A Balkanized Planet
And the search for a cure through music
As many of you already know, we’ve just completed a tour through five Balkan nations with the American Music Abroad program in conjunction with the U.S. State Department. We started in Kosovo, then began a circuit that took us through North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and finally Bosnia and Herzegovina. Five countries in a little more than two weeks, countless amazing people, and a lifetime’s worth of experiences that we’ll carry with us forever. A lot of people just wanna know the classic travel stuff, so I’ve put together a short FAQ below so that I can get to the meat of this article, which is far different than what I expected to be writing about when we departed the country on Inauguration Day…
What did we eat? Loads of meat, cheese and a variety of pastries both savory and sweet were consumed. Cigarette and coffee pairings may as well be on the menu in Balkan nations too. Additionally, many a local ale and rakia (local fruit spirit/moonshine) were enjoyed. A plethora of hothouses across the region ensured that tomato/cucumber/feta “shopska” salads were never scarce. We all loved ajvar (EYE-var) whose ubiquity was much appreciated; to call it a relish is a dreadful understatement. Oh and the cheese. Ah the cheese.
Where did we stay? Generally we were in 3 to 4 star hotels (think Marriott courtyard or equivalent) for 2-3 nights at a time. Usually in the main cities (Pristina, Skopje, Sofia, Ljubljana and Sarajevo), and occasionally in places an hour or two outside the major hubs.
How were the shows? The ability to share our songs and play instruments and music so unfamiliar to people in that part of the world was truly a gift. Every audience was stoked to have us as well as hang out and interact (and EAT) before and after shows. We played everywhere from high schools to a retirement community, 300 person theaters to the atrium of a U.S. embassy.
Was it amazing? Yes. Yes it was. Being able to freely share our love for music and connection without any selling or buying a was a gift. We met so many new old friends, who’ll not soon be forgotten. Saw unforgettable places, and got to do some pretty amazing things- like jam with traditional musicians in North Macedonia, meet high ranking officials all over the region (including a couple ambassadors, and even a President), walk through Roman ruins and past Ottoman walls, take in the warmth of a people and the antiquity of a place where churches and mosques have occupied adjacent corners for centuries. We had conversations with locals everywhere we went- particularly with young people- that, for me anyway, really shifted my perspective on what it’s like to be American (or not), to live and/or grow up in a place where war is a recent and visceral memory. It punctuated for me how similar we Homo sapiens are, despite our keen ability to sniff out and amplify differences. Take home message: pretty much everyone just wants to eat and laugh.
Some obligatory background about the what and the why: This tour was coordinated and sponsored by American Music Abroad. AMA, for short, is a non-governmental organization that works directly in conjunction with the Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs (ECA), within the greater U.S. State Department. To give a sense of the broader mission, I pulled this from AMA’s website: “American Music Abroad activities often focus on younger and underserved audiences in countries where people have few opportunities to meet American performers and experience their music first-hand.” Furthermore, the ECA’s mission statement is “To increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries by means of educational and cultural exchange that assist in the development of peaceful relations”. The ECA website also elaborates, “From artists, educators, and athletes to students and the youth in the United States and from almost every other country and territory throughout the world—we engage rising leaders through academic, cultural, sports, and professional exchanges. Striving to reflect the diversity of the United States and global society, ECA programs, funding, and other activities encourage the involvement of American and international participants from traditionally underrepresented groups, including women, racial and ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities.” That’s the verbiage that has landed this program firmly in the crosshairs of a new and tyrannical administration, but more on that later (and if you’re tired of reading about it sorry, not sorry).
American Music Abroad has its roots in the Jazz Ambassadors program which was born out of the Cold War climate of the 1950’s. Jazz greats like Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck- too many to name- were sent around the globe in the name of cultural diplomacy through music and to “promote American values”. That last little bit of the mission sounds a bit dubious to a skeptical anti-colonialist type such as myself. Of course, the musicians being sent abroad in the 1950’s and their global audiences were under no illusions about the disparity of the “American values” as stated by the State Department, and how those contrasted with the racist, unequal and unjust society that the Ambassadors called home. The Jazz Ambassadors’ Wikipedia page is well worth the read if you’ve got the time. The people and various entities involved have changed over the years, but this non-partisan program has operated without interruption and sent American musicians all over the world under every single presidency since Eisenhower. As it stands right now in this cynical and hostile political takeover we’re witnessing, Never Come Down may be one of the last bands to be sent abroad under the auspices of cultural diplomacy. We’ll see. These programs are all on pause with no concrete plans to resume. Through the duration of the tour, our State Department contacts and handlers in each of the countries we visited were scrambling in unprecedented ways to not only keep their jobs as the memoranda were flying, and operations moving, but to keep us moving too. I don’t believe we’ve heard or seen the half of it.
