MALI PALIĆ 1 MALI PALIĆ A story and memory of a musical circle from the 1970s Svetozar Litvanski, Milan Anđelić, Lazar Brčić Kostić and Milorad Bujić – Buco. MALI PALIĆ 2 Mali Palić is, above all, a memory for me: a time in my life, the people I played with, and a kafana that once stood near the beginning of Kanjiški put, in the part of the settlement also called Mali Palić, between Palić and Ludoš. The kafana is gone today, but when I think back I do not first see a building. I see people, instruments, tables, familiar guests, evenings that ran late, and music that changed with the mood of the room. During the 1970s music remained a constant part of my life. At the same time I was building my professional career in the Waterworks and sewer utility, but evenings and weekends returned me to another rhythm through the guitar. We were not part of the big commercial music world and we did not think of ourselves that way. This was direct, living music, played only a few metres from people who ordered songs, sang along, laughed, sometimes became quiet, and showed you immediately whether a song had reached the m. The names that remain with me from that circle are Milan Anđelić, Milorad Bujić – Buco, Svetozar Litvanski and Janoš. Memory does not preserve every evening with equal sharpness, and it does not need to become an official register. What matters more is what survives from the inside: who entered a song in what way, who pulled the rhythm forward, who carried the bass, who led, and who could suddenly bring out an old song no one expected. The photograph we have today brings back exactly that feeling. It shows Svetozar, Milan, me and Buco with our instruments, caught in one ordinary moment that passed and yet somehow remained. Buco also remained important because of the photograph itself. The image survived in his archive, and that matters more now than anyone would have imagined at the time. People rarely think that one photograph may mean something forty or fifty years later. It simply goes into an album or a box. Then one day that same picture returns the names, faces and atmosphere of a world that has already disappeared. Milan Anđelić was one of the people with whom music connected me over many years. Our story did not begin at Mali Palić. In my memories of the earlier period there is also the group Senke, formed in 1969 with Milan Racić and Milan Anđelić. Later our paths crossed again through live music. Milan remained a musician throughout his life. In an interview many years later for Subotica.info, he remembered thousands of performances, weddings, banquets, dances, taverns and the period when music was work, companions hip and a way of life all at once. MALI PALIĆ 3 His memory of Mali Palić is especially meaningful because he mentions Josa and Margita Buljovčić and recalls years of playing at their place. That matters to me not because every year and every line - up must now be measured precisely, but because his voice brings back the same place that I remember. When two people, after so much time, remember the same names and the same place, an entire room begins to appear again behind a few simple sentences. Josa and Margita were not background figures in that memory. They belonged to the place itself. Josa returned again through my song “Janos.” When I mention “Josica” in the song, I mean that Josa. I find that especially interesting today: a person writes a song without thinking that he is creating a historical record, and decades later he discovers in a few lines the people, nicknames, the kafana and the way life felt at the time. Most of all, the song “Janos” preserves Janoš. I call him an old master and refer to his keys. I remember him as a man who often led the music. When he started, the rest of us followed. It was the kind of musical understanding that did not require much explanation. A glance, an introduction or a small change in direction was enough, and everyone knew where the song was going. I also left very ordinary musicians’ details in the song: begeš, kontra, harmony in thirds, E major. To someone who did not play, those may look like a list of terms. To us they were everyday language. They meant who carried the bottom of the song, who held the rhythm, who filled the harmony and how everyone returned to the same musical line. That is why “Janos” is more than a song about one man. It is a small picture of the way we played together. MALI PALIĆ 4 “Do you remember Mali Palić, where we played for so long, Janoš often led us, and we followed him.” At one point the song returns directly to Mali Palić: “Do you remember Mali Palić, where we played for so long, Janoš often led us, and we followed him.” There is more memory in that short passage than in many pages of explanation. The place, the man, the music and the relationship among us are all there. Svetozar Litvanski belongs to the same circle of memories. He is there with us in the photograph, and the image itself shows how naturally he belonged to that musical world. When I look at it now, I do not see only four men with instruments. I see a time when playing music meant more than performing. It meant gathering, friendship, familiar faces and a small community that formed again every evening. Mali Palić had its own rhythm. People came because they knew where they were going and who they were likely to meet. There was no great distance between musician and audience. Someone called out a request, someone started a refrain, someone joined in, and the musicians immediately felt whether to continue, change the song or move in another direction. The performance was not perfectly planned. Its value was precisely that it was alive. For me, it is especially striking that all of this happened during the same years in which I was taking on increasingly serious professional responsibilities. A later story of mine preserves the irony that some people wondered how a man who played in taverns and bars could also become director of the Waterworks. I never experienced those as two separate identities. I was the same person. During the day I dealt with water, sewers, workers, plans and responsibility. In the evening I could take a guitar and be among people in a completely different way. MALI PALIĆ 5 There was also room in those performances for my own songs. “Ja sam sin siromaha” continued to live in that environment. This was not a concert hall where people came specifically to hear a songwriter. It was a kafana, with all that a kafana brings, and that made it even more interesting when an original song moved through the room and people began asking who had written it or where it came from. Over time our paths separated. By the end of the 1970s, or around 1980, the shared period of Janoš, Buco, Milan and me had come to an end. There was no grand farewell. There did not need to be. With local bands, life usually decides before anyone makes an announcement. Work, family, other responsibilities and different roads slowly create what later becomes the end of a period. Milan continued his musical life. I moved more deeply into my professional and public life. Others followed their own roads. The kafana remained for a while and eventually disappeared as well. Yet what a person thinks is finished sometimes returns in an unexpected way. A photograph brings it back. An old song brings it back. Someone writes a familiar name on Facebook, and suddenly the sound, the room and the people return. MALI PALIĆ 6 That is why this story matters to me not as the history of some major band, but as the history of one part of a life. Milan, Buco, Svetozar, Janoš, Josa and Margita are not names that need to be arranged in a table. They are people who belonged to a time when much of life happened directly, without cameras, without mobile phones and without any thought that one day someone might try to put the story back together. What remains of Mali Palić today can be described geographically: a part of the settlement between Palić and Ludoš, near the beginning of Kanjiški put, and the memory of a kafana that no longer exists. But for me its real location is not on a map. It is in a few lines of the song “Janos,” in Milan’s memory of Josa and Margita, in the photograph preserved by Buco, and in the faces of people who once stood together with instruments in their hands. Perhaps that is the best part of the story. Every small detail does not have to be solved for the time to return. It is enough to look at the photograph and hear again the question from the song: “Do you remember Mali Palić...” And for a moment, the music can be heard again.