Strummertime and the Picking is Pleasing by John Parrish

You need endure only a month of winter before the 42nd annual University of Chicago Folk Festival rolls around. It's the first three days of February and, as usual, features a panoply of groups playing an array of traditional and neotraditional music styles. This year, in addition to the de rigueur old timey, blues, bluegrass, Louisiana French, and Irish music performers, the Folklore Society has invited the Québecois group Matapat, Ensemble Sones de México,

and Tamburitza Rroma, a Balkan immigrant band native to the former Yugoslavia (listed by its former name "Slanina" in the folk festival flyer).

Tambu-what? The root "tambur", or its spooneristic variant "pandur", has generally referred to a long-necked lute, although it has sometimes meant a percussion instrument (e.g. tambourine). The Balkan tambura was a simple fretted instrument that came in one size-whatever size you made it. One played it solo or to accompany singing. In the mid-nineteenth century there were two contemporary trends, the expression of nationalism and the promulgation of ensemble playing. Count Vronsky decided to make a Tartar lute the national instrument of Russia and suddenly you have a family of balalaikas from soprano voice to a big fat triangular bass. Meanwhile in Hapsburg lands the Croatian scholar Kuhar helped create a national identity for his people by designing a family of instruments based on the tambura and arranging music for it in the ensemble style. This family is called tamburitza, or tamburica in the Serbian and Croatian spellings.

The tamburitza instruments are: prim, the smallest of the family; bratch, the alto "viola" voice, although it often carries the melody line; cello-guess what?; berde, a fretted bass; and bugarija, a guitar-sized chord rhythm instrument. The instruments are all plucked, with a preponderance of tremolo facilitated by double courses for some of the strings. Not all ensembles use this configuration-sometimes there are two bratches, and no prim, as is the case with Tamburitza Rroma. Some groups add a violin or, more rarely, an accordion. Kuhar's original arrangements were from the light classical repertoire of the time, but the ensemble style was quickly adopted by village musicians. Soon tamburitza ensembles were playing the indigenous folk music of many ethnic groups in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, especially in the Pannonian Plain, the buffer zone between Austria proper and the Ottoman Empire.

The members of Tamburitza Rroma (Rroma, by the way, is what gypsies call themselves) are second and third generation Croatian- and Serbian-Americans who have helped to maintain the tamburitza tradition in this country. They have a predilection for the often fast and furious "gypsy-style" playing prevalent around the multi-ethnic town of Novi Sad. It is the cultural capital of the Voivodina, an autonomous region of Serbia teeming with Slovaks, Hungarians, Ruthenians, and Rroma, as well as Serbs and Croats. Encounters with other ethnic groups in America have fattened the stateside tamburitza repertoire with Greek, Armenian, and even Mexican melodies, with occasional excursions into country-western and contemporary pop, but the core is still Central European.

The use of harmony and countermelody characteristic of tamburitza music will find its echo at the festival both in the bluegrass and the Mexican son, all three idioms being full of pluck. In addition to a concert at Mandel Hall (1135 E. 57th St.) each evening of the festival (Tamburitza Rroma will appear Sunday the 3rd of February) there are free daytime workshops and jam sessions Saturday and Sunday at Ida Noyes Hall (1212 E. 59th St.). For more information call 773-702-9793. For a complete schedule log on to uofcfolk.org. Concert tickets can be ordered from the Reynolds Club Box Office, 5706 S. University Avenue, Chicago IL 60637 (773-702-7300).

by John Parrish

Reprinted with permission from the Evergreen (Vol. 55, No. 1, January 2002).