Berlin: City Changes, Curry Wurst Stays the Same.

This has been the longest hiatus our blog has ever taken, sorry about the delay, but I have been on the road and not a little bit lazy about updates. Don’t worry – we’ll be making an effort to be more regular in the upcoming months. What can I say – I started this blog in 2006 while in Istanbul as a sort of personal web site to share photos and food with my close friends and over the years it seems to have taken on a life of its own. The latest escapade was a trip to Germany – to Berlin and Westphalia. Berlin, however, was the highlight – good friends, good food, good music. I used to play a lot in Berlin during the 1990s, staying in the then run down and alternative/funky eastern nabe of Prenzlauerberg in what used to be East Berlin. I haven’t been back in over a decade, and my, it has changed. For one thing, Prenzlauerberg has become an attractive upscale neighborhood that caters to young families. We met up with my old buddy Paul Hockenos and checked out the Saturday market.While I don’t have a strong affiliation towards German cuisine, when they do it well they do it well German style: extremely well. German bread, for example, is fantastic, which it should be since that is pretty much what Germans eat at night: abendbrot.Slices of bread with cream cheeses and cold cuts. Perfect for sitting in front of the TV set with. If you like that sort of thing. Not exactly the kind of thing you fly across oceans in anticipation of. Luckily, they have a lot of amazing cold cuts.And cheese. Especially if you wander into the giant department store across the way from the Alexander Platz metro station. And after all, this is Berlin, and you can get some of Europe’s most affordable (read cheap) ethnic eats as long as ethnic means Turkish or that strange German adaption of Asian food called “Wok.” Wok seems to be the name of every pan-Asian corner joint run by either and serving both Vietnamese and Thai food. For some reason, Berlin has no real “Chinatown” neighborhood or active Chinese restaurant scene (which is probably best explained by ex Berlin resident Ed Ward as being because China doesn’t have a sex tourism industry) but you find uninspiring southeast asian “Wok” places on every street corner.But when in Germany, you want the wurst. Germany does a damn good street sausage, and you are never more than five minutes from a hot bratwurst. There are these guys who walk around with a hot grill contraption strapped to their backs selling wurst for Euro 1.20 at tram stops and in the park. And then there is the Berlin curry wurst, invented in 1948 by Herta Heuwer from ingredients she had cadged from occupying Allied soldiers: ketchup, curry powder, and bratwurst. It sounds wrong, I know, but it works. Yes, try this at home: grill a bratwurst, cut it in slices, squirt some ketchup over it, and dust with commercial curry powder (yes, you can choose the spicy stuff.) Eat with a roll.Fumie tolerated my adventures in curry wurst with an ill disguised patience – she wanted to get to the next supposedly Thai wok joint along the way. Luckily, I was in Berlin to work on a yet unannounceable music project involving Dan Kahn, Psoy Karolenko, Jake Shulmen-Ment, and the spectral presence of Michael Alpert.This meant I got to get down to the Kreuzberg/Neukolln district where the studio was located. Visiting these districts is a lot like visiting an upper class neighborhood in Istanbul. Over 30% of the population is foreign born – mostly Turkish – and that meant that I could go shopping in Turkish supermarkets, browsing in Turkish music shops, and lunching on excellent and cheap Turkish kofte, kebabs and burek.

