Damir Imamović, the Sarajevo-born sevdah performer and tambur player, tells us about his remarkable new album and soundtrack for Aleksander Hemon’s novel, The World and all that it Holds.
Damir Imamović’s new album, The World and all that it Holds (reviewed here), is not your usual set of songs or even your usual concept album; it was initially built as a soundtrack for novelist Aleksander Hemon’s new book of the same name. It begs the question, how did the idea originate? “It came about just before the pandemic,” Damir begins. “I started seeing more and more of Aleksander, who is a Sarajevan that has been living in the US for decades. He was writing his new book and asked if I would consider talking with him about it. Despite him living in the States for many years, there’s still so much of Bosnia and Sarajevo in his writing. We began thinking that I might be doing a soundtrack for a novel, but we didn’t know where to go with it. Then the pandemic started, and I had more time; we talked a lot, and I was reading different drafts of chapters, and I got hooked. I was really cheering for the story and waiting for new chapters to come every week! Then I started sending him some songs, because he mentions a lot of Bosnian traditional songs called sevdah [in the novel]. So that’s how it all began, and I loved it so much that I realised I wanted it to be my new album as well.”
The music balances its original personality as a soundtrack to the novel very well while also being an album in its own right, a detail Damir seems aware of. “The book soundtrack is quite an obscure art form,” he smiles, “but I know some people have done it before. For me, it’s not just a musical soundscape for somebody sitting and reading a book; the album deals with the same songs mentioned in the book and some songs he is basing parts of the plot and the emotional life of the characters on.”
This process of collaborating is not new for Damir, having previously worked with theatres and filmmakers, but the project bridged a gap between those works and personal creations. “I’m quite spoiled, to be honest, because I can mostly do whatever I want with my music,” he admits. “I can write my own tunes and arrange traditional stuff, and usually, I’m the one who will decide when it’s finished. When you work with somebody else it can be quite nurturing to have these assignments that are really technical, but that can also make you a slave to the process. For this project, the tunes were very personal and in line with what I do, and that alignment made me realise it was also going to be an album of my own.”
For the songs on the record, Damir selected some traditionals that fit well both within the novel and the album, but he also spent time thinking about the original pieces he was going to write for the project and how they would fit. “In Bosnian traditional music, the same as in any, a lot of lyrics are innuendos,” he explains. “In the book, there are two Sarajevan characters, one a Sephardic Jew and the other a Muslim, and they meet in trenches in the First World War and fall in love. So it’s a gay love story, and usually in traditional music, queer subjects are subdued and not explicit; maybe it started getting explicit in the late twentieth century, if at all. That’s why the song Osmane needed to be literally the character Pinto’s song for his lover who was lost and had died. It needed to be a fucking funeral march, but at the same time, it needed to be explicit; I’m sick and tired of people pretending that we don’t know what we’re talking about. So that’s why I wanted it to be explicit and why I wrote new lyrics and a new melody for it.”
Of course, as you would expect from Damir’s work, the sound behind the lyrics is key and as meticulously thought out as the rest of the process. “I was originally thinking about this traditional instrument called saz [a three stringed, long necked lute with no frets],” Damir says. “It is played widely in the middle east, but also in the Balkans because of Turkish rule. We have our own local version of saz, but I’m not a saz player, I think it’s quite restrictive. However, during the pandemic I got an Iranian tar [a waisted four string Persian lute] from a friend, which is a beautiful instrument and I love the sound – it has more possibilities than saz. Also, a big chunk of the story’s plot takes place in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, which is where the tar was huge. So, in that part of the process, it was like theatre music and I decided to include tar.” Damir stops and laughs. “Pretentious maybe, because I’m not a tar player, but I really fell in love with the instrument and started playing some Bosnian themes with it and some of my own compositions.”
Damir is more known for his work with the tambur, a Turkish instrument more resembling the western guitar in sound. He split most of the songs for this album between tar and tambur. “Sometimes, as an old lady used to tell me, songs decide and not you,” he grins. “But sometimes you have to see how it feels; we are humans, little animals, and we perceive things not only through our intellect but also through feeling. I love this, and I cannot explain it. But there are some songs too that were harmonically more developed and needed a guitar-like instrument that can produce chord changes. On some songs, I used a melodic approach with tar and on some, a more harmonic approach.”
To round off the sound of the album in some style are key band members, with Nenad Kovačić playing percussion, Ivana Đurić on violin and Ivan Mihajlović providing bass notes. “Nenad is playing Balkan-trained drums and stuff, but he’s a big lover of African music,” Damir explains. He spent years in Africa learning, and I love how, even when he’s playing Balkan rhythm, he has some African thing going on too. Ivana is a genius, and I love her so much; she’s able to play very traditional violin, at the same time as dreaming about some new possibility.” He pauses a moment. “There’s a lot of negotiation in traditional music, as you know, about what’s traditional and what’s modern. Ivan played an [electrified] acoustic bass for this record, and we were asked several times, ‘why are you using bass when playing traditional music? It’s a western instrument’. And we were like, ‘yes, but it’s been used in Bosnia since it was invented! And those were the sounds I wanted together.”
The World and All That It Holds is out on Smithsonian Folkways on CD + digital and is available to order now. Vinyl is also available to pre-order, shipping this fall.
Upcoming Events
Hay Festival – The Hive
Saturday, 27 May, 1pm
Cross-collaboration of words + music with Bosnian American novelist Aleksandar Hemon + the music and songs of Damir Imamović.
Online: https://www.hayfestival.com/p-20164-aleksandar-hemon-and-damir-imamovic.aspx