Some light band history: for probably four or five years now, we’d been applying to take part in an AMA tour, but in 2024 we were notified we’d finally been given the chance to audition. We flew to Las Vegas in March for a 20 minute audition (what I like to call our “White House Star Search” moment) that included us playing some of our own music, and discussing issues important to ourselves as individuals and a band. Then we flew home and heard nothing for about a month. When we finally heard back from AMA that we’d been selected as one of ten bands for the ‘24-‘25 season (chosen from nearly 300 applicants), and knowing the little bit that we did about the program and its legacy, it was a flavor of excitement and pride that I hadn’t really experienced in my musical sojourns. We still didn’t know where we were headed, but we were sure to visit some far flung places full of people who could use some healing through music (music they’d probably not heard or seen before in many cases), and at the minimum just provide some good old fashioned entertainment and get people out of their heads for a spell. In the fall, we got word that we’d be headed to the Balkans.
Excited to represent our band and share our take on a quintessentially American style of music? Sure thing, but I wasn’t about to (nor were we ever asked to) try to convince anyone that Americans or our ways of being were inherently good. I think that despite a couple centuries now of giving it the ol’ college try, I wouldn’t use our tradition of governing as a blueprint for anything other than maybe a case study for aliens on how not to treat indigenous people. Before this trip if you’d have asked me, I couldn’t have come up with a good, concrete example of a State Department program, or be able to describe a situation where I saw American taxpayer money directly affecting lives with a positive overall outcome, not just throwing bandaids at compound fractures. Nor could I have really told you what USAID even was or what they did. That could just be my own personal lack of civic understanding and unshakable cynicism. You dear reader, are surely more knowledgeable and optimistic than I.
After this tour, my mind is thoroughly changed in terms of how diplomacy works and how beneficial our use of so-called “soft power” has been around the world. I’m properly convinced that not all our tax money and foreign aid spending goes to spying, or selling weapons and building walls. That just maybe the U.S. State Department- currently being gutted by obsequious leeches, bloodthirsty power mongers, and tech bros- isn’t all bad by any means, and has actually done more good around the world than I (and I wager many of my fellow Americans) realized. The State Department and USAID do a myriad of objectively good things around the globe. We saw it with our own eyes. They feed people, provide medicine, and rebuild war torn nations. Some of our personal experiences with USAID abroad took us to a few hubs that the U.S. has built in hundreds of countries around the world called “American Corners”. An American Corner is a place where people of all ages can gather to hear guest lecturers (or musicians), take part in free English lessons, get free access to all sorts of great American literature, converse and share ideas, and find safe haven to gather in places that might be otherwise unsafe or simply be devoid of free, secular gathering spaces. We were lucky enough to play music for an audience at The American Corner in Banja Luka, Bosnia, and took part in the 20th anniversary celebration of the founding of the American Corner in Skopje, North Macedonia. There were also some young rockers performing at that celebration in Skopje that had found a shared passion for rock music, and formed bands thanks to the community provided by the American Corner. They did a better Eagles (band, not football team) impersonation than the Eagles could. In Kosovo (where legions of people born in the mid-90’s were named Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton), we visited a USAID backed school for STEM education, funded by U.S. tax dollars. This school provides a foundation of modern scientific skills that young people are going to need in order to kindly help us un-fuck the world they’ve inherited. And sadly, with the threat of a near extinct department of education in an already emaciated public system, it might be a long time before our country is producing the sort of artists, scholars, and global thinkers we’re seeing develop in smaller, poorer nations. The powers-that-be might find out sooner than later that a well-rounded education is going to be more critical for thriving in the modern world than making kids memorize commandments and learn to hide from active shooters.
