Saban Bajramovic

Finally, here he comes. In the sparse dressing room of the Bataclan, Saban appears in a shiny white tracksuit. The Gypsy King of Serbia is in Paris, one of a very few concerts before London: this is no insignificant event. The door to the backstage slams interminably – the procession. Everyone, everyone who is anyone in the Voyage in Tzigania Festival at the beginning of May, comes to pay their respects to the legend. O’Djila, the Yeux Noirs, DJ Tagada greet him, shaking his hand and posing for immortality in the digital picture of a mobile phone. For Saban is quite something. Seven hundred tracks to his name, dozens of albums and a voice fit to conquer the hearts of all the girls in Ex-Yugoslavia. Part of what little we know about him. And what we do know should be taken for what it is: part of a myth. A variable that changes according to the interlocutor, the moment and the mood. His age? 70. His town? Nis, in the south of Serbia. This is more or less confirmed. His initiation too, during a stint spent in Goli Otok during the 1950s, an arid prison island where he was a prisoner for five years. He avoids saying what he was there for. Despite it being a somewhat praiseworthy cause: desertion for the love of a girl. “I liked football, I played all the time. And then I started to write songs.” A hundred in all. He didn’t resent Tito for it, and sang for him in private later, or so he says. For Nehru too, and Haïlé Sélassié. Saban, the voice of the non-aligned, the voice of the Rom of all countries. He who Emir Kusturica went to find for Black Cat, White Cat/. He who inspired Goran Bregovic for his hit “Mesecina”. And let’s not go into the delicate subject of the royalties that Saban has hardly received in forty years of travels. A first album in 1964 or 1966 according to the source, bars and weddings before international tours and the peak in the 1970s with Black Mamba, his group who stayed with him for twenty years. Today, “the orchestra are dead” as he says, “but their sons have taken their place”. These shameless accompanists capable of following the most beautiful broken rhythms with the worst synthesized flights of fantasy on the stage of the Bataclan. For a Parisian audience that was half subjugated, half taken aback. And some Rom purists carried away by hearing live the songs they have been brought up with since time immemorial. Since, even if the environment can throw you sometimes, Saban is a monument. In a black suit with dark shades, the Screamin’ Jay of the Balkans knows his stuff. His voice is still fabulous. And if many call him, just because it’s so easy, the Frank Sinatra of the East, he admits to preferring Elvis “because of his mix”. Pledge of good taste, pledge of eternal class.

Jean Stéphane Brosse translated by Marushka Vidovic

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