Čalgija | Üçayak

Review of Üçayak in Rootstime

There are some albums that demand a little more attention and effort from the listener than others. Take Üçayak by the ensemble Čalgija. Originally, Čalgija was the name of the group led by the Dutch ethnomusicologist Wouter Swets. In 1981, he and the ensemble entered the studio to record the second volume of Music from the Balkans and Anatolia. The recordings were completed, but Swets never finished writing the accompanying booklet. Meanwhile, the world moved on, and the ensemble’s line-up and repertoire changed to such an extent that the recordings were no longer considered representative. As a result, they ended up forgotten in a drawer—or perhaps a cellar—and were never released.

A second attempt was made in 1983, but these recordings also failed to reach completion. They were never fully issued, although part of the material was used for a Čalgija album released in 1991. Swets passed away in 2016, and among his belongings a cassette copy of the lost 1981 recordings was discovered. The tracks were carefully restored and digitised, and now form the heart of this album: the first nine tracks are those restored recordings from more than forty years ago.

Even older are tracks 10 to 16, which are live recordings from Čalgija concerts given in 1978 at Theater aan de Haven in The Hague. These recordings were likewise restored in 2019, and a newly recorded closing track was added, resulting in the seventeen-track album we can enjoy today. Together, they paint a vivid picture of what Čalgija represented at the height of its powers.

We owe all this to Michiel van der Meulen, a man of extraordinary patience and deep admiration for the work of Wouter Swets. Through his record label TouMilou—van der Meulen in Greek—he had previously released Unforgotten and Vintage Recordings by Balkan Orchestra Čalgija, featuring Michiel’s father, Albert van der Meulen, on accordion. Thanks to these releases, we now have access to virtually everything that Swets and his musicians ever recorded. Quite apart from this archival work, Van der Meulen is also known through his own ensemble, Kairos Collective, and its albums of contemporary modal music, Pîrî Reis and Európe—recordings that challenge the ear while revealing a wealth of extraordinary musical beauty.

The same is true of this Čalgija album. It sounds exactly as the musicians must have intended: a little raw, a little unpolished, but utterly authentic and deeply felt. This is folk music at its finest—music as it was, and still is, played by ordinary people. Admittedly, it takes a little time to become accustomed to the rhythms and scales, which are not always familiar to Western ears, but the music possesses such profound beauty that you would need a heart of iron not to be moved by it.

Add to this the superb 32-page booklet, which offers extensive background on the musical tradition, the individual pieces and the musicians themselves, and the conclusion is inescapable: this is one of the absolute best world music releases of the year. You know what to do!

(Dani Heyvaert)

© 2021 Rootstime

Review of Üçayak in New Folk Sounds

Articles, columns / Balkans, Netherlands, folk music, Wieringa weighs, Wouter Swets / by Joop Wieringa

It was 1980. I’m looking through an old diary from that year. I’ve kept all my annual diaries since 1973. What exactly was I doing on my Balkan journeys back then? The reason I’m thinking about it is that Hans asked me to review a new album by the ensemble Čalgija​. Around 1980, I found myself becoming more deeply involved with Balkan music once again. That year I joined the Paloina demonstration dance group, with which I regularly performed Balkan dances throughout the Netherlands. In the years that followed, I frequently travelled by motorcycle to the Yugoslavia of President Tito, the country’s enlightened despot.

At the time, the country was experiencing something of a revival of its traditional culture, and the music still sounded deeply rooted in folklore, much as it had for centuries. Sometime around 1984, Paloina learned a new dance choreography by the renowned musician and choreographer Pece Atanasovski. He had built an impressive career in Yugoslavia. As a child of just five or six, he was already playing a wide variety of traditional folk instruments, as many of the men in his family did. From leading dances in his home village and becoming an outstanding gaida (bagpipe) player, he went on to record LPs and create folk dance choreographies.

He later joined the State Song and Dance Ensemble Tanec as a musician and eventually became the director of several musical ensembles. Later still, he spread his wings to the United States and Canada, where he taught his ‘recreational dances’—the social dances traditionally performed at weddings in his homeland and, increasingly, abroad as well.

Our International Folkloristic Dance Theatre invited Pece to the Netherlands to create a new choreography, and our dance group was able to benefit from the visit as well. For a considerable fee, he taught us a suite of dances from his country. As a demonstration group, you were also buying the prestige of having his name attached to your repertoire.

