, Milton, 303n7 stereotypes used in, 236
Gostivar (Macedonia), 94 Together Again: Legends of
Grand Masters of Gypsy Music, Bulgarian Wedding Music,
232–33 161, 233
Greek music, 34, 231, 302n23 urban-rural dichotomy in, 236
Gropper, Rena, 71, 306n7, 306n9 Yuri Yunakov Ensemble in,
Gruevski, Nikola, 215 233–34
Grupi Sazet E Ohrit, 101 Gypsy Caravan troupe, 275
Guča brass band festival (Serbia), Gypsy festivals, 105, 235, 242,
324n3 247, 252, 266, 330n32, see
gŭdulka/kemene, 25 Romfest, Šutkafest
376 Index
Gypsy Punk music, 3, 20, Herdelezi (Herdeljezi, Erdelezi) (St.
43, 235 George’s Day), 32, 33, 83–84
and DJ remixes, 5–6, 280–89, Herdelezi festivals,
294, 329–30nn31–42, VOR-sponsored, 102–3,
331nn44–45 105, 232–34, 242–43, 287,
and the New York Gypsy 314n12, 331n42
Festival, 265–67 heritage, meanings of, 127, 171
popularity of, 264 heritage and the Bulgarian
Romani music appropriated by, socialist state, 19, 127–48
5–6 Bulgarization, 16–17, 127, 129,
Gypsy Queens, 321n2 299n39
The Gypsy Road, 259 category system for musicians,
Gypsy scale, 27–28, 301n12 139–40, 152
Gypsy Spirit (2004), 118, 243, “fascist” families, 139, 313n25
253–54, 314n7, 324n4, the free market and state
324n10, 326n9 control, 137–40, 148,
Gypsy TV (www.gypsytv.tv; Sofia, 313nn21–25
Bulgaria), 34, 311n12 in inclusion vs. exclusion in the
nation/state, 127
Habibi and Malki Kristalcheta: meanings of heritage, tradition,
“Yak Motoru,” 330n34 and folk, 127, 171
Hagopian, Harold, 236–37, 251, Muslim emigration to Turkey,
323n9 130
hairstyles/hairdressers, name-changing campaign,
309n19 129–30, 142, 226, 228,
Hajgara, 283 323n6
Halili, Merita, 102, 231–32, official rhetoric of purity, 129,
323n8 140–45
“Erdelezi,” 328n22 overview of, 127
Hall, Stuart, 7, 55–56, 238 resistance to state policy, 127,
Hancock, Ian, 8, 15, 106, 173, 246, 128–30, 143–45, 147, 148,
253, 296n14, 300n6 228, 292–93, 311n3
Handler, Richard, 53 state ambivalence, 145–48,
Handzhiev, Ivan, 167 313nn26–29
Hannibal records, 149 Turkish resistance to state
Hanson, Allan, 53 policy, 129–30
Hapazov, Ibryam. See Papazov, Ivo wedding music (1970s–1989),
Harrington, David, 326–27n10 131–33, 311–12nn7–12
Haskovo (Bulgaria), 224, 227, zurna and the anti-Muslim
229–30, 314n3, 314n5 campaign (1980s), 128–30,
hate speech, 11, 297n21 141, 311nn3–4, 311n6 (ch.
A Hawk and a Hacksaw, 280 7)
The Way the Wind Blows, See also Papazov, Ivo;
331n44 wedding music, Bulgarian;
“Hazart,” 30 Yunakov, Yuri
Head On (film), 270 heritage movements, indigenous, 54
hedgehogs, 324n5 Herzfeld, Michael, 51–52, 127,
Heller, Andre, 242 129, 145, 147, 296n8,
henna 320n38
ceremonies/rituals involving, hicaz, 27–28, 180, 191–92, 278,
88–91, 96–97, 111, 308n13, 300n6
308–9n16 hidden vs. public transcripts,
use in different cultures, 308n13 228–29
Index 377
Hindi language, 49 issues surrounding
hip-hop music, 122 transnational families,
Hleda Superstar competition, 173 66–71, 306nn7–11
Hobsbawm, Eric, 53 and modernity, 44, 81
Hollander, Marc, 249–50, 256, Native American, 56
282–83, 285, 331n41 and performance, 4–5, 41
Holocaust, 39, 48, 51, 169, 197 Romani rights movement and
homelands, 39–41, 55, 66–67, 196, the politics of, 44, 47–48,
291, 302–3nn2–3 304n11, 304nn13–14
See also Indian homeland of Yuri Yunakov (see under
Home of Humanity and Yunakov, Yuri)
Museum of Music, 215 See also diaspora, hybridity, and
honor, 109, 202 identity
hooks, bell, 52 Identity, Tradition, and
Horahane (Muslim), 306n8 Sovereignty, 197
horo (village dance event), igranka (dance party), 91–93,
160, 312n12 309nn19–20
Hristov, Krasimir, 181 Ilhan, Serdar, 235, 265
Hristovski, Jonče, 93 Ilić, Slobodan, 304n17
Huna, Elvis, 76, 77, 322n13 Iliev, Boril, 136
Hungarian Governmental Office Iliev, Jony, 269,
of Equal Opportunity, 272, 289
Directorate of Romani “Godzila,” 270–71, 272
Integration, 253 Ma Maren Ma, 325–26n2
Hungary, 130, 253, 297n22 Iliev, Nikola, 134, 136, 139, 157,
Hungry March Band, 264, 265 313n26
Husein, Husein. See Yunakov, Yuri Iliyan, 318n9
Hutnyk, John, 43, 44–46, 252, 329n27 Imam li Dobŭr Kŭsmet (Džipsi
Hutz, Eugene, 235, 264–65, Aver), 35
266–67, 280, 281, 285, 287, immigration, 14, 15
329–30n31, 331n42 imperialist nostalgia, 45, 246
hybridity Imre, Anikó, 166, 174,
transnationalism and, 41–44, 196, 248, 257, 293,
303n6, 304n8–11 302n24, 325n15
world music and, 44–47, 151, 239 inbetweenness, 42–43
See also diaspora, hybridity, and Indian homeland, 23, 39–40, 165,
identity 191, 243, 259–60
Hyseni, Raif, 102, 231–32, 323n8 Indian music and films, 49,
304nn16–17, 305n19
Iag Bari: Brass on Fire, 250, 291, indigenous rights movements, 48
310n4, 324n7 See also Romani rights
Iagori festival (Norway, 2005), 242 movement
Ibrahim, Sali, 315n15 “Indiiski” scales, 305n19
Ibraim Odža (a line dance), 114 interethnic relations, Gallup poll
Ibraimov, Muren, 101 on, 196
Ibro Lolov: Ciganski Pesni, 311n6 intermarriage, 71–72, 205
identity International Roma Day
African American, 55–56 (April 8), 33, 50, 119, 170,
Balkan, 195, 320nn37–38 243
Balkan vs. European, 195, 320n37 International Romani Union
in Belmont, 66–71 (IRU), 11, 47, 48, 50,
essentialized identities, 51–53 304n14, 305n21
ethnic/cultural, 54, 243, 262 invented traditions, 53
female, 86 Ionitsa, 247, 256, 326n8
378 Index
IRU. See International Romani Julliard Conservatory, 104
Union Južni Kovači, 37
Isakut, Hasan 231, 232
Ishida, Masataka, 250 K88 (cable television channel),
Islam 183
Bulgarian anti-Muslim kaba zurna, 28
campaign (1980s), 128–30, Kaffe, 317n29
141, 311nn3–4, 311n6 Kal, 251, 255, 269, 270, 277,
(ch. 7) 326n4
conversions to, 8–9, 296n15 Kal, 325n2
revitalization of, 66, 306n6 Radio Romanista, 325n2
on women as sexual, Kalbelia dancers, 247
110 Kalcheva, Mariana, 181
Islami, Kurte, 99, 101 Kalcheva, Ruska, 321n5
Islami, Ramiz, 98, 101, 102, 104, Kalcheva, Slavka, 158–59, 182,
105, 232 318n7
Islami, Redžep, 101 Kalderash Roma. See Roma,
Islami, Romeo, 101 Kalderash
Islamic Center (Belmont, Bronx, Kaliopi, 216
New York), 66 Kalji Jag, 235–36
Ismail, Ferhan, 102 Kalman Balogh Gypsy Cimbalom
“Gurbeti,” 59 Band, 324n10
Ismaili, Kujtim, 98, Ušte Opre, 263
101, 232 Kaloome: “Que Dolor,” 273
Ismaili, Muamed, 101 Kalyi Jag, 243, 321n5
Israeli music, 231 Kamburov, Mancho, 128
“Isuara,” 30 kana. See henna
Ivana, 159, 162, 182 Kanarite, 184, 314n8
Ivancea, Ioan, 291 “Ah Lyubov, Lyubov,” 159
Ivanova, Lili: “Vyatŭr,” 187 “Biznesmen,” 158
Ivanovski, Blago, 206 “Bŭlgarski Cheda,” 159
Ivo Barev/Asiba Kemalova: Kanarite, 98, 158
Tsiganski Pesni, 311n6 Muzika s Lyubov, 160
Na Praznik i v Delnik, 159
Jackman, Robert, 281 Ne Godini, A Dirya, 159
Jackson, Michael, 328n21 Nie Bŭlgarite, Kanarite 25
Jackson, Michael, imitators of, Godini, 158–59
122 “Nie Sme Kanarite,” 159
Janev, Georgi, 155 popularity of, 157
Janković sisters, 118 “Pravoslavno Horo,” 159
Jankuloski, Toni, 104, 105 recordings by/repertoire of,
Jašarov, Ilmi, 32 158
jazz, 135, 136, 329n28 S Ritŭma Na Vremeto, 159
Jeni Jol (a line dance), 114 St. George’s Day concert, 162
Jerrari, Al, 281 Traditsiya, Stil, Nastroeniye,
Jewish diaspora, 39 159
Johnson, E. Patrick, 332n48 vs. Trakiya, 160
Jones, Russ, 284–85 kanun (type of zither), 31
Balkan Bangers, 282, Kapchan, Deborah, 4–5, 295n4,
330n32 296n7
Gypsy Beats, 282, 330n32 Kaplan, Ori, 280–81, 282, 283,
Jones, Simon, 329n28 286–87, 330n31