Bosnia: The Burdens of History

Having just written an article about the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and poring over documents describing the destruction caused by urban warfare in cities, it is doubly unsettling to remember that Sarajevo went through a much longer, much more destructive trauma a mere fifteen years ago. The Siege of Sarajevo lasted three years, as Bosnian Serb militias backed by the Serbian Army ringed the hills over the city and poured shells into the downtown areas to which the Muslim majority had fled for safety. In Budapest we could listen to the reports on the BBC, or if we wished something more immediate, to the live broadcasts of Radio Sarajevo on regular AM radio. It was that close. Today Sarajevo is alive again, but the scars are still obvious for all to see. Aron and I went to the Sarajevo City History Museum, located across from the gaudy Yellow Marriot Hotel in the narrow strip of downtown that used to be called “Sniper’s Alley. One exhibit was dedicated to objects concocted during the siege of Sarajevo, and to the will to survive while dodging bullets in one’s own apartment or trying to feed a family on meager rations smuggled in through the enemy lines.Without access to resupply of guns, locals came up with their own home made weapons, zip guns on a military level. Electricity was provided by a variety of jerry rigged devices, from car battery generators to crank powered flashlights made from bicycle lamps.On entering the museum, there was a wall where it seemed that local residents had donated personal mementos – photographs of family members lost during the siege, newspaper clippings, and a blood stained sweater that had obviously belonged to a child.There were several fresh hand-made posters calling for the unification of the two separate Bosnian governmental zones now that Ratko Mladic had been arrested and handed over to the International court in The Hague for trial. After the museum, more history. I hailed a cab and took Aron up to the Jewish cemetery in Grbavica, up along a hill just above the city center. The cemetery occupies a hillside that slopes steeply down to the river and exposes the city center itself.During the siege, Serbian militia snipers used the protection of the cemetery to shoot and shell into the downtown of the city. Until a few years ago the cemetery was heavily mined and unsafe to visit but like most of Sarajevo it has been demined now. Although most of the names on the stones reflect the Sephardic majority of Sarajevan Jews, the Ashkenazic element is obvious by the appearance of Hungarian Jewish names as well. Not surprising, since Jews from Hungary and Galicia went to Bosnia in the 1870s after it became a protectorate of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I wrote about Jewish Sarajevo on the blog here, so I won’t repeat myself, but in the spirit of presenting too much history, there is one photo from the Jewish museum that bears repeating.During WWII the Jews of Sarajevo were forced to wear yellow Jewish stars. Here we see a Rivka Kabilo, a Jewish woman being escorted by Zenejba Hardaga, a Muslim woman, who held her arm to obscure the incriminating star. Today Hardaga and her sister are both recognized as “Righteous Gentiles” at the Yad Vashem museum in Israel. And of course, if that isn't enough history for you, remember that Sarajevo is where the first world war began when Gavrilo Princip assassinated Grand Duke Ferdinand of Austria on the Latin Bridge crossing the river in downtown Sarajevo. From a dispute about Serbian nationalism grew a typically silly bush war that quickly became a pointless tragedy. Within a month of the assassination Europe was at war, and nobody has ever explained exactly why.Nobody knew what they were actually fighting for. All that history makes you hungry. And the reason we were in Sarajevo was that I had promised to show my son the Glories of Sarajevo Cevapi, which we covered in the last post. But man does not live on cevap alone, although it is not inconceivable that I could. There was burek to be had, usually for breakfast, and our Hotel was located a full thiry seconds from the alley that is home to Sac Burek, which I crowed about the last time I visited Sarajevo.A sac is a metal pan hung by chains above a charcoal fire, kind of an Ottoman dutch oven. While most burek is now baked in a pizza oven, Sac Burek does it old school, meaning the burek is probably the best in the old city, and served with a ladle of slightly soured kaymak cream.After breakfast, coffee! Coffee shops are usually tiny, and located near to other eating places. You don’t get coffee where you eat, you go to a specialist for it. And then, just when you think you will never see a vegetable again, there are the Ascjinicas.These are small restaurants specializing in stews and soups.The most famous is Asem, which serves up some fine okra and veal stew, to be sopped up with spongy somun bread. Alter we tried the Sofra, just off the Sebilj square. Aron ordered the mixed plate of stuffed peppers, but also stuffed onions and stuffed grape leaves served with a dollop of yoghurt.Did I mention that we visited during Ramadan? Yes, and it was a hard one – with temperatures in the area of 38 (that’s around 98 Farhenheit) and the days long, a lot of people simply closed up their shops and waited the day out. But nobody ever worried themselves about the people who do eat during the day. Bosnians are like Turks in their attitudes towards Islam – rather easy and tolderant.This is not Wahabi run Saudi Arabia or fundamentalist Iran. At around 7:45 a canon – yes, a real canon – would go off signaling the end of the fast and the time for the nightly iftar feast, and Sarajevo’s old city would fill up with families looking to stuff themselves through the relatively short night in order to fuel up before the next dawn.

