it's a Bosnian (not a Sephardic) song from Bosnia

[Judith R Cohen <judithc...>]

Hi,Judith here (this is long so I'll sign at the top rather than the
end!). "Kad ya podjoh" is NOT a Sephardic song, at all. It's a Bosnian
song from Bosnia, not a Sephardic song from Bosnia! HOWEVER, Bosnian
Sephardim used its MELODY for the Havdalah "Al Dio alto". And before
that, the melody was from a Turkish "ilahi" (devotional song, not so
different from a piyyut). And before that, I think a late 19th century
Turkish marching song; I have to check. It also shows up in a couple of
other Sephardic contrafact contexts including "A la escola de l'Alianca"
("at the Alliance Francaise Isarelite school").
The song is a well-known, probably THE best-known, Bosnian song; it's an
originally Muslim genre called "sevdalinka" - sevda to do with soul -
usually slow, melancholy. It's a song of thwarted love - along the lines
of, I went down to (the area of) Bembashu, everyone was there but not my
love; I went by her house and she invited me in; I said "maybe tomorrow"
- but by "tomorrow" she had married my best friend.
Far from being a Sephardic song, the genre as I said is Muslim, and
during the war in the 1990's the song became a poignant Bosnian symbol
of loss, almost an anthem - again, Bosnian, not Sephardic.
I first heard it many many years ago - on a Mohawk Indian reserve,
Kahnawake, outside Montreal! But before you get excited about
Crypto-Sephardim on Mohawk reserves - it was sung to me, with delicate
accompaniment on an old piano,  by an 80-something-year-old Bosnian
Sephardic woman, whose long and wonderful (now, sadly, over) story I
recount in Canadian WOmen's Studies 16/4, 1996: p112-113 . - how I ended
up recording a Bosnian sevdalinke (she sang the original, not the
Havdala song) opposite Chief Poking Fire's House/Museum (really!!) in
Kahnewake.....

Now, let's see the text (a good recording on Bosnia: Music from an
Endangered World, Smithsonian Folkways40407 , 1993)

You say: "She was told that it's a sefardic theme with bosniac words".
Told by whom???
About Bosnian - now, they always call it Bosnian in Bosnia, and so do
most Bosnians I know - espeially if they're Muslim but  not necessarily
if they're Croatian or Jewish Bosnians, in which case they sometimes
still use "Serbo-Croatian". Very ironically, during/after the war, in
order to set it apart from Serbo-Croatian, they /the general "they")
started re-introducing a lot of words from Turkish - ironically because
of course the Turks were The Opressors for centuries, so using old
Turkish vocabulary as a means of establishing one's identity and
independence is ironic. 

There are a number of systems for writing Slavic languages without
Cyrillics. The one you use here has been very common, and when I first
started working with Balkan songs it was the one I learned, but the "j"
can be very confusing for non-Slavic language speakers - it's pronounced
"y" and is the transliteration of the Cyrillics character which looks
like a backwards capital R. So it may be less confusing to use a general
European phonetic system. Also, the old system used diacritical marks,
hard to do on a computer, so it's not Bembasu, it's Bembashu - the
little sign over the s has been lost.There are other mistakes too - I'll
try to line up the correct version along the one you sent: mine will be
ON THE LEFT, NO CAPITALS, ok?
 
Kad ya podyoh na Bembashu   KAD JA PODJOH NA BENBASU    
Na Bembashu, na vodu,       NA BENBASU NA VODU
Ya povedoh                  JA POVEDOH
byelo jagnye,               (not:)BJE LA JAGNJE
byelo yagnye sa sobom.          BJE LO JAGNJE SA SOBOM
 
(*byelo means white or fair, yagnye is a lamb; bje la or lo means
nothing at all.)

Sve od derta               SVE OD DERTA
i sevdaha                  (not SERDAHA)
od tuga i zhaloshti        not:OD TU GEI JALOS TI          
svud sam is'o              SVUD SAM ISO 
svud sam gledo             not glcdo SVUD SAM GLCDO
ne bil dragu vidye'o       NE BIL DRAGU VIDJEO

There's lots more; these are just the first 2 verses. 

The melody as you give it is close but not quite the same as the way
it's usually sung. And it's in a slow, melancholy style. But not a
melancholy style for the Havdalah version of course.
 
And the music:
FED_  E__
FED_ C_
G_A Bb_ D_ C Bb A__
G_ABbCBbAG_
F_GABbA FED_
E_FG_ A_
FED__
 
If interested, I can send you the real score off list as .gif file.
Thanks!
MICHAL

Michel Borzykowski
e-mail: borzykowski (at) infomaniak(dot)ch
Geneva klezmer page: http://borzykowski.users.ch

---------------------- jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org ---------------------+