Ex Libris
What connects John Coltrane, Šaban Bajramović, and the Minotaur? This literary debut is not so much read as it is listened to! Taksim Bop by Karlo Ilić is the perfect read for lovers of beautiful literature—especially magical realism—and music from around the world: from the Ottoman Empire to New Orleans. Taksim Bop is a collection of essays about music, indeed about music and from music, as the muses were evidently involved in the writing of this book, reflected in the virtuosic style, playful accuracy, and inspiration that is transmitted to the reader from songs, stories, essays on magical powers and the historical wandering of the lute, through a tale of healing through music in eighteenth-century Istanbul and that of the first musician, to essays on what originally is a jumble, all the way to the story of an un-crowned king, Coltrane's bird hymns and prayers, how Ornette Coleman played the truth, and about the Music of all things. To the extent that words can, in their impotence towards music, this book by Karlo Ilić touches and mirrors the Mystery from all sides and allows music, if only for a moment, to be seen. - Dinko Telećan, writer and translator
"Everything Šaban gets he immediately loses, something out of carelessness, the rest out of instinct, even duty, and that is why he is the king of the Roma, as he easily knows how to lose everything. He accepted his fate entirely and from the beginning, burning by Heraclitus's principle, his life is the fire of truth pierced through the reign of lies. Where is Russia then? Passionate knowledge differs from rationally conceived wisdom in that it realizes the world instead of describing it, thus belonging to faith, opposed to the sciences. (...)
The poor run after the ball, while those whose matches they watch run after money. Šaban knew that money holds the soul by the throat, persistent and genuinely successful in the holy mission of getting rid of it as soon as possible. Of all those who sang his songs around the world, he himself achieved the least profit, not knowing about copyright as they first did not know, or pretended not to know, about their author."
– Niš Temporal Blues part (from the book Taksim Bop)
"Once, after decisive bloody battles, there remained at least traces of life in the ruins, and what came afterward was in some way similar to fertile soil after a fire, the fire of new life beneath the burnt earth. Military orchestras left behind the tin wrecks of instruments like empty snail shells in the mud and debris of explosives and firearms, discarded for no one like unarticulated desires in the post-mortem scent of gunpowder. In the 21st century, behind nuclear bombs and drones, nothing remains except a haunted wasteland and ghosts staring at the sunset from the oil-rich eastern void branded by human shadows on asphalt resembling prehistoric cave drawings, and there is no trace of music unless someone died playing in defiance of unbearably painful death like moral David against Goliath against the backdrop of a hundred-meter atomic mushroom. Up in New Orleans, blacks fought against the klansmen and other phantoms with French quadrilles and marches after the war, then through a century of world wars with hectoliters of blood, sweat, and tears they took a position from which they could kill on their own terms; gathering the same discarded trumpets, tubes, and other horns down in the Balkans, the Roma infused everything they touched with their own nomadic blues, while their northwestern brothers, the Sinti, sealed a new tradition of European jazz arising precisely from New Orleans through the guitar of the quintessential manouche, dreamer and gambler Django Reinhardt, who in turn translated the whole-tone scale of Debussy's hour-long reveries into swing decades before the modal cool of Claude Thornhill and Gil Evans, valued by Miles Davis despite a penchant for baroque phraseology and roasted hedgehogs with sudden vibrato that makes the knees of modern jazz in pressed trousers tremble in awe and undisguised fear of raw gypsy passion. Whether African Americans remember Africa as Roma remember India we cannot know but it is not important because in both cases it is about a brilliant interpretation of migration, an insatiable will for life in defiance of a cursed past, thus achieving true futurism unlike Italian or Russian, Nazi flying saucers, cars of the speed of light, and collective farms on Mars where there is neither good food nor music. No one remembers the first language of symbols of the original poets, vultures on the Sumerian slopes whose songs were pressed into clay by reeds, witnesses to the birth of ancient instruments and the fear of death as the primal source of the creative impulse alongside the discovery of love. No one remembers the first music and celebration in hanging gardens but everyone remembers the Great Flood listening to the echoes of the collapse of the Tower of Babel because that is our everyday life, the apocalypse we repeatedly experience playing music for collateral victims of advertising campaigns and the permanent war in the dying scream of capitalism and the post-mortem grip of communism that condemns acoustics to digital exile without space to store the sweaty patina from cymbals, let alone an entire drum set. No one remembers the first European military orchestras that were created in the image and likeness of..."