Skopje by motorcycle

On one of my journeys, I rode my Honda CX500 into Skopje. I found the small campsite, pitched my little tent, and wandered into the city, which is now the capital of North Macedonia. The city centre had been beautifully restored following the devastating earthquake of 1963. Somewhere in the centre I noticed a cluttered little shop crammed with old odds and ends, although the window also displayed a number of beautiful collector antiques. I had no intention of buying anything—there wasn’t much room on my motorcycle—but out of curiosity I stepped inside. The place was packed with objects that had nothing to do with one another, except that together they offered a glimpse into an long-forgotten world, one that had itself already been swept away by the modern age of the mid-1980s.

There wasn’t a soul in the dimly lit, high-ceilinged room. I wandered around in quiet amazement, taking in the atmosphere created by all this accumulated bric-à-brac. I was just about to leave when, high up on a sunlit shelf in one corner, I spotted a stack of LPs, several of them bearing the instantly recognisable face of Pece. When Pece had visited the Netherlands, he had brought his wonderful music only on cassette tapes and had shown no commercial interest in selling records. Everyone in my dance group would happily have bought a copy, as this exotic music was extremely difficult to find back home. So I made a snap decision to buy a few LPs after all and somehow find room for them on my motorcycle, hoping to get them home intact. I called out, “Hallo! Dobar dan! Dobro jutro!” Somewhere I heard shuffling, followed by the creak of a staircase.

Bent double

A very elderly, stooped little woman emerged from the back of this other world and fixed me with a gloomy look. I didn’t speak Serbo-Croatian, so we had to rely on sign language. I pointed towards the coveted corner, but following my gesture she picked up a small earthenware bear from a much lower shelf. I shook my head and tried to indicate that she needed to reach much higher. She looked at me rather blankly, and I searched my memory for the name of the musician whose face I recognised from the album covers, but not from Cyrillic lettering.

“Pece! Ah, Pece!” she exclaimed, breaking into a smile. “Yes, yes—lijepci… sjajan!” she beamed, delighted that this foreigner knew her hero, and indeed the pride of the entire region. For a while we simply stood there grinning at one another, neither of us understanding the other. It wasn’t getting us very far, so I resorted to more gestures: pointing at the treasured records, then at myself with both hands, and finally making the internationally recognised finger-rubbing gesture for money. The poor old lady was not blessed with lightning-fast comprehension, so I had to repeat the performance several times before her expression revealed that the penny had finally dropped.

I also began to realise that this bent old woman had no hope of reaching the LPs on the high shelf, and I feared our transaction might come to an untimely end. Then she disappeared beneath her dusty counter and suddenly reappeared holding a long broom which, judging by the thick layer of dust on it, had long since ceased to serve its original purpose. Instead, it had become an extension of her curved body. With one sweeping movement she tried to hook the records—but instead knocked her little earthenware bear off the shelf, where it smashed to pieces on the floor. Undeterred, she tried again. I closed my eyes in despair, already anticipating the inevitable outcome, as though watching a scene from a Laurel and Hardy film. This time she succeeded—but the entire stack of LPs came crashing down onto the shattered remains of the bear. The noise made me open my eyes again. I expected to see a look of dismay on her face. Instead, she looked positively triumphant. Busily, she gathered up the—after all, rather fragile—records from the floor as though she were shovelling up lumps of coal that had spilled from a sack. She propped the whole pile against the cabinet, deftly fished out the two albums I wanted, and casually nudged the rest back into a neat stack with the toe of her slipper. Rarely have I expanded my record collection in quite such a fashion. The price stickers showed remarkably low amounts in dinars, written in an almost illegible hand. I paid as close to the exact amount as I could; it was obvious there wasn’t much money to be made in this little shop. She wrapped the two LPs in a newspaper that was already six months old and tied the parcel with a length of coarse string.

Wedding celebration

When I returned to the campsite, I heard live music, the very sort of music I had probably just bought on those LPs. A wedding was taking place at the campsite and, as the only foreigner there (this was before tourism had grown into what we would now call mass tourism), I was invited to join the festivities with a few glasses of rakija and a plate of ćevapčići. In those days, inviting a stranger to your wedding was believed to bring good luck. The musicians played a tapan drum, a zurna shawm, an accordion and, from time to time, a kaval flute.

Thanks to the warm, almost brotherly atmosphere—and my years of experience as a folk dancer—I was soon able to join in. My dancing amazed the other guests and only added to their enthusiasm, no doubt helped by the generous supply of drink available for the celebration. I would estimate that, in those days, a Balkan wedding consisted three-quarters of music, dancing and drinking, with the remaining quarter devoted to the well-intentioned rituals surrounding the marriage of the couple and the union of their families. And for all I know, that may still be the case today.

