zabe i babe
Zabe i Babe is inspired by the breathtaking landscape and people of Sarajevo and its surroundings, drawn from a wide swathe of Bosnian traditional and popular sources, and has developed a distinct American edge that embraces the various backgrounds of its members.
Zabe portrays the unique spirit of openness and creative exchange that shines through Bosnia's diverse soundscape; a soundscape that could only stem from centuries of deep intersections, crossovers, and layering of lifestyles and worldviews.
Minja Laušević and I started the band, originally called “The Yugotones,” shortly after war broke out in her native Bosnia. We were the only constant members during the decade or so of the band's existence, but over the years we worked with a long list of great friends and interesting musicians, many of them ethnomusicologists. In 1997 the band recorded its only album, Drumovi (routes), in two days with hardly any rehearsal time, along with the wonderful Ansambl Teodosijevski- what Esma Redžepova called her “A team.” There are stories within stories.
Minja and I had connected within days of her arriving from Sarajevo in 1991, but we first really recognized each other as kindred spirits in a graduate ethnomusicology seminar when we both chose to respond to Roland Barthes’ “The Grain of the Voice,” by singing instead of writing the assigned paper. It was the first time we heard each other sing. I sang The Wandering Boy and Minja sang Sjajna Zvijezda, which she learned from three young girls who herded together in Tušila, the nearest village and, before French aid workers built the road in 2000, a 45 minute walk from the Olympic center on the mountain Bjelašnica where she and her brother Dragan were ski instructors. Minja described first hearing them sing to that “shining star” when it seemed like the most present being at night in the pasture, barely within earshot of the houses, long before electricity came to the villages on the mountain.
Literally “frogs and grandmothers," žabe i babe is the Jugoslav equivalent of “apples and oranges,” though it’s arguably a better phrase, since apples and oranges are about as comparable as two things could be. But both expressions concern resistance to putting things that “don’t belong together" in the same frame. Before the first shots are fired, people with an an interest in power typically begin by separating things- what’s ours, what’s theirs, what belongs and what doesn’t. Part of Minja’s idea for the band was to put as much as possible of what she loved about the people and music of home into the same frame. The result was a mix of highland and lowland mountain music, “newly composed folk” by stars like Haris Džinović and Lepa Brena, Bosnian rock and punk, traditional sevdalinka and “table songs,” dance music, ritual songs, original pieces in a variety of styles and even sacred illahijas and kasidas: žabe i babe.
-T.E.
In their stunning debut, Drumovi, Zabe i Babe not only presents their own mix of bracing Balkan vocals, Dance beats and provocative rock textures, but it is enriched by the irresistable Romani rythyms and mesmorizing melodies of the Ansambl Teodosijevski.