It’s important to know that regardless your feelings about American ideals, we can see with our own eyes the stark alternative in an autocratic and expansionist Russia. And it’s no leap of imagination to see what can happen in especially sensitive places like the Balkans-just a stone’s throw from Ukraine- when we pull the plug on soft power altogether. Even if all of our aid were purely strategic (it would be a touch cynical to still believe it is), at it’s core it is doing good by providing a level of freedom, health, and security never felt in many parts of the globe. People’s lives are better because of State Department and USAID programs, because of the very smart people sacrificing a lot of comfort and stability in their own personal lives in order to do this important work. There still exists a form of diplomacy in this country that doubles down on cultural exchange, providing assistance, and saving lives with no expectation of any “return on investment”.
As an aside, it’s true that the US does give more money in foreign aid, in terms of sheer dollars, than any other country. The big asterisk is that we spend far less as a percentage of GDP or GNI on foreign aid than almost any other developed nation. We barely make the top 20 list just squeaking in at #19 above Portugal (USA! USA!). As a percentage, we spend less than half of what most of our Nordic or Western European counterparts spend. Even if you still believe that the current (and illegal) stripping down of USAID and State Department programs is a great way to save money and build a surplus in this country, I’ve got bad news. That money being “saved” (about $80 billion) will not magically make it back to you the taxpayer, nor will it get disbursed to those in need here or abroad. Those billions of dollars are already sitting on the table, earmarked for international development and diplomacy. That cash will disappear once these programs are gutted, and if I had to guess, probably wind up buying yachts or building bunkers for our fearless leaders, the AmaTeslaMetaZon executives. Of course, their propaganda machine says otherwise about the whole hullaballoo, making baseless claims (proven lies actually) on a despicable White House webpage. If you’d like some factual, nonpartisan info on USAID, you can look here.
The State Department has provided a plethora of assistance to make war torn areas more secure, sanitary, and livable around the globe. USAID has successfully provided education, security, medical assistance. They’ve helped build safer and healthier communities, planted trees (we can still all agree “trees good”, right?), and create gathering spaces in countries ravaged by war and ethnic division. All that work was very evident in every country we visited. I was amazed by the extent to which some of these heavily shelled cities and towns had rebuilt and revitalized themselves. Sarajevo is a gem. We take for granted our charmed position as Americans in a relatively peaceful and abundant time. A lot of people don’t even have to think twice about buying something they want, or worry about being able to travel as long as they’ve got the vacation time and some money saved. Until 2024, Kosovo nationals were unable to leave the country without filling out reams of forms, and experiencing lengthy waits for visas that were usually denied. People living in the Balkans, the former Yugoslavia if you will, have seen their economies and the entire fabric of their societies disintegrate once, twice, or even three times. Hence the name of this region being repurposed as a verb to mean, “The process of a country breaking up into smaller, mutually hostile political units”. But despite the fractured history, there seems to be a consensus across the region of what is truly important in life. A lot of people we met have seen hell firsthand, and what they invariably said they cared about most was eachother. There’s a deep sense of value in slowing down, taking time for and caring for one another. The average Balkan resident makes due with less space and fewer worldly possessions than their American counterparts, and yet they seem more content than a lot of folks here, who by capitalist standards “have more”. What, of value, do we actually have more of?
Many people we met inquired about the current state of affairs at home (touchy subject, eh?). In some cases they issued their own personal warnings and admonishments about rising nationalism and authoritarianism in our country especially, but aLao around the world. The wounds caused by despotism, hate and greed in the Balkans are still fresh. It’s not abstract. I get the sense that a whole lot of people there and around the world are now watching what we in the U.S., the self-appointed “leaders of the free world” are doing here, with bated breath. Humanity is not composed of beliefs, nations, political parties or religions. Those are things societies create- some of it good, most of it obfuscation. I believe empathy and compassion are part of our composition as a species and not just psychological phenomena. Humankind is nothing without kindness and understanding. May we all dig deep now to find those things within ourselves, and the energy to amplify that message- no matter how angry, marginalized, or dejected some of us may be feeling. Until the next dispatch…
Love and Peace,
NCD
Brian, thank you for sharing! This was an insightful and captivating read. I learned a lot about the Balkans, the US' (current) participation in underserved countries (USAID and the State Department) and you! There's not much I can add to the sentiments below ... it is a big world and we all desire the same things. May we find peace and acceptance throughout the world! You are gifted...continue to muse. Spread your words, music and humor. They are meaningful. Love you.
Thanks, Brian. Brilliant. Learned some things. See you at Wintergrass.
Maria (Dancing_Mur)