"My music? It's a mixture born from the Balkan frontier. A mysterious land where three cultures cross each other: orthodox, catholic and muslim". Goran Bregovic (1950, Sarajevo) can speak a fluent Italian, and he introduces himself without any formality, wearing a swimsuit, a towel and sunglasses coming out from his hotel swimming pool, after a bath. He seems a quiet guy, self confident. His compositions, a mix of Balkan folk and refined technology, conqueered Europe thanks also to the lucky partnership with his Sarajevo's fellow Emir Kusturica, the film director of masterpieces like The Time of the Gypsies and Underground.
Bregovic composed the soundtracks of most of his films, included Arizona Dream, the "American dream" of the Bosnian director, starring Jerry Lewis and Johnny Depp, and in particular the theme - "Tv Screen" - performed by "the Iguana" Iggy Pop (the Stooges).
"The war in the former-Yugoslavia just exploded" Bregovic remembers. "Emir and I escaped to America to take the film. Then we met again in Paris, with many friends from Sarajevo". Yes, friends: intellectuals and artists of the pacific and cultured Bosnia, blown away by the grenades. The old comrades of the clubs where Kusturica showed his early films and played the bass in a punk band. His style was similar to the young Goran's one, who was a rockstar with his own band when he was a sixteen student of philosophy.

Sarajevo rock
"Rock was the only chance to express our dissatisfaction without being in danger to go to jail. But one thing must be clear: Emir and I never played together; he was an amateur, I was a musician", Bregovic points out. Maybe something went wrong with the two former friends, so that in the last Kusturica's film, "Black Cat White Cat", there was Bregovic's music anymore, while the composer signed the soundtrack of "Train de Vie", the little jewel of the french-roumanian director Radu Milhaileanu. The argument begun when Kusturica felt disappointed for the use of the music of his films in Bregovic concerts. But the Bosnian musician prefers to skirt the issue: "Emir and I went on different roads. That's all".
But let's come back to the Sarajevo's underground before the war. It's here that the early Bregovic inflamed the town's youth with rock bands like Beasts, Kodeks, Jutro and, above all, White Button (Bijelo Dugme), his group for fifteen years. Then, he was tired with his role of teen-agers idol, so he decided to change. The Time of the Gypsies, memorable portrait of the rom people in balance between realism and unchained fantasy, marked the beginning of his collaboration with Kusturica. But quite soon the wind of war begun to flow on the Tito-orphaned Yugoslavia, and there was no more place for its' artists.
Goran tells about the happenings with the indifference of someone who broke off his roots. But you can find a vein of nostalgia in his voice, when he recalls the old days in Sarajevo, a very different city from the ghost-town of the post-war times. "I won't come back there. It isn't 'practical', the electricity often goes off and I cannot use my computers, there aren't the basic conditions to work. Now I live between Paris and Belgrade, but I'm touring most of the time".

War and music
Serbian mothered and Croatian fathered, like many people from Bosnia, Bregovic is a symbol of the multiethnic Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, he seems to be resigned: "Thinking that the artists can make things change is quite romantic. Unfortunately, they are the soldiers who make the Yugoslavia history, not the musicians. The problem is the lack of democratic culture. During the Communism everything was imposed by the regime, after, there wasn't a real alternative. In France the worse imaginable thing is that the moderate right can ally with the Fascists; in our country, the politicians are ready to let one hundred thousand persons die just to impose their ideas".
So, changing the music history can be much easier. Even if you launch a new style and introduce a culture that many people - Bregovic admits smiling - "only remember for 'the Bridge on the Drina' of Ivo Andric, Literature Nobel Prize".
So let's give space to the music: raw and roaring sounds, a bit "alcoholic", mixed with solemn and touching tunes, as in the main theme of "The Time of the Gypsies", Ederlezi, that is the title track of a cd-anthology of Bregovic most famous soundtracks. It's a formula that melts Bartok and jazz, tango and Slavic folk, turkish suggestions and Bulgarian vocals, orthodox sacred pholiphony and modern pop beats. Can it be considered "World Music"? Maybe. Surely, for this 43 cosmopolitan gypsy, the concept of the ethnic-national music, imposed today in the countries of the former-Yugoslavia, seems ridicule: "Looking for differences in one language, the Serb-Croatian, is absurd. And so it is in the music. Our people have always been good neighbours, they have similar cultures and traditions. But today, someone is trying to rewrite the History".
The power in his concerts isn't given by special effects, but by the musicians on the stage. On a side the austere Orchestra of Belgrade, in black and white; on the other side the Bulgarian Voices, four extraordinary vocalists wearing their folk multicoloured dresses; in the middle stands Bregovic, dressed in white with an electric guitar in his hand, and the massive director-percussionist, Ognjen Radivojevic; behind them it is the "Wedding & Funerals Band", a brass-band that updates the tradition of the Ottoman and Rom groups. "They really play in the weddings and in the funerals, as in the orthodox tradition. After the funeral ritual you've eaten, you've drunk so, for a while, your pain is estranged by the music".