Sarajevo: Cevapi for the End of Summer

Summer is winding down but I managed to squeeze one last road trip out of it before the temperatures cooled down. I met my son, Aron, in Sarajevo, keeping good on a birthday promise that I would show him the best cevapcici in the world. And Sarajevo has just that, along with a beautiful Ottoman style old city and enough history to keep an eighteen year old history buff occupied for four days. It's been two years since I last visited, and I have had a yearning to come back ever since. It is a city of heroes, a city of survivors, and a city in the midst of renovation and rebirth. Oh… and coffee.Aron has developed into something of a coffee fanatic, and Sarajevo is a coffee obsessed city. Unlike the tea addiction that characterizes Istanbul or Skopje, my other two favorite Ottoman café cultures; here you have Bosnian coffee at every corner. Essentially, it’s the same as Turkish coffee, but like a lot in Bosnia, it comes cheaper here than elsewhere – with the Bosnian mark running two BM to one Euro, coffees cost fifty Euro cents.With rooms renting out at 15 Euro each, and a plate of the world’s best cevapi going for 3 Euro, Sarajevo is a place I can afford to kick back and enjoy without feeling like I need to have an ATM machine strapped to my back. When I lived in Skopje, Macedonia, during the hyperinflation era in the late 1980s my Macedonian friends had a term for spending the day passing the time in cafes rather than pursing the protestant work ethic in a deflating economy: badialdzija. Its from an old Turkish term meaning “producer of nothingness.”They were masters of badialdzija, spending the days sipping tea with art students in Skopje’s old town and nights drinking rakia. I used to change a US $20 bill at the bank and walk away with a shopping bag of Yugoslav Dinars, enough to pay for cevapi and teas for my whole crowd of lazy intellectuals and shiftless Roma and Turkish sufi friends. Sarajevo brings me back to that vibe. Aron is a hardworking, industrious kid, and he desparately needed to be taught a lesson in Balkan sloth. With temperatures outside at the hottest of Europe’s this summer (38 c. or 98 Fahrenheit) there was little to do except sit in the shade of the coffee houses and watch time pass idly by.After his discovery of Bosnian coffee – served in a finjan that will fill two small cups after a nerve-wracking wait for the muddy dregs to settle, accompanied by a wad of loukoum, a soft Turkish sweet to take the edge off the bitterness – my son had a goal. He would himself become a master of Bosnian coffee. So, off to buy a coffee set.The street of coppersmiths had all manner of coffee paraphernalia on sale, but thinking better of it we wandered just a bit outside of the Bascarsija center to a small copper shop I had seen on a siise street near the Bascarsija tram stop. Aron picked up a set at 20% cheaper than our lowest negotiated price in the market. And then there is Bosnia's entry in the world of ground meat: cevapi. Of course, we can digress endlessly on where you can find the best cevapi, and I have on these pages previously, but there is no way out of presenting the latest in cevapi porn here again.Zeljo’s is usually mentuioned as the Big Daddy of Bascarsija cevapdzinicas, with two locations located on opposite corners. Zeljo’s meat is excellent, but they differ from other cevapdzinicas in the way they serve their spongy somun flatbread toasted but not dipped into a broth to dampen it while toasted on the grill. For that, try the cevap at Hodzic’s, which has spread into a mini empire of cevap houses all over the old city (named, appropriately, Hodzic #1, Hodzic #2, etc.)Cevap slightly bigger, and the somun bread is fluffier and dipped in some broth before being toasted. How many hours of my life have I spent arguing with friends whether Zeljos or Hodzic is better? How many more will I waste? Hmmm... How about something completely differnt. So different as to almost comprise a completely alternative food group? How about... the Banja Luka style cevapi! The Banja Luka style cevap served at Kastel is still one of my favorites.The Banja Luka style means that the cevap are made somewhat smaller, but served in bricks stuck together, which preserves their juicyness, and an even damper steamed bread. Apparantly, in Banja Luka itself, which is now in the Serbian Republic, the secret ingredient is a bit of pork mixed into the cevap meat mix. That doesn’t roll in Sarajevo with a Muslim majority population and a very large population of Muslim refugees resettled from Banja Luka. I noticed this elsewhere in the Balkans: cevap places often prepared their products with a stated intention of being off limits to Muslim minorities. This reaches its most absurd peak in Bulgaria, where almost every meat product available is made from ground pork, unlike Turkey, where beef and lamb rule. Needless to say, Bulgaria is not a culinary standout. One final cevap discovery came when we took a tram ride to the far end of Sarajevo – in the Ilidza neighborhood out near the Sarajevo airport. Ilidza was heavily bombed during the siege of Sarajevo, and many of the ruined buildings along the tram line have still to be renovated or bulldozed, and then you arrive in a cement city center evocative of communist times when pleasant architecture was secondary to providing quick cheap housing for the proletariat masses. We had been hoping to connect to visit either the famed tunnel museum or go out to the beautiful park in Vrelo Bosna, but a lack of information and the baking heat drove us into the nearest lunch joint.Excellent cevapi for 3 BM (Euro 1.50) Given that I live in a country that lacks decent hamburgers, I can get by knowing that an annual trip to Sarajevo (only Euro 54 round trip on the train, albeit an 11 hour gruling slog through Slavonia) will keep me fueled for a year’s worth of excellent ground beef goodness. Oh, and did I mention that we visited during the final days of Ramadan? I will in my next post.