Balkan music from the Netherlands

Ever since the first wave of tourism to the Balkans, international interest in the region’s musical traditions has steadily grown. Many ensembles have adopted this exotic style, sometimes performing it almost more beautifully than the original. Čalgija is one such group. Under the direction of the ethnomusicologist and accordionist Wouter Swets, the ensemble approached the Balkan tradition with remarkable authenticity and respect.

I first encountered Čalgija while serving on the committee of the folk club De Draailier, where the group performed. Later, the connection became more personal through the late Roelof Rosendal, and even more so through the still-active member Crispijn Oomes. My long-distance friend Monique Landsdorp, with her magnificent violin playing, was also part of this exceptional ensemble.

Over the years, the excellent Balkan ensemble Čalgija released a number of recordings in various line-ups. Following the death of Wouter Swets, the group disbanded. Years later, a reunion brought several of the former members together again under the name Čalgija-3. Then, last year, a remarkable discovery was made: a set of Ampex tapes containing previously unreleased recordings of the music once heard in pre-Second World War Macedonia and Anatolia—performed, in this case, by outstanding Dutch musicians.

The group’s leader, Wouter Swets, was something of an Alan Lomax of the Low Countries: a field researcher who spent years travelling through the Balkans in the middle of the twentieth century, collecting and documenting traditional melodies. With the original Čalgija ensemble, he sought to introduce this remarkable musical heritage to Dutch audiences.

Urban traditional

Čalgija is the name of a genre of traditional urban folk music from Macedonia and Bulgaria. It is typically performed on traditional instruments such as the tapan, tarabuka, gaida, oud, dajre, kanun and violin. Today, Čalgija-3 carries on that tradition with former members of earlier line-ups. And now there is also the album Üçayak, featuring rediscovered recordings from 1981. Crispijn Oomes filled me in on some of the background.

He explained how difficult the recording sessions at Munich Records had been. The label’s producer, Job Zomer—who, like Wouter Swets, is sadly no longer with us—spent four years chasing Swets for the liner notes that were meant to accompany the recordings. By then, however, Swets had long since moved on to other projects, including a lecture series and a book on Ottoman classical music. The professionally recorded twelve-track master tapes had already disappeared from his mental horizon. According to unconfirmed stories, there were even plans at one point to release the album in the United States. Munich Records has since ceased to exist, and the original tapes have disappeared.

When Wouter Swets passed away in 2016, a cassette containing two-track recordings of surprisingly good quality was found among his belongings. Michiel van der Meulen, a member of the current ensemble, digitised these recordings with the assistance of Wil Hesen, the original sound engineer from the 1981 sessions. The recordings have now been released with great care and expertise, supported by extensive research, source material and newly written liner notes that place this remarkable music in its proper context. The nine recordings rediscovered in 2020 have been supplemented with eight live tracks from 1978. Three of the recordings had previously been restored and released on earlier albums.

An exotic world

As soon as you put the CD on, you are transported to an exotic world of long-forgotten times—the very same atmosphere I experienced in that little shop in Skopje all those years ago. The music is beautiful, timeless and utterly authentic: centuries-old folk traditions dating back to long before the World Wars. The six musicians, including Wouter Swets himself, play a wide range of traditional Čalgija​ instruments, including the gajda, bağlama, cura, laouto and def. Most of the singing is provided by clarinettist and santur player Jan Hofmeijer, although on occasion the entire ensemble joins in. The live recordings were made at Theatre aan de Haven in The Hague. Some of the dance tunes are instantly familiar to me from the folk dance world. Here, however, they are performed with dazzling virtuosity and remarkable flair. Üçayak—which means ‘three-step dance’—is a wonderful addition to the Dutch multicultural musical landscape. It brings together Macedonian and Bulgarian folk traditions with Ottoman café music, dating from the period when the Ottoman Empire ruled this part of the world until 1912. This was immensely popular music until around 1950, and it is now enjoying a well-deserved revival.

The album also brings back many personal memories. The second track, ‘Trakijsko pajduško’, is a spirited dance from Thrace, performed here with tremendous fire. It immediately takes me back to a folk dance evening at Danshuis Terpsichoré. Čalgija​ had been invited to provide the live music, and that’s where things went wrong—particularly during this pajduško.

As with so many Balkan dances, a single dance may be accompanied by a variety of different melodies. In the Netherlands, however, we were very much products of what I call the ‘cassette tape culture’: students learned each dance to one specific melody, which was then used everywhere. As Dutch dancers, we could only dance the choreography to that particular tune, and the same applied to virtually all traditional dances at the time. Consequently, most folk dance bands in the Netherlands faithfully reproduced the cassette recordings note for note, with the familiar A and B melodies in exactly the right order. Dancers tended to recognise the melodies rather than the rhythms themselves.

