8th july 2007 - osijek/ croatia

late afternoon before the concert, the guest musicians still haven’t arrived. It’s now 5pm – tamara obrovac should be on stage in three hours to open the evening. It was arranged that they would arrive about midday in order to have enough time for all the technical stage stuff and also for working something out together. We will be giving two concerts together. Here today and tomorrow in vukovar a few kilometres away. At 1pm we’re told that they’re running late and won’t arrive until 4pm. It’s 5.30pm when they come aboard the ship and the first thing they announce is that they don’t want to spend the night here. Seasickness and also, how else would they get back to the cars they had to leave in osijek … I am appalled at the lack of interest, at the lethargy they have. One musician tells me: “we are actually jazz musicians. When we play with tamara, we get good pay for few notes, normally we play many notes for little money.” We fail and fail to get them to try and work something out together, that would be too tiring, they want to make it spontaneous. This doesn’t look good. We suggest a song from their repertoire, which would go well with the “schönberger” yodel over the top, and my “i bi ån". That's ok by them.

They play well, but what they serve the 700 or so people who turn up is an acoustic sedative, very subtle and introverted. Sometimes tamara just sits there drinking red wine while the drummer strokes the skins.

The people are accordingly scared when we let loose. As arranged, I get tamara back on stage for “I bi ån”. We’re about halfway through the song before she starts to feel happy and gives free rein to her voice for the first time that evening; she comes out with a few really good vocal improvisations.

However after the concert I’m a bit contrite. I was never really able to feel the audience. That was also down to the distance from the audience of course, not much came back. However, I’m the only one who is unhappy.

When it then emerges that the guests will be staying on board after all and will make the journey to vukovar with us (our tour manager jonas has evidently worked on them in the meantime and also arranged a shuttle), I’m reconciled with the world.

The behaviour of the guests is then rather disconcerting during the next few hours that we spend together in the “village square” until dawn. There are two groups sitting at the table who share absolutely nothing at all. I have to come to the defence of my team, as there were numerous unsuccessful attempts, from me too, to break through the phalanx. Not that they didn’t have fun. On the contrary they were completely hyped-up, mad and crazy. But in their own cosmos. They had no desire for interaction. At one point, when we wanted to start the two croatian songs we learned from willi resetarits, they said straightaway: no tonalities please.