Joro-Boro, 267–68 Karafezieva, Maria, 143, 154, 160,
Jovanović, Jarko, 50 289, 313n18, 321n5
Index 379
Karlov, Boris, 165 Koev, Kristian, 190
Karo, Stephane, 250, 256, 272, Kolev, Nikolai, 144–45
283, 324n13, 326n5, 326n7 Kolev, Todor, 302n20
Kasamov, Victor, 320n35 Kolo (Serbian State Ensemble):
Kaufman, Nikolai, 140, 157, Vranje, 116–17, 310n5
312n12 Kolpakov, Sasha, 256, 262
kaval (type of flute), 23, 31 Kolpakov, Vadim, 266, 287
Kayah, 328n22 Kolpakov Trio, 235, 243, 269
Kazakov, Radi, 136 Kondyo, 318n9
Keba (Dragan Koyć): “Idem Idem Konushenska Grupa, 134, 139, 157
Dušo Moja,” 304n17 Kopanari, 25
Keil, Charles, 328n21, 329n29, Koprivshtitsa festival, 167
333n50 Kosovo Roma, 13, 242–43,
“Kemano Bašal,” 50, 305n20 298n31, 327n15
kemene/gŭdulka, 25 “Koštana,” 207
Kenrick, Donald, 50 “Kote Isi Amalalen,” 94, 95
Keranova, Nedyalka, 133, 162, Kotel school, 30, 144
318n7 Kracholov, Aleksandŭr,
kerava bijav (putting on a 163
wedding), 86 Kristal, 34, 156
Kertesz-Wilkinson, Iren, 26 “Bashtinata Kŭshta,” 180
Khajuraho (North India), 191, “Bŭlgarina v Evropa,” 181
319n29 “Chudesen Sŭn,” 180
Khalnayak (film), 191 “Dobro Utro,” 180
Khamoro festival (Prague), 163, “Karavana Chayka,” 180
242, 324n3 Maika India, 304n16
King of the Gypsies (Maas), 67 Maria’s collaboration
kinwork, 86 with, 185
Kiossev, Alexander, 195, 320n38 “Ne Smenyai Kanala,” 185
Kirilov, Kalin, 132, 136, 145, 233, “Sladka Rabota,” 181
302n23, 319n22 “Svatba,” 180
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, Vsichko e Lyubov, 180–81
5, 41–42, 248, 292 “Zvezditse Moya,” 180
kissing hands of elders, 91, 99 Kristali, 34, 166, 330n34
Kisslinger, Jerry, 233 “Godzila,” 271–72,
Kitić, Mile, 301n17 326n6
Kjuperlika, 118 “Ne Smenyai Kanala,” 185
Klezmer All Stars, 235, 270 “Red Bula,” 283
Kličkova, Vera, 171, 316n24 “Telefoni,” 185
Know the Ledge, 283 transnational reputation of,
Kočani Brass Band/Orkestar, 263, 271
272, 277, 282, 284, 287, 289 krivo horo, 132, 312n11
“Erdelezi,” 328n22 Kronos Quartet, 326–27n10
Harmana Ensemble and Kočani Krst Rakoc (film), 322n11
Orkestar, 326n5 Krŭstev, Angel, 128
Kočani Orkestar meets Paola KUD (Kulturno Umetničko
Fresu and Salis Antonello, Društvo), 68, 101, 118–19,
326n5 170, 306n12
The Ravished Bride, 325n2 See also Phralipe
köçek (professional male dancer), Ku-Ku, 172
107, 112 Kulturno Umjetnčko Društvo. See
Kočo Racin, 68, 103, 171 KUDs
Kodály, Zoltán, 300n4 Kultur Shock, 264, 280
380 Index
Kŭneva, Radostina, 156 Lucerne festival (1995), 242, 244,
Kunstler, Agnes, 321n5 246, 261
Kurban Bajrami (festival of Lumanovski, Ismail (“Smajko”),
sacrifice), 83 102, 103, 104–5, 235, 266
“Kŭrdzhaliisko Horo,” 146 Lumanovski, Remzi, 104
Kŭrdzhali school, 30, 135 Luminescent Orchestrii, 267
Kurkela, Vesa, 178, 180 Lynskey, Dorian, 286, 294
Kurtiš, Tunan, 100, 211
Kurtov, Samir, 24 Maas, Peter: King of the Gypsies,
Kusturica, Emir, 242 67
Black Cat, White Cat, 324n2 Macedonia
Time of the Gypsies, 258, 277, as Decade of Roma Inclusion
324n2, 332n47 signatory, 297n22
Underground, 275–76, 324n2 European Union membership
Kutev, Filip, 129 of, 6, 169
Kuti, 30 independence of, 14, 306n11
kyuchek. See čoček/kyuchek Indian culture in, 49, 304n16
Macedonians vs. Albanians,
Laço Tayfa, 36 298n24
Lady Gaga, 190 multiculturalism in, 169
Ladysmith Black Mambazo, prejudice in, 213
328n21 recording industry in, 33
Graceland, 276, 328n19 Romani political parties in,
Lambov, Slavcho, 324n10, 326n9 215
Landler, Mark, 298n32 Romani population in, 11,
Lassiter, Luke, 15 297n23
Latcho Drom (T. Gatlif), 49, 151, Romani rights in, 11–12, 254
242, 243–44, 247, 258–59, Romani television stations in, 33
260, 275 UNESCO application of,
Lawless, Elaine, 15 170–72, 316n22, 316nn24–
Lazarevska, Tatjana, 179 25
Lazarov Records (Bulgaria), virginity test in, 76
34, 152 See also Šutka
Lee, Ken, 297n18 Macedonian Association of
Lemon, Alaina, 122, 257, 268, Romani Women, 215
303n3 Macedonian language, xiii–xiv
Lenovska Grupa, 139, 141 Macedonian National Radio and
lesbianism, taboo against, 190 Television, 169
Lesno (a line dance), 114, 115 See also Ballet Troupe of
Leviev, Milcho, 135 Macedonian Television
Levski, Vasil, 190 Mačev, Bilhan, 36, 100, 211
Levy, Claire, 195–96, 315n16 Madonna, 3, 182, 190, 266, 269,
Lindsey, Traci, 318n10 274
Linnekin, Jocelyn, 53 Maestro (television program),
Lipsitz, George, 279 120
lip synching, 157, 189 mafia, 34, 155, 160, 181, 229–30
Liszt, Franz, 299–300n4 Magazin, 216
Livni, Eran, 166–67 Magdolna, Ruzsa: “Erdelezi,” 277
Lolov, Ibro, 27, 33, 165, Magneten, 242
301–2n20 Mahala Rai Banda, 262, 269
Lomax, Alan, 329n30 Electric Gypsyland 2, 325n2
London, Frank, 216, 235, 270 Ghetto Blasters, 325n2
Lucassen, Leo, 304n15 “Red Bul,” 283
Index 381
Mahmud, Muzafer, 89–90, “V Drug Svyat Zhiveya,” 187
308–9nn15–16 “Vinovni Sme,” 187
Mahmut, Oskar, 323n22 Vreme Spri, 188
Maia Meyhane (East Village, New “Vyatŭr,” 187
York City), 103, 235, 265 markets, postsocialist, 149–163,
Majovci clan, 171 286
makams (Turkish-derived modes/ Marković, Boban, 25, 188, 270,
scales), 27–28, 31, 301n13 275, 282, 301n10
Malakov, Mladen, 136 on Bregović, 276
Malikov, Anzhelo, 27, 33–34, 130, Devla, 325n2
138, 151, 164–66, 314n14 Marković, Branko: Vranje, 116–17,
Malikov, Yashar, 27, 33, 130 119, 310n5
Malina: “Ne Se Sramuvan,” 194 Marković, Marko: Devla, 325n2
Malkki, Lisa, 41 marriage, 71–74, 306nn13–15
Malvinni, David, 27 See also intermarriage,
Mamudoski, Sal, 103, 232–33, weddings
235, 289 Marushiakova, Elena, 12, 48,
manele (music), 194–95, 236, 245, 298n31, 305n21, 307n3,
262–63, 272, 273, 326n7, 315n16
327n11 Massey, Douglas, 40
manele/mahala (dance), 116, Masterpiece of Oral and
310nn3–4 Intangible Heritage of
mane/taksim, 27–28, 180, 209, 210 Humanity, 170–72, 316n22,
manglardi čhaj (asked-for girl), 74 316nn24–25
Maqellara, Haxhi, 232 Matras, Yaron, 8, 48
the marginal as exotic, 248 Mavrovska, Dafinka and Dragica, 206
Maria (chalga star), 182, 183, 185 Mefailov, Vehbi, 100
Maria Theresa, Empress, 8 Megasztar (Hungary), 174
Marinova, Sofi (“Romska Perla”), Mehanata (New York City), 103,
168, 172–73, 184, 185–188, 232–33, 235, 265, 267, 281,
270, 304n16, 316–17nn28–29 288–89
5 Oktava Lyubov, 186 meter
“Ah Lele,” 188 2/4 meter, 29, 32, 112, 114,
“Bate Shefe,” 186–87 136, 158–59, 177, 180, 217,
“Buryata v Sŭrtseto Mi,” 186–87 312n11, 326n7
“Danyova Mama,” 172–3, 185–86 4/4 meter, 29, 49–50, 177,
“Dželem Dželem,” 188 305n20, 326n7
“Edinstveni,” 172–73, 186, 5/16 meter, 312n11
319nn19–20 7/8 meter
“Edin Zhivot Ne Stiga,” 193–94 for čoček, 112, 114
and the Eurovision scandal, fast, light forms of, (lesno),
186, 187 28, 114
“Lyubov li Be,” 186–87 folklore evoked by, 180
“Lyubovta e Otrova,” 187, on Planeta Folk, 162
319nn21–22 rŭchenitsa, 132, 312n11
“Mik Mik”, 188 slower forms of, 28
“Moy si Dyavole,” 186–87 variations of, 29
Ostani, 187 9/8 meter, 28, 29, 112, 114, 136,
and Slavi Trifonov, 172–73, 187 158–59, 177, 301n14
Studen Plamŭâ•›k, 187 10/8 meter, 231
“Tochno Ti,” 186–87 11/16 meter, 312n11
“Ušest,” 186 migration
“Vasilica,” 188 difficulties of, 13, 298n32
382 Index
linear, 243, 258–59, 291 MTV 2 (Macedonia), 33
narrated in song, 59–60 Muabet Bez Parsa (radio
to the United States, 13–15, program), 34
299nn33–34 (see also multiculturalism
Belmont) commercial manipulation of, 43