Yugoslavia underground
You really can't resist to the charm of this Balkan inebriating cocktail. So, every time, the same ritual recurrs, also in austere theatres like the Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome, where Bregovic played two times: people leave their seats and let themselves go to wild dances under the stage. All together: young and old people, children, blown away by the rhythm of "Kalasnjikov" and "Mesecina", the main tunes of Underground. Some critics considered that film "Serbian propaganda". "They must have been wearing some special glasses to see it", Bregovic replies. "And I don't believe the Serbs liked to be described in that way. It's only a love story of three people during a period of our history". But there was something more in that Cannes Golden prize winner film. The cellar, where the characters lived ignoring the reality, was a tragi-comic metaphor of the Yugoslavian drama, of the regime, and of the terrible secrets of the wars.
From the beginning of the Bosnian conflict, Bregovic wrote a lot of soundtracks among them the Reine Margot of Patrice Chereau. But now, he says he doesn't need to make money anymore. He says it shameless: "In Yugoslavia, you had to pay 90 per cent of your earning in taxes, for each record you published. So you lost your desire to write music. But since I went abroad, I started working seriously".

In France and Greece he is an acclaimed star, here, in Italy he was discovered later. "When I was 18", he remembers, "I played in Ischia and Capri, but people were less curious. Today, the interest for these sounds is growing higher and higher. Surely, when I knew I have sold one hundred thousand of copies of my records in France I wondered: who are those fools and why they buy my records?". Now in Italy too he has become a star. And he seemed quite excessive in some Italian performances such as in the Celentano tv show where he and the Italian singer sang together "Ventiquattromila baci", a classic hit of Celentano and, that's incredible, the most popular Italian song in Yugoslavia (as you can see in the Kusturica "Do you remember Dolly Bell?").
Bregovic, who recently published a new album with the Polish singer Kayah (unknown in western Europe but very popular in her own country, where she sold millions of records) was on the stage of the Ariston theatre during the Italian Sanremo festival, where he also was a member of the quality jury.

Tales And Songs From Weddings And Funerals (2002) was a return to his typical sound: eight songs and seven tales between humour and melancholy. One of the tracks is the funny "Polizia molto arabbiata" (with a mistake in Italian...), about the relationship between Yugoslavian immigrants and policemen. Excellent the performance of Goran Demirovic and Vaska Jankovska on vocals, while the usual "funeral and weddings orchestra" enriches all the music.

Though his popularity as a soundtracks composer made of him a rich man he decided to reduce his cinema's collaborations in order to have more time to make experiments: "Now I don't care about my career, I only care about music. I enjoy myself experimenting everything, from childish songs to the most complex symphonies". But the Bosnian musician is sure of a thing: "It's much better a gypsy brass band, even if out of tune, than a 'Madame Butterfly' imprisoned by the routine". So Goran Bregovic will go on exploring the frontiers of music. But he will keep in his heart the free and wild spirit of the Balkan fronteer.