Sziget Festival: the Klezmatics, Socalled, and some guy named "Prince."

The Sziget Festival ended last Sunday, and oddly for me, I was in attendance for three days of the festival. Oddly, because usually I am never in Hungary in the beginning of August when it takes place, and also oddly, because I don’t really like going to gargantuan rock festivals that host thousands of unwashed party people in rapidly deteriorating states of sobriety for a week of drum and bass lines wafting in from several competing stages all at once. On the other hand, it is fun, if you like that sort of thing. And Sziget is the big one in Europe: from modest beginnings as “Student Island” back in the early 1990s the festival has grown into one of the world’s largest festivals, an uncomfortable marriage of retro-hippie crunchyness meets music industry commodification and has a baby that is drunk and eating dodgy fried foods on an island in the middle of the Danube. But I have to admit. It is fun. It would be a lot more fun if I was 20 years old and thought pouring beer over my head was a viable artistic statement, but, in my own geezerly manner, I had fun.The festival usually lasts a week, with day tickets running around $60, but the first day of the festival was deemed “Zero Day” which meant that if you had a week pass you still needed a special ticket for Zero day unless you were camping on the island. People could gripe about that, but the Big Act was none other than... get ready... Prince. Originally the headliner was to have been Amy Winehouse, but given that Amy checked out of Rehab for good last month, we got Prince. Prince does not do drugs of any kind. Probably a very good thing.The Klezmatics had a good time with their set. Amid the classic Klezmer they did a lot of their recent work based on original compositions and arrangements from their forays into Gospel music and Americana folk. A large number of the audience knew the lyrics to their songs, not surprising given that the ‘Matics (or one of their satellite formations) have played nearly every Sziget Festival for the last twenty years.This was acknowledged later by the US Ambassador to Hungary, Eleni Tsakopoulos Kounalakis giving them an official award for promoting Cultural Diversity. And most importantly, they got me a backstage pass. And the catering backstage far outclassed anything to be eaten elsewhere on the island. Thanks Klezmatics!We also caught a bit of Boban Markovic’ Brass Band from Serbia, another band that plays here nearly every year. Serbian Gypsy brass band has been avidly embraced by the Hungarian festival crowd as the official "We are Nearly Balkan" party music of Hungary. Oh, and there was Prince. Yes, that Prince.After the Klezmatics set I went out with Frank London, Dave Likht, and Lisa Gutkin to check out the Artist Who Previously Was Weird About His Name, along with about 10,000 other concert goers in a huge field. It was pretty damn funky. Frank and Dave went into music analysis mode. Here you had the 53 year old Prince fronting a five piece band, kicking out the jams and almost entirely avoiding the use of sequencers and other electro-digital tricks of modern arena stage acts. Basically, rocking the