See also diaspora, hybridity, and Disney version of, 45
identity; Latcho Drom by music promoters, 252–53
Milchev-Godzhi, Georgi: Romani diversity, 47
“Edinstveni,” 172–73, 186, selective, 71, 306n7
319n19 Müren, Zeki, 191, 319n28
Milena (Bulgaria), 34 Musafir/Maharaja, 235, 243–44,
Milev, Atanas, 311–12n8 259–60
Milev, Ivan, 136, 225–26, 227, 233, Musa Mosque (Belmont, Bronx,
301n10, 312n12 New York), 65–66
Milivojević, B., 304n17 music idol contests, 172–75,
Miller, Carol, 71, 306n7, 306n9 316–17nn27–29, 317n31,
millet system, 8 317n33
minstrel shows, 330n35 Musiciens du Nil, 260
Minune, Adrian (“Adrian the Muskat, Tamir, 282, 330n31,
Wonder Boy”), 319n26 330–31n38
Mirga, Andrzej, 47, 304n13 Mustafa, Neždet, 298n24
Mirković, Dragana, 301n17 Mustafov, Ferus, 100, 119, 120,
“Sama,” 192 133
Miro: “Gubya Kontrol Kogato,” 194 “Tikino,” 32
Miss Roma International contest, Mustafov, Ilmi, 32
170 Mustafovska, Eleonora, 217
Mitev, Delcho, 158 mutresa (well-kept woman),
Mitsou: “Erdelezi,” 328n22 318n11
Mixolydian scales, 305n19 Muzafer, Abas: “To Phurano
Mladeshki Tants (young person’s Bunari,” 60
dance), 150–51 Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares,
Mladi Talenti, 33 150
Mladost, 136, 146, 225
modern dance, 32–33, 119–20, 210 “Naktareja Mo Ilo Phanlja,” 28,
modernity 217, 323n22
alternative, 238 nardonosti (nationalities), 10,
amplified music associated 297n19
with, 131, 248–49 narodi (nations), 10, 297n19
and authenticity, 54, 251–52 Nasev, Nick, 187–88, 320n34,
and chalga, 159 322n14
and cosmopolitanism, 44 našli čhaj (runaway girl), 74
and identity, 44, 81 Nasmi’ler, 34
and tradition, 55, 247–48 National Committee on Ethnic
Modern Quartet, 284 and Demographic Affairs
modesty, 109–10, 118, 120, 123, (Bulgaria), 166
202, 218–19 National Council for
monkey leaders, 25 Cooperation on Ethnic
Monson, Ingrid, 329n28 and Demographic Issues
Montenegro, 297n22 (NCCEDI; Bulgaria), 12
Movement for Rights and National Ensemble of Folk Music
Freedoms (MRF; Turkish and Dance (Bulgaria), 129
party; Bulgaria), 298n25 Native American filmmaking,
MTV, 180, 318n8 307n20
Index 383
Native American identity, 56 Novi Sad (Vojvodina, Serbia),
Nay-Dobri Kyuchetsi ot Mahalata, 115, 245
183 novokomponovana narodna
NCCEDI (National Council for muzika (newly composed
Cooperation on Ethnic folk music), 25–26, 177,
and Demographic Issues; 178–79
Bulgaria), 12 Novoselsky, Valery, 51
N’Dour, Youssou, 238 NY Gypsy All-Stars, 105
Neascu, Nicolae, 236, 256
Nelina, 158–59, 162, 182 Obama Kyucheck, Barack, 30,
Neshev, Neshko, 30 301n15
on Gypsy Caravan tour, 233–34, O Clone (television program),
326n8 119
and Papazov, 135 Ogneni Ritmi (Sofia, Bulgaria),
recordings of, 160 130
stature of, 136 “Oj Borije,” 28, 94, 97
in Trakiya, 134, 136 Okely, Judith, 5, 218–19,
and the Yuri Yunakov 304n15
Ensemble, 233 Okka, Sali, 34, 166
Neshev, Neshko, 30 Olah, Ibolya, 174
in Kanarite, 158, 314n8 “Olimpiada,” 30, 133
Kŭrdzhali style of, 30 OMFO: Trans Balkan Express,
Neumann, Helmut, 237, 250, 270, 283–84
324–25n13, 326n7 Ong, Aihwa, 42, 258, 268
Newsweek, 269 Ongeni Momčinja, 33
New York Black Sea Roma “Open Heart” children’s festival, 169
Festival, 235 Open Society Institute, 11, 76,
New York City 166, 168–69, 315n20
blaga rakija banquets in, 99, Orce Nikolov, 68, 103
310n28 Ordulu, Gamze, 235
Herdelezi celebrations in, 84 Orfei, 136, 154–55, 157–58, 162
Macedonian Roma in, 13–15, Mafia ot India, 304n16
299nn33–34 (see also Organization for Security and
Belmont) Cooperation in Europe, 11
videotaping in, 79–80 Orkestŭr Plovdiv, 314n7
weddings in, 99, 308n12 Orkestŭr Universal, 34, 36–37,
New York Gypsy Festivals, 105, 163, 271, 326n6
235, 243, 265–67, 330n32 oro, 114, 115
See Belmont Ortner, Sherry, 7, 145, 228, 237
New York Times, 264 Oruçi, Vera, 232
NGOs (nongovernmental otherness, 116, 121, 123, 245, 258,
organizations), 11, 12, 282
167–69, 168 Ottoman dancers, 107, 108, 112,
Nieuwkerk, Karin van, 321n7 116, 123, 191, 209, 218,
nihavent, 27–28 327n211
nomadism, 8, 296n14 Ottoman Empire, 8, 24, 31, 44,
nongovernmental organizations. 107, 108, 195, 223, 226, 258
See NGOs
Nonini, Donald, 42, 268 Paicho, 154
Northern Romani dialect, paidushko (a line dance), 132,
296n13 312n11
northern style of Romani clarinet Pamporovo, Alexey, 315n16
playing Pamukov, Orlin, 136, 154
nostalgia 30, 45, 246 Panair/Fairground, 314n4
384 Index
pan-Romani human rights self-censorship by, 147
movement. See Romani Song of the Falcon, 301n10
rights movement on Stambolovo festivals, 152
Papazov, Ivo (formerly Ibryam on state constraints on music,
Hapazov), 16, 17 141
arrest/imprisonment of, Together Again: Legends of
142–43, 145 Bulgarian Wedding Music,
awards received by, 325n1 161, 233
BBC Radio 3 award won by, on tour, 151, 161
161 in Trakiya, 134, 136, 160
bitterness of, 161–62 wage labor resisted by, 139
and Boyd, 149–50, 161 on wedding music, 141, 143,
on capitalism and the economic 156–57, 312n12
crisis, 153 and Yuri Yunakov, 225, 227,
“Celeste,” 152, 314n4 233–34
on chalga, 156 Paradox Trio, 105
clarinet played by, 235, 266 Pareles, Jon, 329n30
on corruption, 155–56 parsa (tip collection), 138
on critics of wedding music, 157 Party for the Complete
Dance of the Falcon, 161 Emancipation of Roma
on democracy vs. socialism, (PCER; Macedonia), 170,
155–56 298n24
ethnicity of, 141–42 Pasalan, 250
ethnic variety/tastes among Paskov, Dimitŭr, 30, 136
patrons of, 301n16 Paskova, Poli, 318n14
gaida imitations on clarinet, 132 “Moiite Pesni,” 162
and Gogol Bordello, 235 pativ (respect) vs. ladž (shame),
on Gypsy Caravan tour, 233–34 109–10
on Gypsy Punk music, 266 patriarchy, 74, 77, 85, 88, 94,
influence of, 101 109–10
Kŭrdzhali style of, 30 Payner (Bulgaria), 34, 152, 155,
legends surrounding, 135–36 157–58, 162–63, 179,
Anzhelo Malikov on, 164 182–83, 318n11
musical family/upbringing of, See also Planeta Folk, Planeta
135, 141, 312n16 Prima, and Planeta TV
“A Musical Stroll Around pazari za muzikanti (musicians’
Bulgaria,” 132 markets), 137–38
and Ferus Mustafov, 32, 133 PCER (Party for the Complete
name change of, 142 Emancipation of Roma;
on the NATO concert, 161 Macedonia), 170,
in the New York Gypsy Festival, 298n24
266 peasantry, marketing of, 249–50,
on Payner, 182 324n8
“Pinko,” 30, 133, 300–301n10 pečalba/gurbet (working abroad),
police evasion by, 143–44, 161 59, 103, 305n1
popularity in Bulgaria, 161–62 Pengas, Avram, 231
popularity/stature of, 134–36 pentatonic scales, 305n19
recordings of, 146–47, 160, Pepper, Art, 134–35, 312n15
313n26 performance
reunion tours with Yuri Judith Butler on, 5, 192, 194,
Yunakov, 161 295n5
robbed at gunpoint, 155 definition of, 4
and Salieva, 108 framework of, 4–5
and Salifoski, 105 and gender, 5, 192, 295n5
Index 385
performance (continued) pornography, 121, 182, 311n8
and identity, 4–5, 41 porrajamos (Holocaust), 48
Kapchan on, 4–5, 295n4 See also Holocaust
as power, 228 postmodernists, 274, 329n27
subjectivities created via, 5, postsocialist markets/festivals, 19,
296n7 149–75
Petrova, Dimitrina, 9 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 5
Petrović, Aleksandar: Skupljači Prashtakov, Todor, 146
Perja, 50 pravo horo, 132, 144, 312n11
Petrovski, Trajko, 10, 297n20 Prespa Albanian Macedonians,
Pettan, Svanibor, 26, 31, 108, 111, 101, 307n7, 321n5
