The Crimean fairytale: Jamala’s “Qırım” in perspective10 min read
At a time when there were few recordings of folk Crimean music, Jamala set out to create the first album of Crimean Tatar music with symphonic sound. Qırım emerges from the murky waters of the little known history of the peninsula and its people, reaching worldwide recognition and setting the stage for a new interpretation of both the familiar and that almost lost in exile.
The official launch of Qırım, the latest album by Crimean Tatar-Ukrainian singer Jamala, took place on 5 May 2023. On that day, the album was performed in Kyiv accompanied by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine; six days later, on 11 May, it was presented in Liverpool with the BBC Philharmonic.
Qırım emerged on the world charts and was aired worldwide on radio stations and online platforms, entering the Grammy longlist in the Best Global Music Album category. It was welcomed warmly by the Crimean Tatar community and by critics.
This unprecedented work told the story of an entire people and their native land. Looking more closely, it also revealed the challenges Crimean culture is facing today.
The sound and the visuals
“No one knows who Crimean Tatars are, so I will tell their story,” described Jamala, regarding her motivation behind creating Qırım. Her dream was to tell the world about Crimea and its indigenous culture in her own way. It had to be music that would be characteristic of Crimean Tatars, but also comprehensible for many, and something that would exist beyond time.
Her biggest inspiration and reference was the soundtrack from Game of Thrones, composed by Ramin Djawadi. In the show, each of the seven kingdoms is represented through music with a distinct “folk-like” sound placed atop the symphonic body. These kingdoms, their languages, and their culture are a fantasy, yet each has a unique character easily distinguishable to the listener.
To achieve the effect and to “paint Crimea with music from scratch,” over 80 musicians gathered in Kyiv in 2020; many were summoned from Crimea to play the traditional instruments. Dare and kaval, along with kemane-violin and accordion stitch the folk embroidery here. Jamala’s aim was to use pure sound and the least technology possible to make Qırım an instant and durable classic.
The few places where special mastering was used is in the outro and the first song of the album “Alim,” which tells the story of the people’s hero, the foe of the rich. Blended throughout the song are sounds of a battle, or a crowded bazaar in Bakhchisaray where the news of Alim’s death is not taken lightly. There is a cacophony of busy voices, the muezzin call to prayer. The feeling is that you are experiencing a film — like watching a fantastic story of a fairytale kingdom. After all, the album essentially uses cinematic music as its basis, and aims to create a respective effect.
A lot of thought also was put into the cover image and the visuals accompanying each of the compositions. Red tulips, a withering rose, a horde of wild horses galloping across the steppes, and Jamala, rising from the waters of a quiet bay, like Gulliver in the country of Lilliput. Adding these visuals helps the audience experience Qırım more vividly.
Dialects and musical styles
The mosaic of Qırım comes together through fourteen songs, all originating from different places on the peninsula. Each carries a distinct character through music and language. The lyrics give a sense of who the Crimean Tatar people are, and what their customs and beliefs are, and even their understanding of humour.
“The story in each of the songs is different, from love-ballads to songs about national heroes, all of which demonstrate the rich history of the peninsula and about the times our people came about. The melody, sound, and dialect of each song make it possible to recreate the image of the lost Crimea,” says Ediye, who was born and raised in Crimea. To allow for anonymity, the first names of the Crimean interlocutors Lossi 36 spoke with for this article, were changed, unless followed by a surname.
There are three spoken dialects of Crimean Tatar, and all of them are presented in Qırım: Nogay, Tat, and Yalıboyu. Each dialect roughly represents the three regions of Crimea: the steppes, the middle-southlands with the mountains, and the south, south-east sealine. Historically, these areas received different populations and interacted differently with the outside world, providing for more than one definable living tradition.
“We are children of the mountains, steppes, and the Black Sea,” says Shemsiye in an interview with Lossi 36. “The songs in the album do an amazing job of showcasing the multifacetedness of the Crimean Tatar people,” she continues.
The steppes are represented by a very distinct piece, “Nogay beyitleri.” Normally, beyits are humorous songs about everyday life, often with satirical takes. The rhythm and pronunciation in beyits are starkly different from pieces in other dialects, and the performance is technically challenging. This genre can contain over ten couplets in one song; in Qırım we hear just two.
Another distinct subgroup of compositions in the album are the songs “Arafat dağından”, “Meni ğamdan azat eyle”, and “Kene aldı ğam beni.” The first is a prayer, the second is a ballad that tells about fidelity in love, and the third is about a longing so grand that it overshadows life.
Jamala classifies these songs as mugham — a monophonic vocal improvisation, analogous to raga — and points out that this is probably the first time someone has performed mugham with a symphonic orchestra. Because of how unpredictable the melody produced by the singer may be, it is very difficult to perform when many instruments are involved.
