The following chronicles a trip I took to a music festival in Serbia in the summer of 2006.
Part 1
We were waiting for the bus that would take us to Guca. It was pouring in Belgrade and had been for the last two days. Underneath the awning of a café in front of the St. Marko cathedral, we watched the rain and contemplated spending the next four days at an outdoor music festival cold, wet, and muddy. Not what any of us originally had in mind when I had first announced to my friends that I was going to the heartland of Serbia this summer to the tiny town of Guca to attend the world’s largest balkan brass band festival.
Instead, we had entertained visions of sweet rakija-drenched Dionysian revelry, of banquets turned riots, dinars plastered to our sweaty foreheads as trumpets blasted themselves righteously out of tune right into our ears. Of course, our visions were by and large direct plagiarisms of the images in Emir Kusturica’s “Underground” (1995), a film (and soundtrack) we had all been trying for years to internalize into our daily existence. As a result, we had too much riding on this experience to be foiled by inclement weather. We were expecting bliss, heartache, insanity, and apotheosis—a condensed version of Serbian history in four days of music—rain or shine.
There was a time in my life when I would have wished for a deluge to wipe out all my outdoor brass band obligations. In fact, the words ‘brass band’ still made me a little queasy. They dredged up unpleasant high school memories of the three years I spent dressed like a Prussian dragoon armed with a trombone, glide-stepping into artful maneuvers across a football field while blasting out large ensemble arrangements of “Earth, Wind, and Fire” songs. It was miserable degrading business and it, along with the long captive hours in my father’s car listening to his Sousa tapes, soured me on the whole genus of brass instrument music forever more, so I thought.
In the interim, I had discovered the world of gypsy brass band music from the Balkans. An ensemble of two or three flugelhorns, a pair of euphoniums, a tuba, a snare drum, and occasionally a trombone create a sound so explosive, it feels like a volcano has erupted in your heart and frenetic dancing is the only way to cool the molten lava coursing through your limbs. Plaintive, manic, melancholic, and exuberant all at once, this music rouses whatever passions lay dormant beneath your civilized crust.
I got my first taste of this music in “Underground,” which features a frenzied brass band on the soundtrack and literally running through the scenes of the film--chasing cars, floating on banquet boats, getting shot at (watch the opening scene here). Shortly thereafter, I got my hands on an album (“Live in Belgrade”) by Boban Markovic, the universally hailed king of gypsy brass-- or cocek, as they call it in the Balkans-- the same man, it turned out, whose band was running through “Underground”. For months, “Live in Belgrade” was the only CD in my car. I would play it at deafening volumes so that I could feel the tuba bass line pulsing through my butt cheeks. Eventually Boban had to be rotated out of the car, not because I grew sick of him, but because he made me drive like a maniac. I felt urges to steer the car into buildings or off bridges to match the climax of a song. I decided to limit my fits of Dionysian ecstasy to the dance floor.
The cult of the trumpet in central and southern Serbia dates back to the early nineteenth century, when the legacy of the Ottoman imperial military brass band (the oldest known brass band in history) was appropriated by Roma musicians who integrated the brass band into social life by performing at weddings, funerals, baptisms, banquets. The brass band continues to be a fixture of such rituals in Serbia today.
My initial plan to go to Serbia and just loiter around graveyards and churches in hopes of catching a genuine gypsy band soon gave way to an even better plan. A few laborious minutes of internet research introduced me to the brass band festival in Guca, where, every year at the end of August, this otherwise unassuming village in the valley of the central Serbian hills is flooded for five days with non-stop music and celebration.
The Dragacevski Sabor, The Assembly of Horn Players in the Dragacevo region of central Serbia, began as an underground subversive meeting of musicians in 1961. In the former Yugoslavia, Tito repressed folk art, music, and any cultural expressions that stirred regional or national sentiments in the multinational union of South Slavs. Now, with nothing to keep the lid on great spectacles of ethnic expression (including chauvinism), the festival in Guca has grown continually in popularity, attracting over 300,000 visitors last summer.
If I wanted to catch Guca before it became a de rigeur stop on the Balkan itinerary of all American travelers, I had to act fast.
Jesse and I left the others with the bags and went inside to have a coffee. In the time it took him to go to the counter and order two cappuccinos, he managed to have the waitress fall madly in love with him. As I learned over the course of the next week, this was a routine part of life for Jesse.
The waitress approached the table without the cappuccinos, but with her friend whom she had elected to do her bidding in English. “She want to take picture with you,” said the friend to Jesse. He politely obliged and put his arm around what had to be the homeliest girl in all of Serbia (a true rarity, considering Serbian women are generally gorgeous). She looked at the camera with her one non-lazy eye and her three-toothed grin and then ran away with a squeal of delight to fetch our drinks, which, according to her friend, she insisted on paying for, provided, of course, that Jesse would look her up when he returned to Belgrade. This romantic entanglement, in addition to saving us about sixty cents on coffee, also helped keep my mind off nagging fears about the arrival of the bus.