119, 202, 304n17, 327n15 Prilep (Macedonia), 14, 62, 69–70,
Peycheva, Lozanka, 26, 30, 33, 309n21
114, 166, 302n21, 314n14, privatization, 5–6, 166
315n16, 317n4 Proeski, Toše, 322n14
“Phirava Daje,” 30 “Erdelezi,” 218
Phralipe, 32, 68, 103–4, 118–19, “Magija”/“Čini,” 217
170, 203 prostitution, 182, 318n11
Phrygian scales, 27–28, 180, 209, Protestant work ethic, 9
210 prvić (first visit of bride to her
“Pinko,” 30, 133, 300–301n10 natal home), 95
pipiza. See zurna/zurla public vs. hidden transcripts,
Piranha, 270, 326n4 228–29
Pirin Ensemble, 128 purity
Pirin Folk/Fest, 177, 317n3 ghettoization of, 46
Pirin Pee folk festival, 128, of Gypsy music, 164–66,
129, 167 285–86
Planeta Folk (cable television vs. hybridity, 42
channel), 162–63 myth of, 303n9
Planeta Prima, 317n1 rhetoric of, 129, 140–45
Planeta TV (Bulgaria), 34, 182–84, See also authenticity
318n16 Pŭrvanov, Georgi, 161, 165
Plovdiv (Bulgaria), 137, 139, Pŭrvomayskata Grupa, 312n8
143–44, 157, 158, 313n28, Putevima Pesme: Esma Ansambl
314n5 Teodosievski, 322n11
Plovdiv Academy, 132, 144–45, Pygmies, 332n48
167, 302n23, 315n17
Plovdiv Folk Jazz Band, 149, Qur’an, 311n4
313n1
Pointon, Matt, 318n13 racial profiling, 11
political parties, Roma, 11, racism toward Roma, 6, 69–70,
298nn24–25 168, 173, 196–97, 207,
Pomaks (Bulgarian Muslims), 170, 320–21n39
215, 224, 311n3, 315n19 Radev, Petko, 157, 158, 302n20,
Popaj, Alfred, 103, 232–33, 235 313n26
pop/folk music. See chalga Radić, Indira, 179,
Pop Idol competition, 173–74 304n16
Popov, German, 283–84 Radio Signal Plyus, 34, 153
Popov, Vesselin, 12, 48, 305n21, Radio Skopje, 31, 93, 203, 204,
307n3, 315n16 206–7, 308n16
Popstar Alaturka contest, 173 Radio Veselina, 34, 153
Popularni Trakiiski Klarinetisti, Radulescu, Speranta, 273
313n26 Rahmanovski, Džengis, 103
386 Index
Rahmanovski, Ilhan, 102, “Dani Su Bez Broja,” 216
103, 105 dimije worn by, 204, 208–9,
Rajasthani music, 49, 236, 243, 217, 251
259–61, 326n3 “Dželem Dželem,” 50, 51, 169,
Rajasthani Roma, 247, 259–61, 211
326n3 early years of, 202–5
Ralchev, Petŭr, 136, 143, 154, 155, emotion used by, 208–9
157, 227, 302n20 in Esma—Ansambl
Ramadanov, Zahir, 211, 212, Teodosievski, 31, 205,
249 209, 211
Ramazan (fasting month), 83 Esma’s Band, 217
Ramko (Ramadan Bislim): “O Esma’s Dream: Esma and Duke,
Gurbetluko,” 59–60 216
“Ramo Ramo,” 49, 304n17 family of, 202–5
Ranger, Terence, 53 and Fanfare Ciocarlia, 262
Rao, Pratima, 327n12 in films, 209–10, 257, 322n11
rap music in the Gypsy Caravan tour,
and the authenticity of the 243, 262
ghetto, 248 Gypsy persona of, 46
and chalga, 186–87, 319n20 “Hajri Ma Te, Dikhe, Daje,” 208
in pop/folk videos, 122 Indian ties of, 211
in Romani, 26, 34–35 “Kolku e Mačno em Žalno,”
stereotypes used in, 302n24 210
Rašidov, Eljam, 211 Legendi na Makedonska
Rasimov, Enver, 211, 322n10 Narodna Pesna, 216
Rasmussen, Ljerka Vidić, 25–26 “Ljubov e,” 216
Raznatović, Ceca, 179 “Magija”/“Čini,” 217
reciprocity, 79, 93 “Makedo,” 210
Recommendations on the and Marinova, 186
Safeguarding of Traditional Mon Histoire, 216
Culture (UNESCO), 170 multiethnic socialist agenda
“Red Bul,” 283, 330n34 embodied in her music, 46
red color, 92 “Naktareja Mo Ilo Phanlja,” 28,
Redžepova, Esma, 20, 32, 217, 323n22
201–19 overview of success of, 201
artistic control by, 214, 249 patriotism of, 324n9
on assimilation, 252 performances with her
on authenticity, 214–15, 248 husband, 321n5
awards received by, 215 Pesmom i Igrom Kroz
“Bašal Seljadin,” 206, 208, Jugoslaviju, 210
209–10 as a pioneer, 207, 209,
“Bel Den,” 216 214, 218
on belly dancing, 120 and Proeski, 311n9
on Bregović, 275–76 politics/humanitarianism of,
“Čhaje Šukarije” 31, 35, 209–10, 212–16, 217, 218, 322n14
275–76, 290, 322n11 as Queen of Romani Music,
Chaje Shukarije, 216 201, 211, 214
“Ciganski Čoček,” 209–10 racism/prejudice faced by, 46,
collaborations by/current 321–22n8
directions of, 216–19, 270, “Raise Up Your Hand,” 216
323n22 relationship with Stevo, 204–6,
criticism of, 248 209–10
dancing by, 119, 120, 208–9, 210 respectability of, 109
Index 387
Redžepova (continued) conceptions/stereotypes of, 3,
retirement of, 217 9, 207–8 (see also under
Romani identity of/songs sung Gypsies)
in Romani by, 206–7 diasporic communities of (see
Romani reception of, 205 Belmont; Šutka)
“Romano Horo,” 210 dichotomous conceptions of, 3
at Romska Vasilica, 202 discrimination against, 8, 10–
on segregated dancing, 110 11, 47, 69–70, 152, 206–7,
stereotypes in her videos, 255–56, 292, 297n21
121–22, 311n9 Eastern Orthodox, 9
stereotypes of her by the press, educational integration of
207, 321–22n8 Romani children, 168,
and Stevo’s music school, 315n20
211–12, 322n13 vs. Gypsies, 295n1
style and image of, 205–11, historical and political overview
214–15, 321–22n8, 322n11 of, 7–13, 296nn13–15,
Šutkafest involvement of, 297nn18–19, 297–98nn21–
169–70 25, 298nn31–32
synthesizer used by, 248, 252 homophobia among, 306n13
as visiting artist in New York, Indian origins of, 39, 40, 49–50,
100, 101 55, 211, 304nn15–17,
wedding performances by, 93 305n19
on women’s čoček dancing, vs. Kalderash Roma, 66, 306n7
113 marginalization/poverty of, 11,
Yugoslavian and other Balkan 45–46, 218–19, 254, 274,
songs sung by, 210–11 292, 331–32n46
Reinhardt, Django, 328n24 media emancipation of, 302n21
representation in fieldwork and migration of, difficulties of, 13,
writing, 7, 15–17 298n32
resistance, everyday forms of, 147, migration to the United States,
228–29 13–15, 298n32, 299nn33–34
Rice, Timothy, 132–33, 314n8 (see also Belmont)
The Riches (television program), multilingual, 9, 297n17
67 Muslim, 8–9, 13
Rifati, Šani, 205, 213–14, 217, nomadic vs. sedentary, 8, 10, 22,
234–35, 242, 248–49, 47, 111, 259, 296n14
254–55, 287, 292 oppression of/xenophobia
See also Voice of Roma toward, 6, 8, 9–11, 13,
Ristić, Dragan, 255, 292, 325n14 297n21 (see also Holocaust)
Ristić, Dušan, 251, 255, 277, 292, orientalization/exoticization of,
325n14 9, 10, 244, 292, 297n18
Rromani Songs from Central overview of, 3–7
Serbia and Beyond, 324n11 Pentecostals’ interest in, 315n19
ritual, 86. See celebrations, population figures for,
circumcision, Herdelezi, European, 11
weddings poverty-stricken majority vs.
Rjabtzev, Sergey, 280 successful musicians,
Robert Browning, 236 overview of, 4, 45
Robin, Thierry (“Titi”), 216, 325n1 racism toward, 6, 69–70, 168,
Rofel, Lisa, 246 173, 196–97, 207, 320–
Roma, Balkan, 3–18 21n39
and African Americans, 35, representation in fieldwork and
45, 122 writing, 7, 15–17
388 Index
romanticization of, 9, 291–92, Romani music, 18, 21–37
300n4 2/4 meter, 29, 32, 112, 114,
scholarship on, 10, 315n16 136, 158–59, 177, 180, 217,
self-identification of, 306n9 312n11, 326n7
as slaves, 8 4/4 meter, 29, 49–50, 177,
under socialism, 10 305n20, 326n7
tensions with other Balkan 9/8 meter, 28, 29, 112, 114, 136,
ethnic groups, 101 158–59, 177, 301n14
use of term “Roma,” 255, 295n1 27, 138
violence against, 6, 10–11, 152, Albanian style in, 35
229–30, 245–46 Americans who play Balkan
See also Gypsies music, 105–6
Roma, Bosnian, 14 amplified, 32, 36
Roma, Bulgarian, 12–14. See also as appropriated, 274, 286,
heritage, Romfest, wedding 327nn14–15 (see also
music, Yunakov, Yuri under collaboration,
Roma, Greek, 303n3 appropriation, and
Roma, Kalderash, 13, 16, 51, transnational flows)