house with a five piece funk band. Impressive. Very impressive. And he played an hour set with an hour of encore. Not shabby, Prince. Not shabby at all.I was back two days later when the Klezmatics asked me to join them for an impromptu jam set at the US Embassy tent. Given the political atmosphere in Hungary this year, the US Ambassador has been using her influence to try and steer Hungary back on the road to something resembling a democratic state. We wish her the best of luck in her sysiphean task, and each day the Embassy tent featured a different multicultural act playing for whoever stumbled by. For us, it was just a fun day out for jamming and iced coffee.Matt Darriau’s new bride, Katie Down of the UkuLadies even sang a Sephardic Jewish song from Turkey that blew me away, all the more so for being accompanied by ukulele. The Klezmatics had to travel the next day, and wanted to enjoy the fancy hotel that the Embassy had arranged for them, so they left and I wandered over to the Roma tent. As the Sziget has become more commercially oriented, the funkier folk music events of the past have shrunk and what is left of the original Sziget alternativo feel resides at the Gypsy tent.Mixing local Roma bands and up and coming international acts, it’s a cozy atmosphere, with performers hopping off the stage to greet their friends and – besides fried langos - probably the most “Hungarian” experience on the Island for most f the predominantly foreign festival goers. We caught the amazing Roma Rap from Sutka (Suto Orizari, the majority Roma suburb of Skopje, Macedonia.)These guys are the generation of Gypsies that grew up watching rap videos on MTV, and they have it down - including rapping in staccato Balkan Romani and doing it to the accompaniment of a live Macedonian brass wedding band. Some days you can wander into the Gypsy tent and make some amazing discoveries, This was one of them. Also on the bill was our good buddies from Belgrade, Dragan Ristic and KAL.Three days is almost enough for me, but DJ Socalled called, and when Josh Dolgin says so, you got to move. I travelled with Josh on his epic Ukrainian journey in 2007, and worked with him on Geoff Berner’s recording session in Montreal last year, so who was I to say no to comp tickets. The show was booked early in the evening, so the crowd was light (seeing as The National was playing on the main stage at the same time) but everybody loved Socalled's decidely strange stage show. If you have Katie Moore on vocals and Mike Winograd on clarinet, you can get as strange as you want and still pull off a great show. Josh can make klezmer very funky, and his antic way with stage presence – including doing magic tricks, rapping puppets, and working Allen Watsky’s shirt changes into the show, he grabbed he crowd and held them where he wanted them.

Josh even arranged for Aron to get backstage. Aron, of course, was running off to catch The National at the big stage, but stayed long enough to say hello to the rapping puppet.After the set, we ran off to check out the Gypsy tent again, and the Socalled crew was able to catch the second half of the Tecsoi Band's set with Kiss Ferenc in something called the Karpati Roma Project.

