SEVDAH TRANSVERSALE

Balkan Tour of Wiener Tschuschenkapelle from Serbia and Macedonia to Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania and Croatia.

The roots of the musicians of Wiener Tschuschenkapelle*) are so different as their approach to music. The group, which lives and works in Vienna, has been concentrating on the tremendous variety of Balkan musical traditions for years.

Vienna has always been a melting pot for people from South-East Europe. These people came as ‘guest- workers’, refugees or migrants making Vienna their second home which consequently has resulted in an enormous economic and cultural enrichment of the city. Part of it is the very creative but also ambivalent inter-relationship between the diaspora in Vienna and the various countries the people are originating from.

The recently launched CD “Bosanske sevdalinke” of the  “Wiener Tschuschenkapelle” is an exquisite collection of Sevdah love songs. These songs are on the one hand very popular in Bosnia Hercegovina but also form a common cultural heritage across the Balkans as a kind of ´Balkan Blues´. The new CD was produced together with the Sevdah icon Jovica Petković, an accordeon virtuoso, who used to work in Sarajevo for many years and is now living in Vienna.

The Sevdah Transversale tour will focus on the encounter of the various artists and their contemporary interpretations of the Sevdah songs between “Weltschmerz” and desire for love. This tour is - far away from Yugo-nostalgia and Ethno-Kitsch - again highlighting the lively relationships between Austria and the Balkans. The Austrian Development Co-operation is actively supporting the European integration of South-East Europe. The Austrian Regional Office for Co-operation in the field of Science, Education and Culture OEK, which is based in Sarajevo, is supporting and promoting the tour in Bosnia and Hercegovina, Montenegro and Albania.

Bandleader Slavko Ninić is on a special mission as Ambassador of the European Year of the inter-cultural Dialogue 2008.  "Particularly in this important year we should try to talk and dance with each other, so that we at last will understand: you are not much different from me (we are all the same underneath)".

*) “The word ´tschusch´ is a kind of derogatory term coined by Austrian puritans to label ethnic minority immigrants. The name Wiener Tschuschenkapelle, ie. ´tschusch´s singing in Vienna, is a politically charged irony. The music itself is a celebration of borderlessness and cultural integration.” (Guy Dowsett ©2004 The Provokator Magazine)