I had reserved seats on this bus through the festival’s official website, which offered transportation from Belgrade to Guca and back, as well as accommodation in Guca in a private home. This reservation had been a source of some anxiety for me, as the only way to reserve the ride and room was through a wire transfer of 200 euros to a Belgrade bank account belonging to a man named Vuk Brankovic. I was initially reluctant to send my money down the pipe to Serbia in hopes that two months later a guy in a van would simply roll up in front of a church in Belgrade and tell me to hop aboard. Was the private bus to brass band festival gimmick the Serbian version of the Nigerian millionaire scam? Somehow, I managed to swallow my skepticism and went ahead with the reservation.
Shortly thereafter I read in a book of Serbian history that Vuk Brankovic, the man who I had I just made several hundred euros richer, was the name of the most notorious arch-villain in Serbian history, a Kosovar Count who betrayed his fellow Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, helping to usher in a near half millennium of Ottoman domination. Granted, the Vuk Brankovic of 600 years later was not the same man, but why had his parents named him after the infamous betrayer of the Serbian nation? It would be like an American couple naming its son Benedict Arnold—actually, no one would really balk at a guy named Benedict Arnold, as most Americans, unlike Serbs, are either ignorant or indifferent to both their national history and history in general. Serbs, though their historical education is severely distorted by nationalist propaganda, remain avid students of their largely fictional past.
Upon this discovery, paranoid thoughts arose in my mind with renewed vigor. Had I just been betrayed by Vuk Brankovic, thereby unwittingly repeating the vicious cycle of Serbian history? Had the myths of the Balkan past ensared me, too? Was ‘Vuk Brankovic’ a rhetorical wink to fellow Serbians to warn them off this scam that was intended clearly for ignorant Americans, as revenge for our bombing of Belgrade in 1998? Or worse yet, if I was so stupid as to actually come to Serbia, would Vuk indeed show up in his van at the appointed time and place and then have his chetniks bound and gag me, abscond with me to a remote dungeon beneath Kalmegdan Fortress and then enjoin me to feast on my own entrails as they spilled from my freshly split gut?
Imagine my relief then, when amid a bustle of backpacked travelers, in walked Vuk Brankovic. He looked slightly unhinged as I had imagined, but in a benevolent way, maybe because he was wearing a Guca Festival tee-shirt that fit him like a night-shirt and gave him the appearance of a hairy toddler. As usual, my American media-poisoned nightmare fantasies proved illusory. Belgrade was a charming city, Serbians there were cosmopolitan and friendly, and Vuk Brankovic was not a fourteenth-century mountebank. My name was on his reservations clipboard marked paid and his grim torture van was just a shiny charter bus.
Vuk had a wild libertine twinkle in his eyes, accented by a red skin infection that had taken hold of his right eyelid, a scraggly blond beard, and yellow teeth that looked like they had been placed in his gums by someone with a tremulous hand. He swaggered over to our table and commanded us not to hurry. “Please, please. Bus will wait. What you must do is to relax and enjoy. Relax and enjoy, this is imperative!”
Not wanting to offend, I discretely spit my mouthful of coffee back into the cup, intent on relaxing and enjoying it at least three or four more times. Just as the coffee was beginning to taste more like me than it, my girlfriend Marissa came in and told us the bus was leaving. Jesse winked goodbye to his Belgrade sweetheart, we grabbed our bags, and ran out the door.
The bus was filled with mostly Germans and French, with a handful of Spaniards, Brits, and Americans. Any Serbians or people from the neighboring Balkan countries would either drive themselves to Guca or take the regular bus, which stopped in the nearby town of Cacak, just on the other side of the mountain from Guca. The ride, though rainy and winding, was pleasant enough. The most exciting aspect was the insane Serbian film shown on board. It was a vehicle for a leggy blond Serbian pop star who traveled with her thick-mustachioed band of buffoons through an endless cycle of comic embroilments and slow motion song-and-dance numbers. We speculated that the film had all the classic tropes of Serbian comedy—the guy who is repeatedly gang-raped by nymphs, the obese guy in the gym who puts weights down his pants, and the guy who hijacks buses. We couldn’t help but wonder whether bus hijacking was a common event in Serbia.
The rain subsided as we descended into the valley south of Cacak. Evening sunlight fell onto the plum tree-covered hills in the east. Soon, the faint gurgling of distant brass began to trickle through the open windows of the bus. We had arrived in Guca.
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