Čalgija played a variety of melodies that the dancers at the ball simply didn’t recognise. Everyone waited patiently and politely for the band to finish its set. A handful of people did recognise the correct dance and tried to join in, but no proper circle or line dance ever got going. It was only when someone put the familiar cassette back on that the dance floor immediately filled again.

It was a curious experience of genuine living traditional music—music that, in the Balkans, would have had everyone dancing. Most of the pieces on this album are traditional dances such as kalamatianos, tsamiko and zeybekiko from the Greek Balkans, rachenitsa and kopanitsa from the Bulgarian Balkans, as well as dance tunes from eastern Turkey and Albania. Here, however, the ensemble achieves an almost orchestral sound, with often complex, largely syncopated rhythms and melodies that at times seem almost impossible to follow. Some pieces unfold at a stately pace, while others race along with exhilarating energy.

The variety on this CD is remarkable, not least because the tracks are not grouped by country but interwoven throughout the programme. As a relatively untrained listener, I can usually distinguish the Greek style from the Bulgarian or Macedonian approach, all of which differ subtly again from the Albanian tradition, which to my ears has more in common with Turkish music, despite the geographical distance between those two cultures.

Listening more closely—and with the liner notes to hand—I noticed that Roel Sluis’s vocal harmonies are supported by Jan Hofmeijer, who also plays the kanun and clarinet. His singing adds wonderful colour, particularly in the Albanian song ‘Në Shkodër’. The Turkish song ‘Esir-i zülfünüm ey yüzü mahim’ is beautifully mysterious, with its winding melodic lines and intricate syncopated rhythms.

A beautiful melody

The tsamiko dance ‘Selim Bey’ takes me back to the recently departed Roelof Rosendal, with whom I once shared a tiny bedroom during a folk dance weekend in Lage Vuursche. It was still early on a Sunday morning and I was only half awake after a long evening of dancing when I was gently shaken awake with the words: “you simply have to hear this melody—it’s so beautiful.” The next moment I was violently dragged back to reality by the piercing blast of a Balkan gaida (bagpipe), which Roelof had enthusiastically unleashed on me. Still hovering somewhere between sleep and consciousness, I sat bolt upright in bed. I wanted to tell him exactly what I thought… but just managed to summon the groggy words, “yes, beautiful.” The day had certainly begun with a bang, but I survived.

Incidentally, on this track Roelof plays a wonderful oud part, taking over from an equally fine violin solo by Crispijn Oomes. One of the album’s great strengths is the way each piece allows different instruments to come to the fore. Because all seven musicians are multi-instrumentalists, every track sounds rich and varied without ever losing its coherence or distinctive character. As mentioned earlier, the nine rediscovered studio recordings have been supplemented by eight live recordings. Although these live tracks were recorded in mono, I can hardly hear any difference compared with the studio material; everything sounds equally clear and vibrant. It’s remarkable just how fresh and contemporary these recordings from 1981 still sound. Discussing all seventeen tracks would be impossible, but the newly written liner notes by Michiel van der Meulen provide a wealth of fascinating information about every one of them.

This album, Üçayak, unfolds like a wonderful historical novel about the Balkans, with its very informative liner notes about the tracks and the remarkable history of this extraordinary ensemble.

If you’d like to learn more about this fascinating musical tradition, visit Folkdance Footnotes.

• Čalgija – Üçayak, Music from the Balkans and Anatolia

• TouMilou Records #5, or via Xango Music Distribution

© 2021 New Folk Sounds

Review of Üçayak in Moors Magazine

Üçayak / Music from the Balkans and Anatolia

Just look at the cover of this album, then listen to one of the excerpts before reading any further. I suspect you’ll be convinced that you’re hearing an Eastern European ensemble performing authentic music from the Balkans and Anatolia. In fact, what you’re listening to is a group founded by the Dutch musician and ethnomusicologist Wouter Swets, who had a profound passion for this music and felt that the traditions of the region had become overly Westernised. Through his arrangements, he sought to restore the music to what he believed was its original form. You could perhaps call that a form of cultural imperialism, and, to be honest, I sometimes feel that Swets was more Catholic than the Pope in his approach. Even so, there’s no denying that he and his ensemble tackled this old repertoire with extraordinary passion and dedication.

