Divanhana’s Radio Sevdah: Sarajevo band reimagines Bosnia’s soulful tradition for a new generation

A few steps uphill from the main street, which runs east to west through Sarajevo, is a handsome yellow building on a corner. It’s the city’s Music Academy and I’m heading there with Neven Tunjić, bandleader, composer and piano-keyboard player of Divanhana, one of Bosnia’s leading sevdah groups. He takes me into a narrow room with an upright piano, a saz-like šargija – a traditional accompaniment for sevdah in its early days – and shelves of scholarly publications and archive photos. It’s the ethnomusicology room which he describes as their divanhana, the space that inspired their name. He reflects on how the five-piece formed in 2009: “It began here in this classroom in the Music Academy where we studied 20 years ago,” says Tunjić, who was a pupil of Bosnia’s foremost composer, Asim Horozić. “The divanhana was a central room in a Bosnian traditional house where, after a long day in the fields or the market, people would gather and speak. And that is where sevdalinkas were born.”

Virtually all the members of Divanhana were students at the Music Academy and their singer Selma Droce now teaches there. They’re one of the latest bands to contribute to a sevdah revival which began with the end of the Bosnian War 30 years ago.

Sevdah – or sevdalinka, as Slavs tend to add an affectionate diminutive to anything they love – is the deep and distinctive music of Bosnia and Herzegovina, often full of lost love, nostalgia and longing. The name comes from the same Arabic root as saudade in Portuguese, which characterises both fado in Portugal and morna in Cape Verde. On the notes to their upcoming new album, Radio Sevdah, they describe sevdah melodies as “soft as moonlight and as powerful as the ocean’s tide.” Divanhana perform some traditional sevdah songs, in contemporary arrangements, but are more focused on composing new songs. Their last album, Zavrzlama (Knot), won them Best Group in the Songlines Music Awards in 2023, and they performed at Songlines’ 25th anniversary concert alongside Salif Keita, Balimaya Project and Le Vent du Nord at the Barbican Centre last year.

Radio Sevdah is their sixth album, and the brutalist 1970s Bosnian radio building (nicknamed Sivi Dom, ‘the Grey House’) is our next step in Sarajevo. The radio is not only where many great sevdah singers were recorded, but it also owns extensive archives which Divanhana drew on for the album (which even features a jaunty Radio Sevdah jingle). “When we were kids, the radio was very important,” says Tunjić, “And we wanted to write our own music inspired by those times. This album is simply our vision of how Radio Sarajevo could sound today. If composers and poets had continued creating new sevdalinkas, perhaps today we would have electric guitars, distortion, rap and EDM influences in the arrangements.”

At Sarajevo’s heart lies the old town, Baščaršija – narrow streets, restaurants, tea and coffee houses, metalworkers and minarets, domes and spires jostling together. The main mosque, originally dating from 1540, is metres away from an Orthodox Church built in the same year. It’s a place where Orient and Occident rub shoulders. Sarajevo has the same heady mix of cultures as the music – the Ottomans ruled here for over 400 years until 1878, when the Habsburgs took over. And while there are clearly Turkish overtones in sevdah, its melodies are so Balkan-sounding. Sarajevo is surrounded by mountains, which certainly enhance its beauty, but made it possible for the Serbs to lay siege to the city for nearly four years from 1992 to February 1996. Damage is still visible, but the city is now so bustling and lively that those days seem very far away.

One of the classic songs on Radio Sevdah is a version of ‘Sa Igmana pogledat je lijepo’ (How Beautiful it is to Look from Igman), its title referencing one of the mountains southwest of the city, used for ski jumping events during the 1984 Winter Olympics. The song was written by Serbian composer and accordionist Jovica Petković (1927–2015). In a TV interview from the early 2000s, he talks about how some of the melody was inspired by the sound of the muezzin in the central mosque near where he lived. You can certainly hear that melismatic call-to-prayer quality in Selma Droce’s singing, though in Divanhana’s arrangement, there’s jazzy piano, samples of a violin solo and historic singer Zekerijah Đezić (both from the Radio Bosnia archives) and rap lyrics from Neven Tunjić and Selma Droce, demonstrating how Divanhana meld the contemporary to the historical.

‘Domovina’ (Homeland) also tells of the country’s dramatic landscape. The melody is sung over a muscular electric bass riff and tells the story of a bird flying over the mountainous landscape of Bosnia and Herzegovina, from Mostar to Sarajevo, to Tuzla and Posavina in the north. The Bosnians like to joke that if the landscape belonging to these three million people were ironed flat, it would be bigger than Russia.

Another new song, ‘Rijekama’ (To the Rivers), seems designed to show that sevdah doesn’t have to be melancholy and full of saudade. In a speedy, oompah rhythm with punchy offbeats, it features a beautiful, winding vocal line, accompanied by fierce violin interludes, played by Larisa Droce, full of Balkan fire. The song tells of a man’s love being thwarted by Bosnia’s rivers, the Una, Drina and Sava. Then there are two tracks with EDM-style beats, ‘Sevdah Party’ and ‘Primitivo’, which parody the hugely popular, but often derided, genre known as turbo folk.

It’s interesting to witness the band back in their small but dedicated studio in Sarajevo’s new town, where their music is crafted. Especially intriguing is to see close-up the superb accordion playing of Nedžad Musović – he has a whammy pedal, usually used by electric guitarists, which can pitch shift up to two octaves. And on some tracks, they are adding a distorted double bass, perhaps a first in sevdah.

The band are clearly hugely respectful of the sevdah tradition, but as Tunjić says, “everything else is inspired by the music we listen to today. In that sense, our musical journey and our concerts are like small radio shows, where we try to communicate with the audience, both here and abroad, about our traditional music – and promote it the best way possible.”

+ Radio Sevdah is released by CPL-Music on October 17