Dear Mailing List
Like some miniature comet, my fundraising campaigns come around once a decade.
Crowdfunding Campaign – Saze The Day 2
In 2016, I called for help funding an album by an all-star team of veteran saze musicians from Southern Albania and, with your contributions playing an important part, we made the much-praised album “At Least Wave Your Handkerchief At Me”. The excellent Glitterbeat label brought Saz’iso’s music to thousands of ears across the globe, and we spent years touring with the group to concert halls and festivals from Britain to Kosovo, Portugal to Poland. In Albania today, Saz’iso plays an important part in a revival of interest in the country’s musical heritage.
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Like Brazilian Samba, New Orleans Jazz, Cuban son and Bosnian Sevdah, Albanian Saze emerged at the turn of the last century when mass migrations to the world’s cities brought rural people and their ancient music to new circumstances and modern instruments. Of all these forms, the mesmerizing polyphonic arabesques, joyful dances and heart-breaking laments of saze are among the least recorded, and they remain largely unknown outside Albania.
Newsletter veterans may recall that I’d long been intrigued by the country and its music, but never made it there until 2014, when I got far more than I expected! I met my wife Andrea, who joined me at the legendary Gjirokastra Folk Festival (which takes place every 5 years and which I wrote about here). We were completely taken by the saze music we heard and set out to bring a group of these musicians to the UK. Hearing them perform at their initial get-together during an icy weekend in the city of Korca, we couldn’t resist the idea of recording an album.
Albanian music wasn’t part of the narrative arc of And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, but in the Acknowledgements, I wrote:
“From an early age, I have never stopped listening to music. Changes in the musical landscape that I describe in this book plus my own focus on the task at hand has meant that I’ve experienced far less live music in recent years than at any time since I was a teenager. The shaft of musical light that has brightened my life is the time Andrea and I have spent in Albania, where many pages of this book were written. We’ve passed memorable evenings listening to polyphonic singing, crossed the border into Greece to hear the wonderful, closely related music of Epirus, joined the dancing at friends’ celebrations and, above all, recorded, toured with and listened, both on stage and off, to the eight marvellous, southern Albanian musicians whom, with our friend Edit Pula, we united under the name Saz’iso. The story of Albanian music may not have fit into the narratives I constructed for this book, but seeing how moved their European audiences were and witnessing the way enthusiasm for traditional music at home spread, especially among younger listeners, confirmed my belief in the power of music grown from ancient roots.”
Now, with my book published and my own touring coming to an end, it’s time for another Saz’iso album. The collapse of the isolated Albanian state in the early ‘90s scattered these great musicians across the map of Europe; we shall once again gather in Tirana at the same magical place, the Akademia Filmit dhe Multimedia Marubi, which was once a soundstage in the Enver Hoxha-era film studios. With the great sound engineer Jerry Boys (Buena Vista, Kulanjan, Orchestra Baobab etc) at the controls and our production trio set, all we need is a bit of help with the funding!
In perilous times such as these, music can seem an afterthought, but I like to think of it as the opposite of war.
As ever
Joe