66–67, 306n7, 308n11, and Balkan historical threads,
309–10n26 23–27
Roma, Kelderara, 122, 257 in beauty contests, 120
Roma, Russian, 122, 303n3 brass bands, 25, 300n8
Roma Civil Rights Foundation (see also Boban Marković)
Awards, 174 Bulgarian, history of, 33–34,
Roman, Sasho, 166, 314n14 301–2n20, 302nn22–23
“Oy Sashko,” 304n17 in cafes, 115–16, 245
Roma National Congress, 11 čoček/kyuchek, 27–28, 29, 30,
Romane: International Magazine 301n15
for Romani Culture, concerts after the fall of
Literature, and Art, 315n15 socialism, 33–34, 302n21
Romane Merikle/Roma Beads, 27 in elementary schools, scandal
Romania, 6, 8, 297n22 regarding, 168
Romani Baht Foundation, ethnic variety among patrons
301n11, 316n28 of, 26, 300n9, 301n16
Romani culture in fusion genres, 5–6, 18, 166
and Bulgarian culture, 165 at the Galičnik wedding,
and folklore, 5 170–72, 175, 316n23
folklore taught in schools, 169, history of Romani female
315–16n21 musicians, 202, 218,
and high art, 169–70 321nn2–5
NGO support for, 168–69 homelands evoked in, 40
and postsocialist agendas, 5–6 Hungarian, 22, 299–300n4
Romani Iag festival (Montreal), 243 improvisation/innovation in,
Romani language 26–27
chalga in, 185, 187 and Indian scales, 49, 300n6,
dialects of, 7–8, 48, 296n13 305n19
dictionary of, 48 innovation/hybridity valued by
in films, 258 audiences, 164, 292
as an Indo-Aryan language, xiii, instruments used in, 23, 31–32
7–8, 304n15 Kalderash, 27
literary, 48 Kosovo-style, 36, 49
in Macedonia, 11 in Macedonia, 50, 120, 169–70
transliteration of, xiii–xiv makams, 27–28, 31, 301n13
Index 389
Romani music (continued) pop/folk music; wedding
mane/taksim, 25, 28, 180, 184, music; and individual
193, 301n13 instruments and musicians
by non-Roma, 275, 327n16 Romani music as world music,
novokomponovana narodna 20, 241–68
muzika, 25–26, 177, 178–79 caravans, nomadism, and
oral, 30 Romani unity, 258–63, 268,
overview of, 21–23 325n16
piracy of, 34 and fashion, 254
as polyethnic/-lingual, 26 festivals/tours, generally, 242–
popular, 25–26 43, 262, 267–68, 293–94,
popularity in the West, 269, 324n3 (see also specific
325n2 festivals and tours)
pure Gypsy music, 164–66 marketing exoticism and
on radio, 34, 153 authenticity, 241, 244–52,
recordings of, generally, 257, 293
32–34, 302n22 (see also and New York Gypsy Festivals,
specific recordings) 265–67
resistance by musicians, 7 overview of, 241–44, 324n2
resistance songs, 50 and self-stereotyping, 257–58,
scales used in, 27–28, 49, 325nn14–15
301n12 world music events as education
scholarship on, 21–23 vs. entertainment, 252–57,
Sofia-based, 33, 151 324n11
song variants/versions, 30–31, See also Gypsy Punk music
301n17 Romani Music Festivals. See
stereotypes used strategically Romfest, Šutkafest
by, 7, 292 (see also under Romani rights movement
Romani music as world emergence of, 15
music) and the European Union, 11
stylistic trends in, 31–37, growth of, 292
302nn23–24 and identity politics, 44, 47–48,
talava songs, 36–37, 60, 191, 304n11, 304nn13–14
302n25 music in, 49–51, 304–5nn16–22
technique/passion in, 26–27, national symbols of, 48
300–301n10 and NGOs, 11
on television, 301–2n20 and the Roma label, 238,
themes in song texts, 50 304n11
tours, 293–94 (see also and stereotypes, 173
specific tours) and unity, 325n16
as traditional, 214–15 Romani Routes (booking
turbofolk, 177, 178–79, 319n22, company), 254–55, 326n9
319n27 Romaniya, 122
urban folk, 22, 25–26 Romano Sumnal, 170
U.S. reception of Bulgarian and Romano Suno 2, 21
Macedonian musicians, 7 Romanov, Manush, 129
videos, 34 Roman oyun havası, 301n14
village folk, 25–26, 131, 272 Roman Star contest, 317n31
vitality of, 36–37 Roma Portraits (Balicki), 84,
See also meter; chalga; 307n4, 307n20
collaboration, Roma Reggaeton Hip Hop,
appropriation, and 26
transnational flows; Roma Rights, 297n21
390 Index
Romashka, 267–68 Sapera, Gulabi, 247
Roma TV, 172 “Sapeskiri Čoček,” 49
Roma Variations, 233 Saraçi, Sunaj, 232
Romen Theater (Moscow), 257 “Sarajevo, 84,” 30, 133
Romfest (Stara Zagora, Šaulic, Šaban, 301n17
Bulgaria), 34, 122–23, 152, Savić, Tanja, 173–74
163–67, 185, 189, 311n11, Savigliano, Marta, 258
314nn13–14 Schafer, Murray, 274
Romska Gaida (a line dance), schizophonia/schizophonic
114 mimesis, 274
Romska Ubavica (Most Scott, James, 147, 228–29
Beautiful Romani Woman Seeman, Sonia Tamar, 108, 114,
contest), 33 251, 301n14, 309n25,
Romska Vasilica (Romani 317n4, 323n2
St. Basil’s Day), 33 Seibert, Brian, 253–54
Romska Veseliya, 122 self-orientalization, 258
Romski Boji, 106 Sellers-Young, Barbara, 116
Rosaldo, Michelle, 308n14 Senaras, Müzeyyen, 191
Rosaldo, Renato, 45, 246 Senlendirici, Husnu, 36, 235, 266
Rouse, Roger, 41 Laço Tayfa, 251
Rozhen festival, 167 Serbezovski, Muharem, 100,
R Point, 50 301n15, 304n17, 307n1,
Rromani Dives, 50–51, 202 328n22
rŭchenitsa, 132, “Bože Bože,” 304–5n18
312n11 popularity of, 305n18
Rudari, 25, 295n1 “Ramajana,” 31, 49, 305n19
Runjaić, Živka and Jordana, “Ramo Ramo,” 49, 304n17
206 “Sine Moj,” 94
Ruseva, Dinka, 139, 144, 154, Serbia, 25, 115–16, 297n22
155, 157 Serbian language, xiii–xiv
Šerifović, Marija, 174
Safran, William, 39, 303n3 Serbian-Albanian conflict, 13
Said, Edward, 9, 244, 297n18 Ševćet, 26, 36
Sakip, Šadan, 100, 211 sexual consummation, 74, 75, 95
Šakir, Feta, 33, 92 sexuality and dance, 109–12, 115
Saleas, Vasillis, 36 See also belly dancers
Salieva, Zvezda, 108 sexualized female body, 121, 123,
Salifoski, Seido 182, 191
activism of, 106, 234 shahnai (zurna-like instrument),
family life of, 64–65, 71, 72, 191–92
73, 105 Shakira, 182
as a musician, 101, 102, 103, shame, 109–10
104, 105–6, 232, 289, Shantel (Stefan Hantel), 281–82,
310n32, 327n16 286, 325n1, 330n32
Salijević, Slobodan, 93 Borat tour, 289
šalvari (wide, billowing pants), 87, Bucovina Club 1 and 2, 271,
91, 96 281, 283, 288
See also dimije on dance clubs as bringing
Sambolovo festivals (1985–1988), people together, 288
148 Disko Partizani, 281, 325n2
Samson, Jim, 327nn14–15 Planet Paprika, 281, 325n2
Sandu, Florentina, 270 reception of, 284, 287
Sant Cassia, Paul, 247, 248 response to critics, 331n44
Index 391
Sharena Muzika, 168 292–93, 296n8, 299n39,
Shay, Anthony, 116–17 302n21 (see also heritage
Shepik, Brad, 105 and the Bulgarian socialist
Shiroka Lŭka, 144–45, 182, state)
315n18 Sofia (Bulgaria)
Shopov, Rumen Sali, 103, 233 Alley of Stars in, 161
Shukur Collective: Urban Gypsy, megaconcert in, 152
331n41 musicians’ market in, 137–38
Siderov, Volen, 197 Romani music based in, 33, 151
sieve (sita), ritual function of, Romani NGOs in, 12
28, 91 Romani rights/living conditions
Simeonov, Filip “Fekata,” in, 12
northern style of, 30 Soja, Edward, 42–43
“Shalvar Kyuchek,” 28 Šoko, Robert, 281, 330n33
stature of, 136 soldier send-off celebrations, 131,
and Taraf de Haidouks, 311n7, 313n21
262–63, 272 Sonneman, Toby, 311n9
in Taraf de Haidouks, S Orkestŭr Na Kanarite
314n7 Na Svatba, 146
Simon, Paul, 328n21, 329n30 Spain, 297n22
Graceland, 276, 328n19 Spears, Britney, 182
Sinapov, Traicho, 136 Spin, 331n39
“Sine Moj,” 94 Spivak, Gayatri, 51–52
Sinti, 48, 295n1, 304n13 Spur, Endre, 300n4
“Sitakoro Oro,” 28 Stambolovo festivals, 146–47, 148,
sivi gŭlŭbi, 133, 318n7 152, 228, 314n3
Skopje (Macedonia), 115, 215, Stan, Peter, 327n16
308n15 Stara Zagora (Bulgaria), 139–40,
