A small town in the rolling hills of central Serbia is an unlikely setting for one of Europe’s wildest music festivals, but across five days in early August an annual trumpet competition transforms Guča (population 3,000) into a febrile brass fest like no other.
The Balkan brass tradition dates back to Ottoman military marching bands and remains popular. To win Guča’s Golden Trumpet marks your orchestra – as they refer to their dozen-strong, all-male lineups – as heavyweight champions; lucrative bookings at weddings (huge, often all-weekend events across much of the Balkans) and other festivities follow. Alongside the bands who have made it through regional heats to compete at these finals, hundreds of ensembles travel to Guča to join the street party and raise baksheesh (tips) as they blast their eerie funk all day and night. Imagine a non-stop Notting Hill carnival with brass bands instead of sound systems and you have something of an idea.
But only an idea. Guča is a celebration of primal, bacchanal spirit, the music helping people party until they drop. To the musicians who flock here, Guča is where the best players turn up to compete and funds can be earned; to the hundreds of thousands of Serbs who attend, it is the summer’s wildest moment.
Guča trumpet festival was launched in 1961, initially for musicologists gathering to document the village brass band tradition. Its popularity has grown exponentially: the films of Emir Kusturica (Time of the Gypsies, Underground, Arizona Dream) featuring Roma brass bands coincided with the sanctions against Milošević’s Serbia so ensuring that Serb youths, starved of rock and dance festivals and unable to travel abroad, turned Guča into their own brassy rave party. The musicians are predominantly Roma – music still being a viable trade for the Balkans’ largest minority – while the revellers are almost entirely Serb.
I first attended in 2003. It was fun, if exhausting – as being stuck in a rave tends to be – and I never intended to return. But a summer 2007 Balkan sojourn coincided with Guča festival and my then-partner hadn’t previously attended. Initially, 2007 appeared little different from 2003: the competing orchestras perform in the main arena but most people stay on the surrounding streets where Roma brass bands play for drunken revellers. This changed on Saturday night when the headliner was Goran Bregović, the Sarajevo-born rock musician and soundtrack composer to Kusturica’s most famous films.
Bregović rose to local fame as guitarist/songwriter in Bijelo Dugme (White Button), Yugoslavia’s foremost rock band (1974-89). He then won international acclaim with his soundtracks to the aforementioned Kusturica films and his London performances often find him leading a 40-piece folk orchestra (to replicate the films’ multifaceted music). Astute, and very wealthy, Bregović is also somewhat controversial: Roma musicians have complained he appropriates their songs, he regularly recycles old songs on new albums, and he’s performed in Crimea since Russia annexed it.
Taking the stage in front of a vast audience packed into Guča’s open-air arena, Bregović and his percussionist/vocalist were seated up front. Seven male brass players stood behind them and two Bulgarian female vocalists stood stage right. The women and brass musicians were all dressed in traditional village costume while Bregović wore his trademark white suit.
Then they started to play, and more than 100,000 people united in something akin to religious ecstasy. The audience’s enthusiasm meant that, as they sang and shouted their appreciation, they became louder than the band; densely packed together and projecting waves of adulation towards the stage, they appeared to be levitating on their own exhilaration. Huge Serb and Chetnik flags – an ominous skull-and-crossbones – were waved throughout: Bregović may be performing Yugoslav-era songs but Guča attracts many hardline Serb nationalists. The audience were not predominantly middle-aged rock fans drunk on nostalgia but youthful, with lots of families, and everyone was going wild.
The band played Bijelo Dugme’s hits alongside party anthems Kalasnjikov and Mesecina, both from the brass heavy soundtrack of Underground (and thus often heard on Guča’s streets). That these songs from Yugoslav times inspired deep fervour at a festival where some celebrate Serb war criminals – T-shirts featuring Karadzic, Mladic and Arkan are sold and worn openly – exposed the paradoxes at Guča’s heart. Bregović, born in Sarajevo to Croat-Serb parents and married to a Bosniak (ie a Muslim), is the former Yugoslavia in microcosm; Bijelo Dugme’s members hailed from equally mixed backgrounds and enjoyed their success while Tito’s Yugoslavia was at its most liberal and unified. His performance, and these songs, should therefore be anathema to nationalists but classic rock is often embraced even by those whose debased ideology it refutes.
I’ve seen everyone from Beyoncé to Black Sabbath command adoring arenas, but I’ve never witnessed a response akin to Guča’s for Bregović. He is their golden boy, and his music connected the audience to what they likely consider Yugoslavia’s golden age of peace, prosperity and visa-free travel. Nodding to tradition, Bregović drank a glass of rakija (brandy) and gave baksheesh to his musicians. The audience roared approval. Then he was off on a jet to Russia, while the crowds surged back on to Guča’s streets. The Roma brass musicians started up again.
