Praise songs: Amira sings sevdah at Temple Church.
Last Saturday evening the Bosnian singer Amira Medunjanin performed at Temple Church. This was a concert to be treasured: its not often Amira appears in London – its been at least six years since she last sang in the UK – and Medunjanin is an exceptional singer. It was also my first ever entry inside Temple Church.
I’d heard of Temple Church – it was built almost a thousand years ago by the Knights Templar, thus appears in The Da Vinci Code (the success of that nonsense novel ensuring its legions of fans head here) – and walked past it when wandering through Temple (which remains one of the West End’s most atmospheric neighbourhood’s). But I’d never set foot inside before and savoured the idea of entering one of London’s oldest buildings.
Admittedly, the church’s interior doesn’t appear a thousand years old. This is due, largely, to German bombs wreaking havoc here during WW2. But a sense of history imbues its walls and the acoustics are superb: Amira sang accompanied by an acoustic guitarist and the beautiful noise they made together resonated throughout the church. We sat in the pews and let Amira’s sublime voice wash over us – what a pleasure it was to hear her sing again!
Amira sings sevdah – this is the traditional music of Bosnia Herzegovina, the former Yugoslav republic that suffered more than any other region of Yugoslavia as that Balkan nation tore itself apart. If anything good came from that awful war (and, thinking of Nazi bombs hitting Temple Church reminded me how Amira survived the brutal, drawn out siege of Sarajevo) it is the revival of interest in sevdah.
As Bosniacs’ (the name given to Bosnia’s Muslim majority) began forging their newly independent state, they reclaimed sevdah from being seen as a dusty “folk” music and took this beautiful, reinvigorated music across the world.
There are now sevdah bands and sevdah singer-songwriters and cross-dressing gay sevdah singers who add bpms to their recordings. And then there’s Amira Medunjanin, a singer often described as “the Billie Holiday of the Balkans.” Amira is a very different singer to Billie – her voice is rich, throaty, deep in range – but similar in the sense she can convey deeply felt emotions with economy and grace.
Amira & Bosko: the footage here is similar to Saturday’s performance. I’ve seen Amira sing with everyone from jazz pianists to big bands - her musical intellect forever adapting and developing.
I first met Amira in Amsterdam before her sublime debut album Rosa was released in 2005 – she was visiting Bosniacs living there - and was immediately smitten: Amira’s whip smart and very funny, warm and generous, and a straight talker. I call her “diva” when I address her because she is anything but! Indeed, Amira was in London to sing at a fundraiser for Our Kids, a brilliant charity that raises money for displaced children in Bosnia Herzegovina: https://ourkidsfoundation.org/about-us/
Since then Amira’s enjoyed considerable fame across former-Yugoslavia – music, as often is the case, can bond people divided by politricks (actually, seeing how nationalist zealots destroyed Yugoslavia has made me forever allergic to those who spout a mythic separatist ideal. This includes the SNP and Catalonia’s inflammatory idiots) – and performed in North America and Australasia.
She is, as her Temple performance proved, one of the great singers currently working. Not just the beauty of her voice but the warmth and empathy Amira employs as she engages the audience.
Are you wondering why you’ve not heard of her? Amira really should be on a similar level of recognition to Portugal’s Mariza or that enjoyed by Cape Verde’s late( and very great) Cesaria Evora. Honestly, she possesses that level of talent. But she has never enjoyed having the triumvirate of management/booking agent/record label – these industry figures work together to ensure a musician wins a wide audience.
Bosnia is a small, fractured nation with no music industry to speak of, so Amira has had to achieve recognition by her own grit and determination. Admittedly, she’s achieved a great deal, effectively managing herself. But, as Saturday’s performance reinforced, she should be singing at venues such as the Royal Festival Hall - just a hop across the Thames from Temple - rather than singing for the Yugoslav diaspora and aficionados (moi!).
Amira recently performed in New Zealand on the same weekend as the Womad festival was held in Taranaki - Amira’s could easily headline that festival yet she’s never yet even been invited to perform... If any music biz insiders are reading this and decide that, yes, they might be the person to take Amira to a wider audience then drop me a line and I’ll make the connection.
Amira was studying economics when Yugoslavia brutally disintegrated – it could be said that war hurt her into song. And not just any song but sevdah, the ancient lyric ballad of Bosnia. Sevdah’s existed for hundreds of years in this region, often just a voice and a saz (a Turkish lute). Yet it took Bosnia’s suffering to focus the world’s attention on this tiny nation’s musical beauty.
Sevdah – the word is Turkish and suggests desire, yearning, thwarted love – bears comparison with Portugal’s fado and Spanish flamenco, all three being vocal arts rooted in Arabic courtly love songs from a millennium ago.
Bosnian Venus: Amira at Piha, the wild surf beach on Auckland’s west coast, March 2024.
In Temple Church – an ancient place of Christian worship – my Muslim friend sang her extraordinary songs. Unlike Amira, I’m not a linguist (sadly) so just appreciated the beautiful tone of her voice, the exquisite phrasing she employs. I once asked her how she learnt to sing and she said her mother had the radio on when she was a child and she would sing along. A natural, then.
Amira addressed the audience in Bosnian and English, noting where the songs origins were (several were Macedonian) and sometimes outlined what the songs were about. She’s witty so often had everyone chuckling. Gosh, she’s good – I go to hundreds of concerts a year but its rare to encounter a singer who has both the voice and the poise that Ms Medunjanin does.
I previously caught up with Amira and her husband Bekim in Sarajevo last year – I was on a road trip with Nick Nasev, my buddy in Balkan adventures, and they invited us to dinner at a historic local restaurant. Covid having stopped us seeing one another regularly, we had a lot to catch up on – indeed, both of us had lost our fathers since we last met.
I love the Balkans for many reasons, even though they remain unstable – Bosnia’s ethnic divisions make efficient government extremely difficult while Putin continues to fund the extreme nationalist Serb breakaway enclave of Republika Srpska (hoping to fuel a new conflict and thus further destabilise the EU + NATO). Not that we discussed such when we sat outside on that late summer evening. Instead, we spoke of personal loss and the challenge of being self-employed in an increasingly corporate world. And the wonder of Sarajevo - Bosnia’s capital is a beauty.
That evening reminded me of a previous Sarajevo encounter where, again, Amira took me to a restaurant. Here’s a paragraph from a feature I wrote detailing my experience of dining with Bosnia’s finest singer.
Amira orders a Bosnian feast - stuffed onions, broiled veal, shopska salad, burek pie – and, as we begin to eat, four minstrels wander the restaurant, playing traditional songs to diners who decorate them with banknotes. The ensemble’s tambura (a Balkan lute) player recognises Amira and she shrinks. “Ohhhh noooo, they’re going to want me to sing!” Surrounded, she lights a cigarette, fends off requests. The tambura player plucks out a mournful sevdah melody and sings to Amira. Her black eyes sparkle. He pauses, she leans forward, begins to sing. Amira’s voice possesses an eerie, pitch perfect beauty, one that contains both darkness and light. Fellow diners hush as she sings, curling syllables, casting spells, conjuring up Sarajevo’s beautiful, battered soul. Song finished, the restaurant erupts. For sevdah has spoken.
Happy travels: Amira and me in Sarajevo, September 23.