Gino & Hadjia: Sevdah

Who are Gino and Hadjia? Gino and Hadjia are two best friends that grew up together playing the music that they love. Srdjan (Gino) Jevdjevich sings and plays the Tarabuk Saz and Nedim (Hadjia) Hamzic sings and plays the Oud and Djembe.

The word "sevdah" is understandable all over the Balkans. In Bosnia and Herzegovina it is used to describe the musical genre of love songs specific for the country's captivating amalgamate of Near Eastern, Mediterranean, and Slavic sound imbued with refined Slavic lyricism. To the Western audience, it's often introduced as the Balkan blues, and the equivalent of the Portuguese fado or Spanish flamenco. All of these musical genres are actually related bearing roots in Arabic courtly love songs from a millennium ago. On this same note, the eternal ambassadors of music, the Roma (Gypsy) musicians should be mentioned. Roma musicians were the midwives that helped deliver all of the four sisters. These caravan musicians spread many fine tunes all over the Balkan peninsula and elsewhere and gave their own contribution to the music of this extremely colorful part of the world.

From the artists..
"There are many common denominators between Sarajevo (capital of Bosnia) and Seattle. They both begin with the
letter S, they are both rich in culture, and parts of the landscape is surprisingly similar. But, the biggest one of all,
what really connects these two cities are their people.
There is a very particular feeling when your life gets destroyed by series of events that are out of your control. You pick up what is left, and try to rebuild it piece by piece, often wondering how did this happen? Is this the end of one cycle, or the beginning of another? It is a cold and bitter, but at the same time an optimistic feeling that not really everyone gets to experience. What better way to share this feeling with others, then through music!
The music is the very essence from which the Universe is created. Everything in it from the smallest particles to
largest galaxies oscillates and vibrates in a particular frequency, which creates a really small, or an incredibly large tune, and if you could scale down the space, or supersize yourself to a size of a planet or a star, you could hear the eternal song of the universe."

Website
https://sevdah.org