Albanian influence in, 28 154, 161, 168, 308n11,
bajraktari in, 309n21 314n5
celebrations/festivals in, 32–33 Stara Zagora festivals. See
racism toward Roma in, 207 Romani Music Festival;
Romani immigrants from, 14 Romfest
Romani spoken in, 62 starogradski pesni (old city
temana in, 94 songs), 183
See also Šutka state
Skopje, 63, So Sila Tatko (film), Bulgarian socialist, 10,
322n11 16–17, 33, 119, 164, 227,
Skupljači Perja (Petrović), 50 292–93, 296n4, 296n8,
Slavchev, Prof., 315n17 299n39,302n21 (see also
Slavcho Lambov, 314n7, 324n10, heritage and the Bulgarian
326n9 socialist state)
Slavic Soul Party, 264, 265, 327n16 post-socialist, 296n8
“The Slavi Show” (television Statelova, Rosemary, 315n16
program), 172 Stefanovski, Vlatko, 322n14
Sliven (Bulgaria), 139–40 Stephen, Lynn, 303n6
Slobin, Mark, 40 stereo zapis studio (tape recording
Slovenia, 297n22 studio), 147–48, 152,
smiruvanje (reconciliation) 313nn28–29
ceremony, 74 Stewart, Susan, 246
Smolyan Dance Ensemble, 158 stick dancing, 300n6
socialist state, Bulgarian, 10, Sting, 276
16–17, 33, 119, 164, 227, Stivell, Alan, 134, 312n15
392 Index
Stoev, Atanas, 158–59, 314n8 multipart playing of, 25
Stokes, Martin, 7, 319n28 ritual function of, 24, 36, 89,
Stoyanova, Maria, 167, 313n20 308n15
strategic essentialism, 51–52, tarabuka (hand drum), 31, 209
213–14 Taraf de Haidouks, 242, 247,
Struškite Svadbari, 101 263–64, 325n1, 326n7
Sugarman, Jane, 108, 115, 195, awards received by, 325n1
277, 304n17, 311n6, Band of Gypsies, 250, 256, 262,
320n36, 321nn2–3, 321n5 272, 314n7, 324n8
Šukaripe, 122 clothing/image of, 213, 236,
sunet. See circumcision 249–50, 251, 256–57
Sunny Music/Sunny Records The Continuing Adventures of
(Bulgaria), 34, 188–89 Taraf de Haidouks, 256, 272,
Sunrise Marinov, 183 324n8
Super Ekspres, 185 on the Gypsy Caravan tour, 213,
surla. See zurna/zurla 235–36, 243, 255–56, 262
Šuteks (Šutka, Skopje, and the Kočani Orkestar, 263, 272
Macedonia), 308n10 and the Kronos Quartet,
Šutel (Macedonia), 33 326–27n10
Šutka (Šuto Orizari, Skopje, No Man Is a Prophet in His Own
Macedonia) Land, 250, 254, 272–73,
families of musicians in, 309n16 324n8
music/dance as emblematic of and Simeonov, 262–63, 272
Romani identity, 4 and Winter, 246, 251, 255–57,
Romani population in, 12 272–73, 283, 324n13
settlement of, 12 Tarkan, 37, 105
weddings in, 86–88, 308n10 Taussig, Michael, 333n49
Šutkafest (Skopje, Macedonia, Tavče Gravče, 93
1993), 50, 120, 163, 169–70, Taylor, Timothy, 238
202, 324n3 Tekbilek, Omar Faruk, 105
Šuto Orizari. See Šutka tel, 89
svatbarska muzika. See wedding temana (hand gesture of respect),
music 94, 97, 98, 309n22
svirki (flutes), 128 Tenth Mediterranean Youth
synthesizer, 35, 131, 237, Festival (Akdeniz
248–49, 252 University, Turkey), 242
Teodosievski, Pero, 211
Takev, Ventsislav, 138 Teodosievski, Stevo
Takev brothers, 33 on authentic Romani music,
taksim. See mane/taksim 214–15
talava songs, 36–37, 60, 191, “Bašal Seljadin,” 206, 208,
302n25 209–10
Talking Heads, 329n30 death of, 211, 215
tambura, 132, 302n23, 312n10 in Esma—Ansambl
Tanec, 101–2, 118 Teodosievski, 31, 205, 209,
tapan/tŭpan 211
in ensembles, history of, 23–24, on Esma’s leadership, 207
128 as King of Romani Music,
as exclusively male, 24 211, 214
at folk festivals, 167 music school of, 211–12,
at the Galičnik wedding, 171 322n13
in henna processions, 89 relationship with Esma, 204–6,
improvisation on, 25 209–10
Index 393
Teodosievski (continued) popularity of, 134, 227, 229
Romani music promoted by, Stambolovo festival success of,
206, 214 146–47
Šutkafest involvement of, targeted by Bulgarian officials,
169–70 142
young drummers used by, 209, on tour, 151, 161, 229
322n10 See also Papazov, Ivo
Ternipe, 119 Trakiya Folk festival, 133, 152,
Tetovo (a Romani KUD), 119 314n5
Tetovo (Macedonia), 94 transborder processes, 303n6
Theodosiou, Aspasia, 303n3 Transglobal Underground, 330n36
thirdspace, 42–43 transliteration, xiii–xiv
Thomas, Nicholas, 52–53 transnational flows. See
Thrace (Bulgaria), 33, 132, 133, collaboration,
137, 164 appropriation, and
See also Stara Zagora transnational flows
Tia Juana, 262 transnationalism and hybridity,
Time, 269, 277 41–44, 303n6, see also
Time of the Gypsies (2001), 242 hybridity
Time of the Gypsies (Kusturica), transnational minority, 47, 304n13
258, 277, 324n2, 332n47 Trask, Haunani-Kay, 53
Times Square Records/World Travelers, 245, 295n1, 324n5
Connection, 290 Traykov, Dzhago, 35
Titanik, 28, 33 Trifonov, Dimitŭr, 146
Tito, Josip Broz, 10, 32, 116, 169, Trifonov, Slavi, 189, 190–91
210, 215 “Edinstveni,” 172–73, 186,
Todorov, Manol, 139, 140, 146, 319nn19–20
157 and the Eurovision scandal,
Todorov, Todor, 312n12 172–73, 316–17nn28–29
Todorova, Maria, 195, influence of, 316n27
297n18 “Ljubovta e Otrova,” 187,
Tomova, Ilona, 315n16 319nn21–22
tradition Roma TV, 172
and authenticity, 53, 247–48 “The Slavi Show,” 172
conceptions of, 54–55 “Vinovni Sme,” 187
invented, 53 “Yovano Yovanke,” 319n20
and modernity, 55, 247–48 truba (trumpet or flugelhorn), 31
oral, 137 Trumpener, Katie, 9
Traditional Crossroads, 161, 233, Trŭstenik, 30, 157, 311n8
323n9 Tsigan, 48, 295n1, 318n13
Trakiya, 313n21 Tsiganska Muzika, 122
Balkanology, 150–51, 160 Tsiganska Muzika (Gypsy Music),
and Boyd, 149, 161, 229 122
Fairground/Panair, 160–61, 234 tsiganska rabota (Gypsy work),
fees for weddings, 137 195
founding of, 134 Tsintsarska, Rumyana, 149
“Gypsy Heart,” 160–61 Tupurkovski, Vasil, 215
improvisation by, 136 turbofolk music, 177, 178–79,
vs. Kanarite, 160 319n22, 319n27
NATO concert by, 161 Turkey, 173–74, 197, 317n31
Orpheus Ascending, 150 Turkish culture
police evasion by, 228 as a mark of civilization, 8,
popularity in Bulgaria, 161 44, 115
394 Index
music and belly dancing, 231 Vagabond Opera: “Gypsies,
translations of songs into Tramps, and Thieves” concert,
Bulgarian, 311n6 263
Turks seen as Muslim fanatics, Valdes, Valentin, 318n9
196–97, 317n5 Vali, 183
Turkish language, xiii, xiv, 8, 44 Van de Port, Mattjis, 115, 245,
Tuysuzoglu, Tayik, 272 247, 257–58, 279
Tweed, Ras, 216–17 Van Gennep, Arnold, 85–86
Tyankov TV, 162 Vanjus, 284
Varga, Gusztav, 256, 260
ud (type of lute), 31 Vasilica (St. Basil’s Day), 83
Ultra Gypsy, 275 Veliov, Naat, 326n5
Umer, Dževat, 102 Velkov, Saško, 211
Umer, Erhan (“Rambo”), 70, 98, verbunkos (Hungarian recruiting
101–2, 232–33, 235 dance), 301n12
Umer, Husamedin (“Uska”; Verdery, Katherine,
Erhan’s son), 102–3 146, 147
Umer, Husamedin (Erhan’s Verdonk, Anton, 248
father), 98, 101–2 Versace (Romani band), 33
Umer, Jusuf, 102 Vesela, 158–59
Umer, Sevim, 102, 235 Veseli Momci, 33
Umer, Turan, 102 Veselina TV (Bulgaria), 34
Umer, Vebi, 102 Via Romen, 266
Underground (Kusturica), 275–76, Vie dei Gitani (Ravenna, Italy,
324n2 2000), 242
unemployment, 152, 155 Vievska Grupa, 157, 162
UNESCO, 285 Visweswaran, Kamala, 16
UNESCO world heritage Vlax Romani dialect, 296n13
applications, 149, 170–72, VMRO-DPMNE (Macedonia), 215
316n22, 316nn24–25 Voice of Roma (VOR), 16, 213–14,
Union for Romani Culture, 169 242–43, 254–55, 324n11,
Union of Macedonian Folklore 326n9
Ensembles, 171–72 See also Herdeljezi festivals,
Union of Roma (Macedonia), VOR-sponsored
298n24 Volanis, Sotis: Poso Mou Lipis,
Unison Stars (Bulgaria), 190, 319n26
34, 152 VOR. See Voice of Roma