– Taksim Bop, excerpt (from the book Taksim Bop)
Vid Jeraj (Kritika H,D,P): Čvrsto sjedenje na dvije stolice
Taksim Bop is a collection of stories by the Rijeka writer, editor, musician, composer, and bookseller of the younger generation Karlo Ilić – a true hyphenated man, as the Americans would say. Ilić, better known to the wider public as the editor and translator of the Jazz Beat series at the Rijeka antiquarian and publisher Ex Libris, co-signed the double CD In Action by the Roberto Magris Denis Razz Quartet last year, released in the USA and already received exceptional critical reception in foreign publications, in which Ilić participates as a double bassist, arranger, guitarist, and lutenist, or oud.
The title of the collection already hides the idea of synchronicity, a kind of diwana of the East and West that develops through essayistic prose about music. Yes, we say diwana, not alternative, although alter, as a Latin adjective meaning “other of two,” is the closest epithet to the subject of this critique, since Taksim Bop is a title that breaks space in relation to the mainstream... While taksim is the introductory part in oriental music, a free improvisation outside of rhythm, actually “jazz before jazz” in our regions, bop is a term that eludes the general public when it wants to reach for jazz, forgetting that jazz was born in New Orleans.
And it died on the West Coast of the USA as a relic of the migration of a late feudal people who viewed this dark object of desire in a new environment as “aunt's tapestry” that new white neighbors – entrepreneurs, doctors, and lawyers – might look at askance, casting a glance through the window of the basement apartment of some black family in a big city. Ilić's endeavor further expands the field of what Neven Ušumović previously tackled in Makovu zrnu and Zlatnoj opeklini or Marko Pogačar in Jugoton gori!, with distant echoes of Kundera's letter. Ilić follows a similar milestone: he enters the zone of magical realism, retelling myths and legends about the origins of Eastern instruments (...)
Nikola Petković (Jutarnji list): Knjiga kao nijedna
I have been reading for exactly sixty years. I even teach and create literature. But neither my extensive reading nor my teaching of literature, and least of all my own writing, has helped me not to be rendered speechless in front of Karlo Ilić's book and to humbly admit with an unprecedented humility: I am not up to writing about this book, especially not as beautifully as it deserves. So I decided to do something else.
The first chance I get to go down to the city, I will go to our Rijeka antiquarian on the waterfront, where Željko works, where Karlo works, and buy a package of "Taksim Bop." Twenty copies of the book will be enough to give one to each person I love. And I will do this for one very simple reason: "Taksim Bop" is a book that everyone who considers themselves a citizen of the 21st century must read. At the same time, it is a book for which a language needs to be invented to evaluate it; for starters, perhaps it can only be jazzed and jammed. The archaeology of knowledge Karlo Ilić's approach to the archaeology of knowledge is so quiet and unobtrusive that, having removed himself before the mystery of everything that is, everything that was, and everything that will be, he opened an abyss of the ingredients of the world that little by little filled with his own acquisition of reality.
This book deserves much more than mere criticism. It deserves at least the erasure of any and however articulated preconceived idea about it that might suggest anything to anyone of you who intend to read it that could spoil the pleasure in it: not in reading it; not in discussions about it; not in impressions... A simple and unpretentious pleasure in it all. Since the wonder and beauty, wisdom and inherent beauty of the unobtrusive voice that narrates with us whispered to me to mute the tone of my own voice about it, from now until the end of this dedication to beautiful literature and the immeasurable wealth of the author's humility of Ilić's voice, in search of an appropriate tone from Karlo borrowed from the jumble, in the rest of the lines it tells me (...)