On Poravna, Croatian vocalist Vesna Pisarović doesn’t so much reinterpret tradition as pull it apart, letting the traces of Bosnian Sevdah drift through improvisation, dissonance, and suspended time. The album is grounded in a deep awareness of cultural memory, but it resists any fixed reading. Recorded across two live sessions in Zagreb and Berlin, Poravna filters the drawn-out melodic contours of Sevdah through a restless, experimental lens. With Noël Akchoté on guitar and dobro, Tony Buck on drums and percussion, Greg Cohen on double bass, and Axel Dörner on trumpet, the ensemble brings both precision and volatility to these performances.
Pisarović, once a celebrated pop singer in the former Yugoslavia, has spent the last decade reshaping her artistic identity within free jazz and improvised music. Poravna extends that evolution, placing traditional forms in unfamiliar settings, where they shift and shimmer with uneasy beauty.
Poravna will be released on June 6 by PDV Records. Pre-order it HERE and follow Pisarović HERE.
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As always, to start let’s go all the way back. What are some of your earliest memories related to music and sound? Was there a lot of music around you and in the house growing up?
Growing up, singing was a part of the everyday routine in my family. We just sang together, whenever we could and whenever we were all in one place, at home or during travels. My mother, professionally a radiologist, is still a passionate choir singer – we in fact have very similar voices – and she loved to sing Bosnian Sevdah songs. I thus learned some of these melodies when I was very little. My father was also passionate about music: especially American rock and pop from the fifties and sixties, which he collected on vinyl, djing locally with his collection, but also Yugoslav pop from the seventies and eighties. So all this made up my early repertoire. As a child, I was incessantly switching from rock choruses to harmonizing several voices with my family.
When did you start to sing and become aware of the wonder and power of your voice? Did you take lessons when you were young or sing in choirs?
Unlike my mother, I never found a love for traditional choirs – attempting to blend in with a multitude of voices in unison or through the division of roles in harmonic or melodic developments – this was not something that really enthused me as a child. Of course, I do love to listen to choirs now, and I think there is hardly anything as powerful as a multitude of human voices, untied in a well-balanced or shattering sound. However, very early I discovered a passion for voice as a solo expressive force – perhaps already in the music school, where I actually studied flute. Although I cannot say there was a simple moment growing up where I became consciously aware of my voice as a force. I think that I simply always loved singing, which I always found very natural. Perhaps both as a means of expression and of imitation. In music school, for example, I remember I would devote so little time to flute practice, which I never developed a proper love for, but then I would be imitating singers and the melodies that I liked for endless hours. I started with singing lessons when I was fifteen. What I did become aware of then is that the voice needs to be treated as an instrument – for, as direct and natural as it is, being a part of our bodily composition, it is still something that needs to be put under a strict regime of control, to be able to use it effectively and durably.
Your latest project, the fantastic Poravna, reimagines Bosnian Sevdah music in an avant-garde way. What drew you to this particular genre, and what does it mean to you personally? Was this music something you were exposed to and interested in from early on?
I think I might need to demystify my attachment to Bosnian Sevdah, for even if geographically and historically this is a musical genre that comes rather naturally to me, what ties me to it consists mostly of a series of contingencies. First: I was in fact born in Brčko, Bosnia (then part of the Yugoslav Federation) where my family briefly settled for work. But I was very young when we moved further, away from Bosnia, so I cannot really say whether this is music that I would hear daily in the social environment growing up. That said, as I already mentioned, my mother really liked to sing Sevdah songs, even if she comes from another Yugoslav region, and has German ancestry – and we did sing them together when I was little. Sevdah was also an important part of popular culture in Yugoslavia, so I was exposed to it on the radio and television, but not to such an extent as someone who would be coming from a traditional Bosnian environment. Fast forward thirty years or so, one night as I was researching some Indian raga singers on the internet – I had been trying to learn raga forms at that time, in my attempt to find a way to emulate Steve Lacy’s saxophone sound through the singing voice – I discovered some lost recordings of a radio show from the sixties, edited and hosted by the Yugoslav ethnomusicologist and composer from Banja Luka, Vladimir Milošević, who had been making field recordings with local amateur or semi-professional singers from the villages and smaller towns surrounding Banja Luka, which is a city in the very north of Bosnia and Herzegovina. And what I heard here really struck me: songs and voices, even singing techniques, which both sounded very familiar and strangely new and exotic. One particular singer really amazed me – her name was Rasema Katana. The way in which she sang Sevdah reminded me of jazz vocals, of Billie Holiday or Carmen McRae, or even of jazz saxophone, of Steve Lacy or Lee Konitz. Her voice was one of a full sound, without vibrato, with truly beautiful phrasing and a very personal approach to the typical Sevdah melismatic ornaments, which she sang less in a quarter-tone fashion, and more as if she was playing with scales or tone rows. I was enchanted with her artistry – and this is how this adventure actually began.
The album title, Poravna, has multiple meanings. How do these interpretations reflect the artistic approach you took on this record?
“Poravna” is an adjective in Serbo-Croatian, although an idiomatic one. Etymologically, it is a rather unusual compound of the preposition “po” which means by, and the adjective “ravan” or “ravna”, which means straight or flat, or something extending as a line or a vector, but also something equal. “Poravna” is not a word used in standard language, but it has an idiomatic sense within the context of the development of Bosnian traditional music, where the expression “pjesma poravna” or “pjesma po ravno” denoted both a peculiar way of singing and a peculiar type of melodic development, of singing “by long breath” or through flat, or long sustained vowels or syllables. What I discovered about it with the ethnomusicological research of Vlado Milošević fascinated me, especially the drone-like hypnotic quality of the singing and the accompaniment, and I was attempting to find ways to transpose this in a completely different musical idiom – and especially how to use this material for sonic experiments or collective improvisation.
