Croatian singer Vesna Pisarović has come a long way since her song “Everything I Want” placed 11th in the Eurovision Song Contest 2002. She still sings pop music in concert, and the music on her nine pop albums has been rediscovered by a younger generation, but with Poravna she returns to her cultural roots. It’s an album of traditional Bosnian Sevdah songs delivered in all their emotional intensity and melancholy, backed by an international avant garde jazz trio.
Traditional Sevdah is generally sung a capella or with sparse accompaniment, the songs characterized by slow tempos, melancholy themes and atmospheres, and long, sustained melodic lines. This is all of that, yet it’s distinctly modern. Vesna has taken the form and reinvented it, with sparse accompaniment from French jazz guitarist Noël Akchoté on electric and acoustic guitars and Dobro; Tony Buck of The Necks on drums and percussion; Greg Cohen of John Zorn’s Masada on double bass, and German trumpeter Axel Dörner.
Pisarović here employs a clean, clear vocal style (most of the time) that delivers an emotional punch without histrionics. It’s a deceptively easy seeming technique that actually takes a lot of effort, physical and mental. For a glimpse of this, take a look at the performance video for “Dunjaluče, golem ti si,” with just Vesna singing and guitarist Akchoté improvising a continuous, busy solo line that winds around and under and over and through her vocals.
I’ve had this song on repeat for a couple of days now, as I write this. It’s my favorite track but I’m enjoying the entire album. I especially appreciate Akchoté’s always inventive guitar playing, which reminds me a bit of Marc Ribot at his most restrained. Greg Cohen’s bass, when present, it also mesmerizing in its ambient presence. In fact he opens the album with an amazing bowed line in a rubato intro to the utterly astounding song “Pita Fata Halil mejhandžiju” that eventually includes the whole ensemble — trumpet, bass, drums and guitar all freely improvising throughout, as is Vesna. She has a few moments of joint improvisation with Dörner’s horn that is chill-inducing.
I noted above that Vesna mostly sings in “a clean, clear vocal style,” but there are a few notable places where she pushes the free improv envelope into Yoko Ono territory, and on consecutive tracks first she and then trumpeter Dörner push their instruments to produce sounds of a high range I never knew the human voice or a horn could make.
This isn’t an album to listen to while you drive around with the windows down on a glorious summer day; or even to listen to straight through in one sitting unless you’re of a particular temperament and have some stupendous melancholia to work out. But Vesna Pisarović and Co. have recorded an absolute tour de force of modernized traditional music. Listen at your own risk, because Poravna is likely to grow on you.
(PDV Records, 2025)