During its long existence (1969–1995), Čalgija released two albums: Music from the Balkans and Anatolia #1 and #2, in 1978 and 1991, respectively. The ensemble was at its peak as a live act from the late 1970s until the mid-1980s. In 1981, another album was recorded and prepared for release, but, apparently, Swets never managed to complete the accompanying liner notes, and the album was shelved. The original master tapes were preserved for many years but disappeared around a decade ago. Other master tapes from 1983 and 1984 were later discovered, containing live recordings that had partly been used for the 1991 album, alongside several previously unreleased performances. These were eventually issued under the title Unforgotten – Music from the Balkans and Anatolia.

Later still, a cassette tape surfaced among Wouter Swets’ personal effects, containing the recordings originally intended for that unreleased LP. Swets was evidently a perfectionist who was not easily satisfied, but listening to these recordings today, one can only conclude that this was an ensemble with a complete mastery of the traditional music of the Balkans and Anatolia. You can hear the passion and energy in every performance, and that enthusiasm is impossible not to share.​

• Čalgija – Üçayak​ – TouMilou Records #5

© 2021 Moors Magazine

Review of Üçayak in De Subjectivisten

NNM is a series in which we review new music by Dutch artists.

Čalgija – Üçayak (cd, TouMilou / Xango Music Distribution)
This NNM series is devoted to New Dutch Music, and in the case of Čalgija that may seem something of an odd one out – yet it makes perfect sense. The music of this ensemble belongs stylistically somewhere between the Balkans and Turkey, but it is performed by Dutch musicians. And it is “new” in the sense that it has never been released before. Although the terms world music, folk and traditional music are often used interchangeably, I generally mean music that is unique to a particular country and rooted in its traditions. Whether it has been given an electronic twist or any other modern treatment is beside the point. My own interest in the genre was first sparked by Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares and the music of the French ethnologist Hector Zazou. They opened the door to a much wider world of traditional music. The Netherlands had its own remarkable musical ethnologist in Wouter Swets (1930–2016), who, alongside Balkan Orchestra Čalgija – often simply called Čalgija – was also involved with Al Farabi. With Čalgija he made a number of recordings, many of them originating in the 1960s, exploring musical traditions from Macedonia and Bulgaria to Greece. From 1978 onwards these recordings began to appear on album, although only a modest number were released. In some respects they were even more traditional than much of the music then being made in the countries from which they drew their inspiration. You might say they were more Catholic than the Pope, yet infused with boundless freedom and a profound love of the music.

Forty years ago Wouter Swets and his ensemble recorded Čalgija’s second album, but because the line-up changed so extensively afterwards, the recordings were no longer considered representative. They were eventually forgotten altogether. In 2020, however, the long-lost tape of those sessions was rediscovered among Swets’s belongings. Three of the twelve recordings had already appeared on other albums; the remaining nine tracks have now been released on Üçayak, supplemented by eight live recordings from 1978. The album has been issued on Michiel van der Meulen’s distinctive TouMilou label (home to Pîrî Reis, Kairos Collective) and Ano Kato. Van der Meulen also played a major role in restoring these recordings, while his father Albert had been a member of Swets’s ensemble. Alongside Swets (accordion, kanun), the musicians featured here are Tjarko ten Have (gajda, bağlama, saz, ney, def, tapan), Jan Hofmeijer (clarinet, santur, vocals), Thijs de Melker (Macedonian tambura, laouto, divan saz, oud), Crispijn Oomes (violin, gadulka, cura saz), Roelof Rosendal (darabuka, oud, tapan, def, gajda) and Roel Sluis (vocals, kaval, sopranino recorder, davul), who together take the listener on a musical journey across the Balkans and beyond. The album’s subtitle, Music from the Balkans and Anatolia, could hardly be more fitting.

What I have always loved about this kind of music is its sense of purity and the universal melancholy and emotion it conveys. Čalgija captures that with sublime artistry. They perform both instrumental and vocal pieces, each leaving a lasting impression. This is the type of traditional music I once fell in love with, music that brings so much more than pop, rock and all electronic genres combined. I enjoy those genres too, but they rarely surprise me in the way that centuries-old traditions still can. Admirers of groups and artists such as Kolinda, Tanec, Muzsikás, Kızılırmak and Ahmet Kaya will find much to treasure here. Most remarkable of all is how fresh and compelling these recordings remain after more than thirty years. In that sense, this release is like a newly unearthed treasure, timeless in its value. Magnificent world music that transports you completely away from the here and now – even if, like so many people today, your holiday destination is simply “Balconia”.

​Jan Willem Broek

© 2022 De Subjectivisten