United Democratic Front Vranje (V. Marković), 116–17, 119,
(Bulgaria), 298n25 310n5
United Kingdom, Roma in, Vuorela, Ulla, 59
245–46
United Party of Roma Wagner, Roy, 53
(Macedonia), 298n24 Weber, Alain, 259
U.S. State Department, 12 Wedding and Funeral Orchestra,
“Ustaj Kato,” 94 278
Ustata wedding music, Bulgarian
and Azis, 194 amplified, 32, 131
“Bate Shefe,” 186–87 Bulgarian ban on, 16–17, 19,
“Buryata v Sŭrtseto Mi,” 119, 131, 142–43, 146, 227
186–87 Bulgarian instrumentation/
“Lyubov li Be,” 186–87 style/repertoire (1970s–
“Moy si Dyavole,” 186–87 1989), 131–33, 141, 311–
“Tochno Ti,” 186–87, 319n20 12nn7–12
Index 395
wedding music (continued) weddings
Bulgarian vs. Romani, 132 American, average cost of, 99
vs. chalga, 156, 160, 162, 179: American customs at, 97–98
See also čoček/kyuchek in Belmont, 95–99, 309–
music; Chalga; cultural 10nn26–28
politics of postsocialist brideprice, 88, 308n11
category system for musicians, bride’s clothing, 90
139–40, 152 bride’s crying, 90, 92
comeback of, 162–63 bride’s importance and
crimes against musicians, transitional status, 85, 90,
155 307n5
criticism of, 131, 140, 157 bride’s transfer to groom’s
development of, 141 home, 93–95, 97, 153,
eclecticism in, 132 309n21, 309nn23–25
economic crisis’s effects on čoček/kyuchek danced at, 115
musicians, 153–55 dance’s role in, 86–87, 96–98,
economic framework of, 310n28
137–40, 148, 313nn21–24 economic crisis’s effects on,
vs. ensemble music, 138, 156, 153
312n12 Esma and Stevo’s wedding,
fees for musicians, 99–100, 205
154 food preparation for, 87
female singers for, 137 gift giving, 87–88, 92–93, 99,
and folk music, 132–33, 140, 309n21
156, 160, 162, 167, 226, homosexual, 189–90
312n12, 315n18 igranka (dance party), 91–93,
guest musicians, 93, 96 309nn19–20
history of, 131, 311–12n8, invitations to, 92, 95, 309n20
327n11 length of, 85, 96, 153, 307n7
improvisation/innovation in, 27, Macedonian, 85, 307n7
132, 301n10, 312n12 midweek, 134, 309–10n26
learned in secret, 144–45 mother-in-law and
as a male realm, 86, 137 daughter-in-law
and nationalism/patriotism, relationship after, 94,
156, 159–60, 162–63 309n24
as an oral tradition, 137 Muslim vs. Eastern Orthodox,
popularity of, 151, 156–57, 86
227, 293 order of the wedding week, 88,
on radio and television, 146–47 308n12, 309–10n26
recordings of, 146–48, pan-Balkan structure of,
313nn26–29 85–86
self-censorship by musicians, pregnant brides at, 84
147 Romani and Turkish vs.
stars of, 16, 36–37, 136, 137, 294 Bulgarian, 153–54
structure of, 132 season for, 89
tipping for, 138, 313n24 segregated dancing/parties,
uses of, 131 110–11
versatility in, 132 as status symbols, 133
See also čoček/kyuchek in Šutka, 86–88, 308n10
music; cultural politics women’s clothing at, 87–88, 91
of postsocialist markets/ women’s vs. men’s roles in,
festivals; Papazov, Ivo; 86–87, 98
Stambolovo festivals See also henna
396 Index
Werbner, Pnina, 52, 302–3n2, Yambol Ensemble, 128
303n8 Yanamoto, Yohji, 250, 254
Western European Gypsy Yanev, Georgi, 136, 154–55,
festivals, 242 157–58
When the Road Bends: Tales of a Yaneva, Pepa, 154, 157–58, 182,
Gypsy Caravan (Delall), 213, 321n5
259, 327n17 Yaneva, Tsvetelina, 157–59,
Willems, Wim, 304n15 182
Winter, Michel, 246, 251, 255–57, Yanitsa, 183
283, 326n5 Yankov, Nikola, 139, 313n26
See also under Taraf de Yankulov, Stoyan, 160
Haidouks Yiftos, 295n1
WIPO (World Intellectual YouTube, 17, 34, 81, 271
Property Organization), 285 Yugoslavia
WOMAD (Belgium), 242 dance/music in, 116–17,
women 119
freedom of movement of, 111 economic crisis in, 14
hairstyles of, 309n19 guest worker policy of, 14
inside world of, vs. men’s multiculturalism in, 10, 32,
outside world, 111, 308n14 116, 297n19
kinwork by, 86 socialist, 10
modesty of, 109–10, 118, 120, violence associated with,
123, 202, 218–19 306n11
objectification/commodification wars in (1991–1995), 14
of, 121 Yunakov, Ahmed, 136,
power/knowledge of, 71, 77–79, 224–25
88, 94, 109–10, 306n14, Yunakov, Danko, 104, 225
307n19 Yunakov, Yuri (formerly Husein
role in weddings (see under Huseinov Aliev), 16, 20
weddings) 221–39
sexuality of, 109–10, 120–21 activist projects of, 234–35
subjugation of, 76, 306–7n17, Americans taught by, 234
308n14 arrests/imprisonment of, 227
work ethic, 9, 63 awards received by, 235
World Bank, 11, 12 bitterness toward the press, 162
World Intellectual Property boxing career of, 226
Organization, 170–71 Bulgarian Turkish identity of,
world music and hybridity, 222–23
44–47, 151, 239 clarinet played by, 223–25, 235
See also hybridity; Romani clothing/image of, 237, 251
music as world music club performances by, 235
World Music Folklife Center, collaborations by/contacts of,
243 231–35, 270, 323n8
World Music Institute (New York), at dance workshops, 310n32
243, 258–59 early years of, 221–26
World Village, 161 educational events,
World War II Nazi extermination participation in, 255
of Roma, 9–10, 48 emigration to the United States,
See also Holocaust 17, 20, 160, 229–30
ethnicity of, 142
xenophobia, 3, 13, 246, 252–53, ethnic variety among patrons
268 of, 100, 300n9
Xenos, Nicholas, 14–15 “Fincan,” 231
Index 397
Yunakov, Yuri (continued) Balada, 233
and Foster, 327n16 clothing/image of, 237, 251
on Gypsy Caravan tour, 233–34, in the Gypsy Caravan tour,
235–36, 260, 262 243
Gypsy Fire, 231 New Colors in Bulgarian
at Herdeljezi festival, 234 Wedding Music, 233
and Hutz, 287, 331n42 in the New York Black Sea
identities of, 44, 237–39, Roma Festival, 235
323n10 Yuseinov, Ateshhan, 160
and Kaplan, 287
kaval played by, 224 zadruga (patrilineal familial unit),
kyuchek played by, 227–28 64
and Mamudoski, 232–33, “Zajdi Zajdi Jasno Sonce,”
235 319n27
as mentor to young musicians, Zapej Makedonijo (film), 207,
103, 104 209, 322n11
and Milev, 225, 233 “Zapevala Sojka Ptica,” 28
multiple identities of, 237–39, Zap Mama, 330n37
323n10 Zekirovski, Sami, 211
musical background/training of, Žekov, Osman, 136
223–26 Zhekov, Osman, 30
name change of, 142, 226, Zhelyaskova, Antonina, 315n16
228 Ziff, Bruce, 327n12
and the New York Gypsy Zig Zag, 192
Festival, 235, 266–67 Zirbel, Kathryn, 244, 246, 252,
on oppression of musicians, 260, 261, 325n14
227–28 Zivković, Marina, 301n17
and Papazov, 225, 227, 233–34 Žižek, Slavoj, 43
on Papazov, 134 Zlatne Uste, 105, 265–66,
police evasion by, 143–44, 228 327n16
on professional female dancers, Zsurafski, Zoltan, 324n4
109 zurna/zurla
on Rajasthani music, 236 and the Bulgarian anti-Muslim
repertoire/versatility of, 231–32, campaign (1980s), 128–30,
235 141, 311nn3–4, 311n6 (ch.
reunion tours with Papazov, 161 7)
Romani identity of, 223, 230–37 Bulgarian ban on, 24,
and Salifoski, 105 128–29, 148
saxophone played by, 227 vs. clarinet, 135
synthesizer used by, 237, 249 in ensembles, history of, 23–24
on Taraf de Haidouks, 236 as exclusively male, 24
Together Again: Legends of at folk festivals, 167
Bulgarian Wedding Music, at the Galičnik wedding, 171
161, 233 in henna ceremonies, 89–90,
on tour, 237 308–9n16
in Trakiya, 136, 227 mane (free rhythmic
Turkish music played by, 231 improvisations) on, 25
and Erhan and Sevim Umer, multipart playing of, 24–25
102 of Pirin, 24
on wedding music, 312n12 recordings of, 148
wedding music by, 226, 227–29 ritual function of, 24, 36, 89
Yuri Yunakov Ensemble, 17, 243 training in, 24
398 Index

