Singer Eva Salina amplifies voices of past generations of Balkan Romani women musicians in Race Brook Lodge concert

Original Article by Sharon Smullen on BerkshireEagle.com:

SHEFFIELD — The language of music transcends national borders. No one knows this better than the Roma, a tribe that left India more than a thousand years ago to roam across the diaspora, itinerant communities in different countries united by a common heritage.

Vocalist Eva Salina, though not of Roma descent, has taken their music into her soul. Along with Serbian/Romanian Roma accordionist Peter Stan, Salina will interpret the moving, melancholic songs of iconic Roma singer Vida Pavlović at Race Brook Lodge’s rustic Barnspace, on May 5.

Pavlović is the subject of the duo’s latest album “Sudbina,” which in Romani means destiny. Her songs are a perfect vehicle for Salina’s plaintive yet powerful voice and Stan’s dynamic accordion skills.

The musicians met when, at 18, she sat in with the band Slavic Soul Party in Brooklyn, N.Y. He is still their accordionist, and Salina’s husband played tuba with the band for 14 years.

“Peter had never met an American that grew up in Balkan music the way I had,” Salina said. “When I sang with that band later on, we would warm up the crowd, just me and the accordion. There was something effortless about how we played together.“

Salina has performed with “a potpourri” of bands over the years. When it was time to make her own project, she said, “I wanted a strong theme and chose the most famous Roma male singer from the Balkans, Saban Bajramovic. He had this ragged, throaty voice, real rough edges, beautiful free, loose expression.”

She recorded the album “Lema Lema: Eva Salina Sings Saban Bajramovic” in Serbia and New York with 15 musicians. Knowing she wouldn’t be able to tour it, she began performing as a duo with Stan.

When choosing repertoire, she said, “I thought, I would love to find women singers who never achieved international recognition and find music that had more tenderness and intimacy.”

“[For] decades there were incredibly powerful beautiful and strong singers. Vida Pavlovic from northern Serbia, she passed away in 2008. The depth of her expression, the way she talked about the realities of women in her community, of poverty, struggle and being a woman musician, was so moving to me.”

When Salina first heard a song by Pavlović about a decade ago, “I just sat there and cried, I was so moved by the honesty and power and really deep sadness in her voice,” she said.

All her songs are sung in Romanies, Salina said. When Roma sing in their own language for their own people, they speak much more directly about the realities of life, about hardship and things people are experiencing, she said.

Salina, who moved to the Hudson Valley from Brooklyn with her husband and now-three year old daughter during the pandemic, grew up in Santa Cruz, Calif., with Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews on her father’s side, Dutch and Irish on her mother’s.

“I was very musical from a young age,” she recalled, noting her father’s parents would send her cassettes of Yiddish music from the East Coast.

“My father’s friend gave me a cassette [with] a women’s ensemble singing Eastern European traditional music on one side, and a Yiddish language recording on the other. It was beautiful and unpretentious, very genuine singing, and I taught myself all of the songs.”

Her parents sought out a teacher for her, and found “a phenomenal migrant young woman who in the 1980s started an all-women Bulgarian traditional band with folk instruments and three-part harmonies that played all around town. The lead singer played accordion and was a great musician,” Salina said. “And my whole life was irreversibly redirected towards southeastern Europe, I just fully dove in.”

From the age 8 she attended annual Balkan music and dance workshop camps in Mendocino, where she first heard Romani music and met legendary singers and musicians. In the 1990s, Bulgarian refugees, who were professional folk musicians, arrived in the United States, “so I shifted to learning from native-born folk music practitioners.”

In 1996, then 12, she traveled to Bulgaria  with her teacher, expanding into neighboring traditions — Macedonia, Greece, Serbia, Turkey. When she listened to Balkan Romani music, however, “I picked up an abundance of technical skills but also so much personal expressions of improvisation and fluidity and playfulness,” she said.

“It felt like opening a door. I found supportive people within the tradition who could serve as my barometer. For centuries, Roma have been the largest minority stateless group in Europe. I was aware my participation needed not to reinforce damaging stereotypes or over-romanticize, and gently educate people whenever I could about the reality and hardship and sociocultural context of these songs.”

She has performed Balkan music for 30 years.

“By the time I moved to Brooklyn in 2007, I was pretty deeply entrenched in the Balkan music community,” she said. She founded and still directs a southeastern European chorus in New York City, and has worked with Williams College choirs in the past. “I love polyphony so I’m drawn to harmonizing traditions from different cultures,” she said.

Accordionist Stan is her musical partner, Salina stressed, not an accompanist. Born in Australia to Serbian parents, Stan immigrated to New York City at age 11. His whole family was there, he said, and everyone played instruments. He already playing accordion, along with his dad and three brothers, and “became more serious about it,” he said.

Growing up, he would attend weekly three-day Balkan parties, eating goulash and cabbage soup with music playing long into the night.

“The music would be wild, with tons of money on the floor, all over the place. One of my cousins, he was 17, a few years older than me, I was jealous he played much better than me. A family member came from Serbia, and I fell in love with his music, it put me in another world.”

Stan’s path in life was set. At age 18, he played in a kafana, a Balkan bar, from 8 p.m. to 3 a.m. “I made more money than I’m making now,” he said. “sometimes $500 in tips, $1,500 a week. I didn’t always tell my parents how much I made.”

Salina and Stan have performed across America and overseas, bringing the music of the Roma to new audiences. Now they share Pavlović with the world.

“Vida wasn’t a beautiful woman, she had a tragic life of failed marriages, and was unable to have children which she longed for,” Salina said. “There was a directness in her singing, like she was singing to her community. Peter knew all her songs. [His] wife helped with the lyrics, and I understood there was something profound about what she sang about: Roma in the Holocaust, domestic abuse, challenges of being a women musician, economic migration, really powerful topics.”

There is no language barrier to the music, Salina said; it speaks for itself.

“I shy away from poetic recitation of lyrics,” she explained. “What I want to create is an armature that people can build their own story on top of. There’s something powerful about the abstraction of language, if people are open to it and allow themselves to be moved by melody and harmony and use their imagination.”