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Saturday, January 04, 2003

By John Hayes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Their stories are in their songs:

After being freed from a prison cell where the water reached his knees, a Macedonian learns that his woman has just married his best friend.

	The Balkan Babes, featuring, from left front, Stefni Agin, Stoyan Kostov and Deb Knox, will perform tomorrow at City Theatre. The Balkan Babes WHERE: City Theatre lounge, 57 S. 13th St., South Side. WHEN: 7 p.m. tomorrow. TICKETS: Free; go to http://www.balkanbabes.org for information.

Serbians ask the Moravo River why it floods the village.

And in Bulgaria a woman asks her brother why he stares at the mountains. "There is fighting and they are waiting for me," he says. "Don't weep for me."

Traditions east of the Adriatic are steeped in thousands of years of pathos, and the sentiment is often reflected in song. Folk music from the frequently warring Balkans also can be deceptively innocent and naive: caressing a sleeping lover under a Dalmatian window, harvesting livestock feed in Croatia, dancing and drinking in Serbia.

Balkan music bristles with as many influences as the region's politics. It's an unusual and unlikely blend of Greek, Turkish and Eastern European sounds from a land where the cultural integration has often been swift, harsh and nonconsensual.

For 10 years, a small group of Pittsburghers have worked to keep the nuances of Balkan folk music alive. The Balkan Babes, an 11-member vocal group, perform at festivals, fairs and ethnic events for Pittsburgh audiences searching for a link to their cultural heritage. Tomorrow at the lounge at City Theatre, the Babes throw a free party celebrating their 10th anniversary and the release of their second independent album, "Zvezda."

"Surprisingly, more people in America are playing Balkan music than you'd expect," says the group's leader, Lynette Garlan. "Here in Pittsburgh, there are lots of groups playing Eastern European music, from the Tamburitzans on down."

The Balkan Babes have a repertoire of some 60 songs from the swath of land between the Adriatic and Black seas. Governments change and the people now live like contemporary Europeans, but each village proudly holds onto its traditional costumes and folk songs. Musicians performing with the Babes play the songs on contemporary Western instruments, adding ethnic color with a half-dozen traditional instruments.

"They're playing the kaval, sort of a shepherd's flute," says Garlan. "They're playing the tambura, which is something between a guitar and a lute. They're playing the gudulka, a three-stringed violin; the tupan, a two-sided drum; and the gajda, which is kind of like a bagpipe."

This winter, the Balkan Babes are taking Bulgarian language lessons in hopes of booking a tour of Bulgaria in August.

"I was in Macedonia when it was still part of Yugoslavia," says Garland. "The musical traditions seemed [healthy] and they were just the sweetest people. But most of them had family members who had been killed. There's been a lot of that, and it survives in the songs."