Track Tales: Damir Imamović - The World And All That It Holds (Smithsonian Folkways 2023.)

Three years after the last album "Singer Of Tales", Damir Imamović returns with the new album "The World And All That It Holds". This album was released for the Smithsonian Folkways, so after the released albums for Glitterbeat Records and Wrasse Records, Damir continues to work with the best publishers in the world, as far as world music is concerned.

This album is special because it was created as a kind of soundtrack to Aleksandar Hemon's novel of the same name. Imamović created the album by reading Hemon's manuscript and carefully selecting traditional songs that would accompany the plot, and wrote his own songs in that style. In this edition of "Track Tales", Imamović talks about the process of creating each song.

Sinoć

This was one of the first songs I wrote after reading early drafts of Saša’s novel. The love story of Pinto and Osman evokes the atmosphere of the early 20th century and Bosnian poetry of the time. My lyrics were inspired by the famous Bosnian Romantic poet Musa Ćazim Ćatić. In the recording of this track, I used a tar, an instrument widely played in Central Asia, the region where much of the novel takes place. In Bosnia, a similar longnecked instrument, the saz, was historically used to accompany sevdah singing.

Bejturan

Poravne songs, an older singing style that was unadorned and rhythmically free, are at the heart of the traditional sevdah repertoire. The 20th century brought fixed rhythms and harmonies and some of the singers’ freedom was lost in the process of turning long narrative songs into popular tunes. Omer Ombašić, a Bosnian emigrant poet living in Sweden, wrote these lyrics about a love story between the famous Bosnian epic hero Alija Đerzelez and the fairy who grants him his strength in perfect poravne form. He sent it to me without knowing that I was working on a soundtrack for a novel, which prominently features the story of Alija Đerzelez.

Anderleto

Sephardic Jews brought this old folk ballad with them as they fled 15th-century Spain for what was then the Ottoman Empire. Longer versions tell the story of a queen who sits in front of a mirror as she hears someone entering the room. Wrongly assuming it is her lover Anderleto, she welcomes him by singing, only to realize she has just confessed to her king that two of their four sons are not his. I learned this version of the melody from a 1984 recording of Anula Abinun and Berta Kamhi made by ethnomusicologist Ankica Petrović, who generously shared her archive with me.

Teško je ljubit tajno

This song from Vojvodina, Serbia, is also sung in Bosnia as part of the sevdah repertoire by great singers such as Zehra Deović. Traditionally, it opens as an ode to hidden love, a theme common to many sevdah tunes, but in the second and third verses it loses this thought. Inspired by the story of Pinto and Osman, I rewrote the last two verses to make it a hymn of secret lovers who eventually triumph.

Kad ja pođem draga

The legend among sevdah performers is that Sarajevans sung this song when joining Tito’s partisans in their fight against fascism during World War II. The song always reminded me of a scene in the famous 1972 Yugoslav film Walter Defends Sarajevo directed by Hajrudin Krvavac, in which people pass through army lines to recover the bodies of relatives murdered by Nazi soldiers in occupied Sarajevo. This song tells a similar story of love and defiance. Even before I discovered Saša had made it a part of Pinto and Osman’s longing for Sarajevo, I had toyed with the idea of creating a modern version of the traditional song.

Harmoniko

At the beginning of my sevdah journey stands a friendship with Farah Tahirbegović, a young sevdah singer, accordionist and book editor. She was my best friend—”my good sevdah angel”—who encouraged me to become a professional musician. We shared a love for old sevdah recordings and for Saša’s early writings. I think she would be very happy and proud to see me working with him on this album. Farah died when she was only 33 and I have been writing this song for her since then. Her name means joy in Arabic (radosti in Bosnian). For this recording, I invited her favorite accordionist, Mustafa Šantić (formerly of Mostar Sevdah Reunion) and we recorded it together in the old style of Radio Sarajevo.

Osmane

This song came to me as an immediate reaction after immersing myself into Osman and Pinto’s love story. Their travels, their bringing Sarajevo with them wherever they go, their dreams of returning home—all this resonates in this song. I imagine it as both a love cry and a funeral march.

Madre mija, si mi muero

I was afraid of singing in Ladino at first, not sure about the accents, not sure how much I should imitate speakers of contemporary Spanish. A lot of time passed since Ladino was a language heard in the streets of Sarajevo and I just did not have any reference for it. But then I started listening to old recordings of Sephardic songs from Bosnia, and they were all sung in a heavy Sarajevan accent. I was relieved and thought “I could do that.” This song was famously recorded by Flory Jagoda, a well-known Sephardic singer from Sarajevo. In the novel, it is sung by Pinto, the story’s Sephardic character, when he remembers the warmth of his home and the love of his mother.

Snijeg pade

This is an emblematic sevdah tune celebrating freedom to love. As in many places, arranged marriages were a common occurrence in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Therefore, there are many songs about young women and men

who dream of choosing for themselves whom they will love and marry. Today we live in a much freer world but there are still fights to be fought. The LGBTIQ+ movement in the Balkans has recently adopted this song as an unofficial anthem, sensing a tremendous power in the words: “Let everybody love whoever they want. And those who don’t want should not impose.” I performed it at the first Pride march in Sarajevo in 2019.

Nočes, nočes

This version of the well-known Sephardic song was forgotten by Sarajevo’s Jewish community. I was lucky to have heard it on a 1960s Deutsche Grammophon recording by Eliezer Abinun (1912–1998), a Sarajevo-born hazan who spent most of his life in London. Abinun sung it in an old Ottoman melodic form called hijaz humayun. Working on it, I imagined Jewish and Bosnian merchants travelling together to Istanbul and bringing back the tunes of the day.

Koliko je širom svijeta

As refugees from war or due to economic migration, many Bosnians historically fled the country and found a new life elsewhere. That is a reason many Bosnian tunes are about leaving your home, running away with your lover to a land where you can be together, remembering a mother who you left behind. This old sevdah standard tells the story about the loneliness emigrants often feel. It was famously sung by my grandfather Zaim Imamović.