Rather than simply preserving or hybridizing traditional Sevdah, you and your collaborators actively deconstruct it. What led you to this experimental approach, and how did you navigate the balance between honoring tradition and reshaping it?
In a certain sense, I would say that I cannot relate to Sevdah in a different manner. I am certainly not able to sing it in a traditional way, which has a rather strictly codified form – and even if I studied the traditional vocal techniques, the proper mastery of them is a vocation in itself, something which not only comes with years and years of study and training but also with a very firm idea of a particular vocal tone production. My “touching upon” Sevdah already transposes the traditional singing somewhere else, with the aid of techniques from jazz or improvised music – and with a completely different conception of the vocal tone. That said, artistically as well, I believe our aim had been precisely to attempt to avoid falling into a trap of making “hybrids” of tradition of all sorts, the stuff that usually characterizes “world music”, which is not a label or an approach that I am particularly fond of, as I see it mostly as a means of commercializing traditions. Deconstructing or transposing traditional forms seems to me as a much more sincere way of approaching this material artistically for someone coming from an entirely different musical idiom. And I think we might have thus also honored this music more appropriately – for I believe that the very idea of “unchanging traditions”, in contrast to evolving or changing forms, is also a completely false way of thinking about specific artistic ways that we inherit from the past.
The album was recorded in two live sessions, separated by the pandemic. How did this time-gap affect the music and your creative process?
The pause gave us time to reflect and also to approach things differently. There were many hit-and-miss elements of the first session, which was simply a very open attempt at improvising collectively over a minimally set form. As always, some things did work in this regard, and some things did not. For the second session, we took a different, more cautious approach, also reducing the scope of the instrumental interplays. Thus also the different combinations: duos, trios, and even an a capella approach. But I think somehow that everything did come together in the end.
The interplay of traditional melodies with noise, improvisation, and dissonance is a striking feature of the album. How did you approach arranging and performing these pieces to achieve that effect?
In a certain sense, such a contrast was imposed already by the traditional material at hand. By following Vlado Milošević’s ethnomusicological explorations further, I realized that the very interplay between the voice and the accompaniment of this genre in traditional Sevdah – “pjesma poravna” is usually sung a cappella, or with sparse accompaniment, provided by the saz, a plucked string instrument, which is variant of the Turkish bağlama, or alternatively, by the accordion – such an interplay is in fact already made up of a fascinating exchange of contrasts, tensions and dissonances, where the voice, in its melodic development, pivots upon an almost discordant or disharmonic way of instrumental playing. In a certain sense, what I tried doing is simply amplifying this further, and exploring how such an interplay of contrasts can be made to work within the setting of improvised music, where one can properly explode the very contrast between the sung form and the improvised instrumental or sonic exchanges. Taking this to the studio, I passed around very simple music sheets, while attempting to take the lead with minimal hints of potential developments, expressed solely metaphorically, in terms of colors, shapes, imaginations, etc., all the while allowing for the collective improvisation and sonic experiments to provide the actual course of where we are going. And it took only two or three takes for the music to happen, which amazed us all. Sometimes we all felt in a kind of a trance.
This record marks another step in your artistic evolution, from pop star to free jazz and experimental music. What inspired this transformation, and how has your perception of your own artistic identity changed over time?
I always say that my moment of “conversion,” almost Pauline, was an encounter with Peter Brötzmann, whom I heard one event in a duo with a drummer at a Berlin club. The intensity and the sheer unbridled creativity of his artistic approach left such an effect on me that I literally woke up the next morning deciding to put my pop endeavors on an extended hiatus and devote myself entirely to the study of jazz and improvised music. In the process, I moved to the Netherlands, then London, and finally settled in Berlin, where I have been living for more than twelve years, and where I became part of the jazz and improvised music scene. During this entire period, I grew very distant from my pop artistry. But recently I found both an interest and also the will to return to pop music – approaching it now in a completely different light. I am now actually writing some new materials, collaborating with some very creative, even if slightly more experimental producers. All in all, I often think I am leading a double life, like a spy who is constantly forced to change guises. In my case, this is now literally: performing improvised or experimental music in a small venue in front of a dozen people a day after a large arena concert in front of thousands of people.
Would you describe Poravna as a political or cultural statement, in addition to being an artistic one? If so, what conversations do you hope it sparks?
Through the concepts laid out, the choices made, the gestures involved, I primarily see it as an artistic endeavor. And an experimental one – even if I think that we did create something beautiful. But of course, I cannot anticipate all the effects that it might provoke. Certainly, this way of approaching Sevdah is bound to stir up a bit of a scandal locally. Even more so as it comes from someone who is locally primarily recognized as a pop singer.
And lastly, to close as always, what are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
The birds in the forest in front of my house, the sound of Steve Lacy on the soprano saxophone, Carmen McRae’s singing, especially on the magnificent “Bittersweet”, Caetano Veloso live in Rome during his recent European tour, or Klaus Mäkelä performing Shostakovich in the Berliner Philharmoniker, but also Raphael Rabello on his recordings of choros on a seven-string guitar or Thelonious in San Francisco … The list can be very long.
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