1^st and 2^nd  April 2018 – 1^st Lesson and Interview with Bajsa

This time my stay in Skopje had an incredibly serious connotation – the research for my Master Dissertation. As I had planned a number of visits, including most of the summertime, it seemed much easier, and also cheaper to rent a flat, and thus, with my lovely Mihajlo, we had rented our first little flat together. A small apartment, pretty central but quiet, with a lovely balcony – the inside however, needed attention, so the moving-in involved removing layers of dirt of the last decade... In the evening we were so shattered, that we did not go to the centre and join the first-of-April celebrations, which would have involved lots of Romani drum and zurla music in the centre, and costumed people – the year before, I saw everything from Hitler to Roma-cross-dressed men and princesses….

Next morning, after some more cleaning and a little warm up on the violin, I made my way up a steep hill to Bajsa’s flat. Bajsa is an incredibly gifted multi-instrumentalist, a great characterful and charismatic person, very well connected in the Folklore and Romani music world, and highly educated and knowledgeable; she was my first interviewee, also the ‘centre point’ to connect with the Masters of čoček, Romani music and ethnomusicologists of Macedonia. Also, I aimed to learn to play čoček including ornamentation from her, or more realistically, to make my first baby steps to play real authentic čoček.

After I was fed with some left-over lunch, we started the interview with all sorts of questions, and I found my well-organised and thought-through interview ending up being a slightly chaotic questionnaire – I realised very quickly, that my strategy did not at all fit the mentality of how Macedonians and Romani people think about čoček and their music in general. Still, with some spontaneous changes, I got a lot of knowledge, and great new insights down on tape. As we are by now something like professional friends, and know each other fairly well, I knew, that I can come back and ask many more questions at any stage.

In our music making I was taught ‘Bursa Čoček. Here a performance by one of her friends, Ilija Ampevski, nickname ‘Ampe’, a clarinettist and saxophonist, who is a non-Romani, but is still highly appreciated by Romani musicians - which is rather the exception, as most non-Romani are only considered as ‘imitators’ of čoček.

Learning phrase by phrase by ear, ornament by ornament – Bajsa is used to teach mostly classical musicians, or western advanced hobby musicians, who do not necessarily have a natural feel for that music, so each time I imitate an ornament and it has the right ‘kick’, she breaks out in a huge, high pitched laugh and ‘gives me 5’. One thing however strikes me about her and other Romani people in general. When it comes to talk about payments, she becomes a different person. Usually generous, bubbling, completely open, and certainly not at all money-driven, she transforms for one moment only into a stern persona, who seems business-orientated, and easily offended; in a way, as if there would be an inherited Romani gene, which suffers from the abuse of having been taken advantage of by white people for centuries, which is turned on for one moment. And I have watched similar weird moments with other Romani, even though, she, and some others have never been in person traumatised by that abuse; she works on a regular basis with Western European non-Romani musician, and earns good money.

Before I departed, she did two quick phone calls, and set me up with a musician colleague of her, Zoran Kraguevski, a clarinettist and saxophonist, and apparently very knowledgeable of čoček and Macedonian music in general, and then, to my great amazement, with the King of čoček, Ferus Mustafovski !!!