This interview you may be
read directly at:
www.iht.com/IHT/SOUND/96/mz032296.html
Haris Dzinovic:
A Musician Who Lost His City
Friday, March 22, 1996, page
24
By Mike ZwerinInternational
Herald Tribune
PARIS - Haris Dzinovic opened his fat press
book with torn and aging color photographs
of young pop stars with winner smiles and
good complexions, accompanied by blurbs and
press releases in Serbo-Croat.
The name of his language has turned into
a kind of oxymoron, and a past tense prefix
has been added to the name of his country.
''I sold more than 3
million albums in the ex-Yugoslavia,'' he
said. ''I am Bosnian,
but Serbs and Croats loved my music too. Now
my friends keep telling me, 'Come back, Haris.
We still listen to your music. We need you
more than ever. Please. Come back.'''
An Associated Press article dated Jan. 20
described the ambience in a Serb café in Sarajevo:
''In a scene typical of the strange dichotomies
and seeming contradictions that make friends
of enemies and enemies of friends in the former
Yugoslavia, the Serbs sitting around the table
are moved to sing, dance and cry to the music
of a popular folk singer, Haris Dzinovic,
a Muslim.''
Now 40, Dzinovic won music industry prizes
and fanzine polls for composing, recording
and performing Gypsy-oriented folk music with
his own orchestra in top variety music venues
and stadiums.
In March of 1992, after being abroad on vacation,
he flew back to Belgrade as the war was starting.
He decided not to continue on to his hometown,
Sarajevo, because ''I am afraid of hand grenades
and assault rifles.'' There was heavy eye
contact, and the unspoken phrase - ''See,
I am not afraid to say I am afraid.''
Interviewed on Radio Belgrade shortly after
he arrived, Dzinovic was asked about the political
situation. He said that in his opinion if
Belgrade was bombarded by a hostile foreign
force tomorrow, ''at least 100,000 Sarajevans
would come here and help defend it. We are
countrymen. We are comrades. This war is a
scandal. Stop attacking Sarajevo.''
A few days later, he went to visit a friend
in Novi Sad, about 100 kilometers (62 miles)
away, where, late one night in a discotheque,
he encountered a man who did not approve of
such a fraternal point of view.
''It was like the Wild West,'' Dzinovic
said. ''The war was already
making people crazy.''
''What are you doing in Serbia,'' the man
shouted. ''You are Bosnian, you are a Muslim.
Go back to where you come from.'' The man
was obviously drunk. Maybe he was jealous
of the big pop star with the fast cars and
the beautiful women. Either way, Dzinovic
got the message. Love it or leave it. He left.
He had been born and bred in Sarajevo. His
father was an engineer, his mother an economist.
He played the accordian at first, until discovering
that it was considered a proletarian instrument
- not intellectual enough, and not very ''sexy,''
as far as the girls were concerned. They had
their noses in the air.
So he taught himself the guitar and then
he slipped the janitor a bottle of slivovitz
a day so he could practice on the grand piano
in the high school gymnasium.
After signing a contract with a Sarajevo
football club, he decided to go to law school.
He graduated but had his first of many hits
and a new career as a pop star before he had
a chance to practice.
''I have no curiosity
to see my beautiful city again,'' he
said. 'Those stupid morons
have destroyed it. They have destroyed friendship.
Destroyed love. Many of my friends are dead.
My spirit is mortally wounded. Quelle horreur!''
Although he recently cut an album in English
(to be released this year, one song is called
''My Home-town, Sarajevo'') and speaks it
well, he is a resident of France now and he
preferred to be interviewed in French. Actually,
he might have come to France even without
a war. Tired of being a big fish in a remote
pond, he had been ready for a new career move
anyway.
He arrived in early 1993, a refugee but not
a vagabond. He was liquid, he had deposited
money in West European banks. But he discovered
that the Yugoslav painter who had invited
him to Cannes had died. The painter's best
friend had made a fortune in real estate and
offered him the use of an apartment on the
Croisette.
Thus based on the French Riviera (he has
since moved to Saint-Tropez), Dzinovic toured
Europe performing 77 benefit concerts for
Bosnia in three years. At the same time he
founded a record company. The widow of Claude
François, the French variety music star who
wrote ''Comme d'Habitude,'' a song Frank Sinatra
later made into an even bigger hit called
''My Way,'' asked Dzinovic to write Serbo-Croat
lyrics to the melody. He did and he recorded
it, but at the last moment he decided not
to release the record at this stage of the
game. He does not want to be introduced into
the international market with a song already
so well known and associated with other singers.
''I'm not a debutant,'' he said, somewhat
defensively. But on the other hand he is exactly
that in the larger and richer territory to
which he has moved.
One way or another, by now there has been
so much water under so many bridges that he
cannot imagine any circumstance that would
tempt him to sing in Serbo-Croat in Sarajevo
again:
''What they say about Sarajevo
is not a myth. It was a magic town with a
rich cultural life. People of many nationalities
lived there together in harmony. There were
many good musicians.''
Returning to it now that it is reunited would
be considered a good, even noble deed by his
friends. But he snickered and said:
''Bad things would happen
to me. Like some drunken Serb is going to
call me a dirty Muslim. So I ask myself, is
it worth the price?''