A Gypsy Musician's Funeral in Transylvania

Been a bit too lazy for frequent updates to the blog, folks. Summer seems to have bypassed Europe this year, with cold weather and rain nearly every afternoon. It’s like an endless April that won’t go away, except for the occasional scorching hot day to turn the damp soil into a steamy fermented stink brew that means you can only go out at night. But I was lucky this year: I got to Transylvania early, in May and June. Traveling around with my musical colleagues Jake and Eleonore with Scribbling Mystery Guest in tow, we managed to visit several great old style musicians, both living and dead. When I started traveling around Romania with a tape recorder looking for traditional music in the 1980s, I was convinced that the folk music was on the verge of disappearing. I, very fortunately, was wrong. In some places it has remained, in others it has changed, in some it has gone out of fashion entirely, but it is still there. Every year I meet a few visiting foreign musicians who want to collect folk music in East Europe, asking me for advice. What you need is simple: working knowledge of about three languages that are not taught at your local community college, a recording device, and a pocketful of cash, preferably won at the track or a casino so that you are not too attached to it. Musicians like cash. They like it very, very much. And traditional musicians – particularly professional Gypsy musicians – do not play because they love you and your deep respect for their heritage and want to share with you. Oh no. They play for cash. As Antoine Baptiste says in the TV series Treme “Play for that money, boys. Play for that f***ing money!"While I was in Cluj/Kolozsvar we were set to visit the village band in Sopor, but a phone call to the band leader revealed a small problem. Could we loan him a few hundred Euro? Now, within Roma culture borrowing money is a sign of acceptance within a family or clan. You should be proud that you are so accepted that you are now part of the great economic web that feeds the tradition. However, a loan doesn’t really mean a loan in the accepted sense. Basically, if you lend anybody money east of Vienna, it is a gift. Same problem happened with Palatka – a tour had been cancelled and the band was on high alert for any new source for a float and could we get out to the village as soon as possible with our pockets stuffed full of lovely cash? Er, maybe not. In the end, we lucked out. We went to visit a musician who had no cash flow problems at all. We went to his funeral.

In Cluj I met up with Raoul Weiss, the Alsatian polymath, linguist, and gourmet who also happens to be the Palatka Band’s friend and sometime French manager. Through Raoul we got a hot tip that Iosif Ghemant, the primas (lead violinist) in Gherla (Hungarian Szamosujvar) had passed away and was being buried the next day. Without a clue to where the funeral was taking place (or, in fact, the name of the deceased at the time) we drove forty minutes east to Gherla and started asking around. Nobody knew about a funeral, so we asked where the cemetery was, and drove in that direction. Sure enough, on a near the outskirts of town we saw some musicians in suits turn down a street and followed.A large crowd of Gypsies was gathered in front of a house, and dozens of musicians waited outside. The deceased was Iosif Ghemant, who had led the local folk orchestra and it was time to pay proper musician respect by fiddling the man to his grave. Nobody made any comment about our obviously foreign presence. When musicians slag each other off they often comment “And how many musicians will there be at your funeral, huh?” In the case of Iosif Ghemant, quite a lot. Much respect. And so a few foreigners just adds to the prestige of the event.As people arrived they were ushered into the house to pay last respects to the deceased, and suddenly I found myself escorted inside by the violinist’s son to view the open casket, surrounded by weeping daughters and wife. I excused myself and returned to the yard just as the band began to play.Gherla is smack dab in central Transylvanian plains, the Mezoseg, and the music here is fiddle music, accompanied by the three string kontra viola and bass. Gherla, however, is one of the places that started adding modern instruments after WWII, and saxophones and accordions became accepted in lautar bands here, while in the nearby villages such as Szek and Ordongosfuzes the string bands maintained their primacy.

Ghemant was one of the musicians who played on one of the now-forgotten Argo folk music series recordings that I heard decades ago when I was just beginning to learn about Romanian folk music. He was one of the musicians who straddled the border between tradition and folklorized arrangements, and the musicians who came to play included everybody from the hot younger city fiddlers to village musicians to journeyman musicians who never made the lautar grade.The tune here is the traditional “accompaniment to the grave” song used in Central Transylvania. Unlike a New Orleans funeral, there was no “second line” on the way to or from the graveyard. The procession marched through a run down residential neighborhood about two miles to the new graveyard, and we left before the march had gone very far. But when the day comes and your number gets called, this is one fine way to take that long last road to the cemetery. And to get a taste of Ghemant's sound click on this link. The man was a master of Transylvanian fiddle.