All the other songs tell a story in themselves. Playful “Çalbaş Bora” is about the windy trade roads of eastern Crimea and the camel who trods these paths, working to provide for the family of its owner. “Qaranfil” and “Pencereden” are love ballads about feelings unrealised.
All very different, the songs in Qırım reveal the lived traditions of the Crimean Tatars and their core values.
“[It] combines that of many faiths, languages, and ethnicities. Its music is heavily influenced by the pentatonic scales and rhythmic ornaments of both Greek and Asiatic traditions,” says Elvis Cholpukh, a Crimean activist based in Germany.
The mugham, different ways of poetic expression, and musical form crystallised over centuries carry along much more than meets the eye.
Handling folk heritage
While the pieces in Qırım reveal Crimean culture to the world, most of these songs were already very familiar to the Crimean Tatar community. There are few quality recordings from the past century, but among Crimean Tatars, the songs presented in Qırım have been sung at family gatherings and weddings, which are the main place of socialisation and passing on the culture.
Popular and revered Crimean Tatar singers, such as Sabriye Erecepova and Ediye Topçi, have performed many of the songs featured on the album. The melodies and texts are a nostalgia, but not a revelation.
Performing folk content can be contentious. Jamala’s performance style, alongside praise, received criticism. Arslan ağa, a folk musician from Crimea, says that some of the songs presented in the album brutally distort the musical conventions that make Crimean music distinct — most importantly, the melodies and rhythms are changed.
Perhaps the song “Bahar kelse” (Shall the spring come) best illustrates how large the difference can be. In Qırım Jamala preserves the mood, rhythms, and alterations to the lyrics she applied in her 2014 jazz interpretation of the song. In that year’s album All or Nothing, even the name of the song is different — “Unutmasan” (Shall you not forget).
Arslan ağa also worries about the overall influence of Caucasian and Turkish traditions on Crimean music.
“Let it be noisy and disorderly, but you know it is Turkish rock playing when you hear it. They have a very distinct style, even in such [non-traditional] genres,” he says.
Just singing, or in fact just producing any material in the Crimean Tatar language will not make it Crimean Tatar, he stresses.
Jamala could have taken the route of recording an album with just folk musicians and conventional interpretations. This would be much simpler and perhaps would spare criticism. But opinions are many, and for some in the Crimean Tatar community Qırım is, on the contrary, not innovative enough. While the desire to have new songs created fully from scratch is understandable, when put in perspective, Qırım in fact might be offering something of much greater value.
The struggle to unearth and develop a cultural heritage
For Jamala, Qırım is clearly a big personal exploration, a quest to make sense of her heritage and to create momentum to unearth and piece together what is on the verge of oblivion.
In some cases, to collect the material, Jamala and her team had to research archives across countries. This required reaching people in Crimea, Turkey, and Central Asia, where a large population of Crimean Tatars still lives since the deportations of 1944. In the case of the song “Kene aldı ğam beni,” only the living memory of a musician in Uzbekistan allowed Jamala to rectify the communist-era censorship that manifested in official recordings.
This is just one example among many, symptomatic of a larger problem. Over the decades of restrictions and life in exile the Crimean culture developed very unevenly and expert knowledge was dispersed across vast territories. Any action to sustain and develop Crimean Tatar culture is typically fuelled by individual initiatives, like Jamala’s quest.
The Crimean fairytale
In an interview with Lossi 36, Elvis Cholpukh suggested that another major difficulty Crimean Tatars face is the absence of a definite “national brand” or a common national idea, which never came to settle because of the loss of statehood and repressions that plague the people to this day.
Such a concept would help with defining the general trajectory of their culture and the tools for development. A romantic period akin to that which most European nations had is one element that is desperately lacking for the Crimean Tatars. They need a national myth that would be rooted in the local realities and be defined by the local intellectuals, Cholpukh says.
The ideas that were produced looked too far away from Crimea, says Cholpukh: to Turkestan, the Caucasus, or to the Muslim world at large, while the focus should have remained on Crimea- and Crimean Tatar-specific realities.
Later, because of the deportations, the quest for the definition of a Crimean Tatar identity was never completed. In its turn, without national motifs formulated and embraced widely, presenting a congruent critique is impossible. Neither is creating a product which satisfies the demand for both originality and authenticity.
What Jamala’s Qırım offers is perhaps this missing element — a fairytale for Crimea. Her album presents a semi-fictional land beyond time where the Crimean Tatar heritage is assembled and interpreted anew. Her work, driven by folk-oriented global music and pieces of the Romantic period, brushes the dust off of the known and creates a unified world of the “Green Island,” as Crimea is often referred to.
Despite limitations, Jamala takes a risk to work with what she has, and the agency to actively create culture. She sets an example of how things could be done.
“For me the album Qırım is the evidence that our music is a part of world culture. With it I see what level and quality our culture could have reached, had the historical tragedies not affected our people,” concludes Shemsiye.
Listen to the album and read more about the songs here: Qırım
