Eva Salina and Peter Stan's New Album SUDBINA Paints Luminous Portrait of Roma Diva Vida Pavlovi

They called her a queen, with reverence and affection, though she mostly sang in smoky bars, her voice rising above the din of smirking, drinking men. Despite the undeniable emotive power of her voice, Serbian Roma singer Vida Pavlovi? never gained international notoriety and died before her 60th birthday in 2005.mEva Salina & Peter Stan's new album SUDBINA is available now. The duo will also be performing at the Greenwich House Music School in New York on March 29th.

Yet in the memory of Roma musicians and older generations in former Yugoslavia, Vida's singing and the songs she sang were regarded with tenderness and honor, even while fading quietly into Balkan musical history. Scouring obscure corners of the internet for new repertoire, singer Eva Salina kept returning to Vida's soul-wringing, haunting recordings. The resulting new album, SUDBINA (release: March 30, 2018), her first as a duo with accordionist Peter Stan, shines a light on Vida's legacy, but also on Salina's exquisite knack for re-imagining faded but vital music. Salina and Stan will share this connection with audiences in all upcoming 2018 performances.

The goal of identifying and amplifying the voices of those who have been silenced, or who have had to remain quiet, resonates profoundly for Salina, particularly in this current moment of growing global focus on women's experiences--experiences Pavlovi? addressed directly.

"In the context of current movements toward women's equality and agency, as I continue to dig deeper into this repertoire, I realize over and over how it's all way more relevant than I could have anticipated. You can fill these songs to the brim with sadness, anger, frustration, and hope, and yet they are never saturated. There's always room for more: more life, more desire, more understanding, more fire. Songs like these bring tenderness to the day-to-day reality of an unpredictable world and help temper the hardships in our own lives, and hopefully the lives of others."

"I hope that my work can contribute to a legacy. I personally don't know anyone else who is actively singing these songs," says Salina. "Peter and my imaginations and our personal musical histories give us the possibility to say new things with these rich old songs. Our interpretations of this repertoire can hopefully provide new insight into the incredible musical diversity in the Balkan region, broadening the common understanding slightly beyond, say, Bulgarian women's choirs and Roma brass bands. Vida's songs speak to something else, something poignant and personal, and that's precisely what I hope to amplify."

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