Kaftan d’Alma

Maybe we can blame a common Mediterranean feeling working its way into a shared culture, but it is quite interesting that some Balkan singers are choosing to make fado, a traditional Portuguese song, their musical ground. Maja Milinkovic is now digging deeper into the path she carved with Fado É Sorte (2017), when she took quite an unexpected turn in her career. But if her storming passion for fado started by taking chances with some standards, such as ‘Uma Casa Portuguesa’ or ‘Lágrima’, after Fadolinka (2019) Milinkovic began melding Portuguese and Bosnian tracks, bringing to light the strong link between the two countries.

Having moved to Lisbon in 2012, Maja Milinkovic has perfected her fado singing and spotlessly mastered Portuguese. Kaftan d’Alma builds on her connection to this music that she was not born into but made her own through some admirable work and a pristine voice. Bearing a stripped-down instrumentation, Kaftan d’Alma navigates from Portugal to the Balkans, from fado to sevdah, hinting at a common language, and presenting them as one in the beautiful ‘Luda Vodo Stani, Stani’, the traditional ‘Fado Bacalhau’ with a new Bosnian lyric by Milinkovic herself, or the marvellous Bosnian song ‘Lijepi Li Su Mostarski Ducani’ accompanied in a fado fashion. What is truly remarkable in Maja Milinkovic is the way she commits to a foreign tradition without suppressing her own roots, making it whole in her music.