Balkan Multiculturalism Lives On Through Music
18 years of the Balkan Trafik Music Festival
*A Bonus Post originally published in New Perspektiva
The Balkan Trafik music and culture festival has been held in Brussels annually for the past 18 years but the idea for it began in Kosovo 20 years ago with a trip to the region by a Belgian TV cameraman who met a Kosovo- Albanian fast food owner in Belgium and became curious.
“They took me to their village one night and I thought I was going to end up with my organs trafficked!” Festival Director Nicholas Wieers told me. Instead he was inspired by the music and resilience of the Kosovars, who were in fact, burying their returned dead who had been found in a mass grave near Belgrade.
Balkan Trafik, so named because Wieers wanted to traffic Balkan culture to the rest of Europe as opposed to the perceptions of organ and drug trafficking being the primary activity of the Balkans.
Held from 25-27 April this year, the festival featured some of Europe’s top artists like Manu Chao, Shantel, Daan and Eurovision winners Kalush Orchestra along with the Unza Unza band (formerly the No Smoking Orchestra), Koza Mostra and the Fabijen Brass Band amongst others from across the Balkans.
Manu Chao
Over 6000 people - it was estimated - came out to the festival with over 3300 the first night, partying in the centre of Brussels despite the cold and freezing rain.
From Kosovo came the Mitrovica Rock School, part of the Music Connects project with the Skopje Roma School of Rock and the Dutch Rock Akademie school. The Mitrovica School of Rock - operating since 2008 - brings together students from all communities in Mitrovica to play music and work in mixed ethnic bands. At a time when Kosovo is facing increased tensions between the ethnic Albanian and Serbian communities this is an example of reconciliation projects continuing to build a community bound by commonalities.
The Mitrovica Rock School has centres in both south and north Mitrovica. The teachers and students are from the Serb and Albanian communities, numbering about 70 right now, playing in mixed ethnic bands. They are encouraged to write about politics in their music but to focus on their lives and themselves as individuals. The teachers are also ethnically diverse.
There are few initiatives for mixed ethnic cooperation that have worked for as long as the Mitrovica School has in Kosovo. With the increase in tensions over the past few years the opportunities for the communities to mix and work together are not increasing but decreasing. Many young people growing up in Mitrovica have still not met or even crossed the bridge that connects the cities.
What’s more, the opportunity to do activities like music (instead of very typical civil society based roundtables, workshops etc…) - especially rock music - are decreasing.
Mitrovica, of course, was known for its culture and music, particularly rock, jazz and blues. Most of that cultural output is gone now, thanks to the war, the shutdown of most of the industry connected to the Trepca mines, the poor condition of the mines themselves and the long lasting instability. Leaving institutions like the Rock School as one of the last bastions of intercultural cooperation and continuing the tradition of rock.
Shantel
Many of the bands at Balkan Trafik play rock mixed with - as one audience member told me “the Balkanic sound.” The combination of the new and the old; often the Roma pioneered sounds, the demos and byzantine notes, the musician Shantel described it to me as and the newer Western influenced rock music. Mitrovica Rock School sticks to straight rock music, a slight anomaly in the heady mix of punk and Greek kolos, Roma Brass and Klezmer sounds.
Some in the Balkans don’t accept the folk mixed with traditional sounds as it is reminiscent of the type of nationalistic posturing that not only sets the scene for the conflict but still affects the region. The nationalists used genres like turbo folk as a way of asserting ethnic supremacy and use of folk reminds people of the music that divided them. Despite that, all of the musicians and bands here are trying to reclaim Balkan sounds and modernise them for a new diverse audience, in the Balkans and beyond.
Not to mention the sometimes problematic issue of appropriation of Roma pioneered music and melodies.
Fabijen Brass Band
This isn’t answered in the festival, as Wieers says, he leaves it up to others to create their own festivals or events, “they should do it.”
But as he also acknowledges, creating a festival of this type is difficult, even for him when prices are going higher every year. Balkan Trafik costs nearly 1 million euros to produce and Wieers makes little if anything off of it. But it's a labor of love that continues despite the difficulties which is even more complicated by the political dynamics.
Brussels is home to diasporas from across the Balkans but the Kosovo Albanian and Serbian diasporas have begun bringing their tensions to the festival.
Both groups have their own stands on the festival grounds and last year tensions came out at the event. An UÇK flag was displayed and the organizers mediated. This year though the Albanians gave out free flia and cake and the Serbs told fairy tales to groups of festival goers.
Alice in Wonderband
Would this festival with the Serbian duo Alice in Wonderband singing songs, incorporating their version of ‘Body Music’ from across the Balkans, including a traditional Serbian song from Kosovo make it in the region? Most musicians thought yes but some were hesitant. The politics, that can be mostly ignored in Brussels, can’t as easily be put aside in certain places in the region.
Alice in Wonderband’s Ana Vrbaški was at pains to emphasize this is about people and people are the same everywhere and don’t care about ethnicity or nationalism. Alice in Wonderband have played in Albania and across the region.
Alex the lead singer from Unza Unza said politics is “shit” and “I have nothing to say about it.”
Taufik, 17, who plays guitar and is from south Mitrovica said he found the school himself online and joined up. He was already a Hendrix fan. This was his first trip abroad to play, his family came to support him. He is still giddy in the dressing room afterwards, with excitement visibly bubbling out of him..
Ana, 30, who plays bass and is from north Mitrovica and is still here playing in bands, “I just love music.”
They both have no problems, they say, with the tensions currently bubbling in Mitrovica and the north, or any pushback from their communities. And watching them play together, outdoors in the middle of a Brussels square on a cold, rainy Saturday, they look free and happy.
*Balkan Trafik festival paid for the flights & hotel of the writer.