~ News ~

Hey everyone.  This is Scott here, guitarist for OBI, and I figured it was about time that one of us finally posted something regarding our amazing trip to Serbia.  We were there for two weeks in July, attending a cultural immersion camp that focused on Romany (Gypsy) music and culture.  The camp is called Amala School and was founded in 2001. It runs only two weeks in the summer and usually there are no more than 10 students attending at one time.

The camp is located in Valjevo, which is about 200 km southwest of Belgrade.  So the flight itself, from Minneapolis to Belgrade, is about 16 hours (For a couple band members, because of delays, the trip was muuuuch longer).  Upon arrival, though, Valjevo is beautiful, with red clay roofs all across the city and a small mountain range rising to the east.  Our accommodations were a three-story house in which all band members and additional students slept.  The house was near a street on the top of a hill, and across from the house was another house where the teachers slept.  Most of our meals, lessons, and socializing happened outside in a smaller open-air structure under a thatched roof.  The director of the camp was Dragan Ristic who is the leader of a fantastic Roma pop band called KAL.  He was full of energy most of the time and managed to keep us all on task.

The schedule, once we arrived and settled in, was quite full.  Some hours were divided between individual lessons and group lessons.  We also had one-hour lessons in the Romany language every day. Occasionally, we had visitors come in occasionally to do presentations on Roma issues such as poverty and human rights, which were powerful in terms of learning how the Roma have been fighting against government oppression for years and continue to this day.

All in all, every day was full of activity from morning til late at night.  We did have a free day to ourselves every Sunday, along with some evenings, during which time some members of the band would go into town to sightsee or eat.

Eating was usually never an issue at Amala.  In fact, the food was fantastic – everything from simple but tasty pastries for breakfast to hearty soups in the evening.  And the tomatoes in Serbia were amazing -- I think many of us still miss the taste.

The main focus for the camp, though, was music and we all worked very hard. We had some incredible teachers, one for each instrument in the band (though there was one teacher for the string rhythm section: myself and Matt, our bassist).  They ended up only teaching us four songs at the camp, because they wanted to focus on technique.  Their method was to make sure that, through those four songs, we knew how to perform the correct techniques in Romany style, so that the feeling would carry over to other songs.  It was a very challenging task, with many of us practicing and playing six-to-ten hours a day.  But we had some of most talented and patient teachers working with us, so we learned quite alot during our time there.

Each of us has on our take on the Amala experience; I know that I certainly do.  But what we can all agree upon is that our Serbian adventure has had a pronounced affect on us as a group, not just in terms of sound and technique but also in how we approach the songs and even our own rehearsals.  We find that many of the song we know approach in a Romany style.  It’s a fascinating discovery and we all believe that our sound will continue to evolve as we rehearse and become more familiar with the idiom.   Suffice to say, our adventure was surely worth it and we look forward to being able to bring more of the Romany spirit through our music and to our audiences.