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Fiddler on the Move

Oxford New York

Copyright © 2012 by Oxford University Press

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Figures and Charts vii

1. Balkan Roma: History, Politics, and Performance 3

2. Musical Styles and Genres 21

3. Dilemmas of Diaspora, Hybridity, and Identity 39

Part II Music in Diasporic Homes

6. Transnational Dance 107

Part III Music, States, and Markets

7. Dilemmas of Heritage and the Bulgarian

9. Bulgarian Pop/Folk: Chalga 177

Part IV Musicians in Transit

10. Esma Redžepova: “Queen of Gypsy Music” 201

11. Yuri Yunakov: Saxophonist, Refugee, Citizen 221

12. Romani Music as World Music 241

13. Collaboration, Appropriation,

Figure 2.1. Variations of Čoček Rhythmic Patterns 29

This book deals with four Balkan languages—Romani, Bulgarian, Mace-

Romani, Serbian, and Macedonian words are written with Bosnian/Croa-

Bulgarian words are written according to one widely accepted scholarly

The sound sh as in shop is written sh

xiv Notes on Transliteration

The author and Oxford have created a password-protected website to ac-

1.1 Working-class home, Šutka, Skopje, Macedonia, 1994

2.1 Zurla and tapan, Šutka, 1990

2.1 Shalvar Kyuchek, Nezhniya Tsumani (The Delicate Tidal Wave),

3.1 Romani ﬂag

3.1 Muharem Serbezovski, performing Ramajana at a private Romani

xvi About the Companion Website

Text Supplements (not attached to other media)

3.1 Dželem Dželem

4.1 Album cover, Amanet, Rome (sic) Songs, 1995

About the Companion Website xvii

Text Supplement (not attached to other media)

4.1 Education and Gender

5.1 Women making stuffed grape leaves, Šutka wedding, 1994

xviii About the Companion Website

5.1 Henna ceremony: groom’s female relatives arriving with trays of

About the Companion Website xix

xx About the Companion Website

5.1 Muharem Serbezovski, Gilaven Romalen, Zaljubih Se, Ans. Crni

About the Companion Website xxi

6.1 Solo dancer on top of a car, circumcision procession, Šutka, 1990

6.1 Romani Čhaj Sijum, Džansever, Kemano Bašal/Violino Sviri, text

Text Supplement (not attached to other media)

6.1 History of Romani Dance

7.1 Zurna players, Pomak wedding, Avramovo, 1980

xxii About the Companion Website

7.1 Trakiya, Kŭrdzhaliisko Horo, wedding, Iskra, Bulgaria 1980

Text Supplement (not attached to other media)

7.1 Heritage, Nationalism, and Socialism

About the Companion Website xxiii

8.1 Publicity shot, Trakiya, Ivo Papazov (clarinet), Neshko Neshev

8.1 Orkestŭr Kanari: Nie Bŭlgarite, Kanari 25 Godini, Horovodna

9.1 Sladka Rabota, Toni Dacheva i Orkestŭr Kristal, Vsichko e Lyubov

xxiv About the Companion Website

10.1 Esma Redžepova Ansambl Steve Teodosievskog RTB EP 12725,

10.1 Bašal Seljadin, Putevima Pesme Esma Ansambl Teodosievski (MP

10.1 Bašal Seljadin, Anka Gieva and Dragica Mavrovska, Jugoton SY