History of the ESO

The Elegant Savages Orchestra arose from the ashes of the Soviet-era Bassanda National Radio Orchestra. Founded by Yezget Nasilsinez some time in the late 1940s, when Bassanda National Radio first went on air with funds from the State Directorate, the Ulusal Radyo Orkestrası (or BNRO) drew its personnel from all over Bassanda, in addition to various adventurous expatriate musicians from the West. Until the 1930s, when the Central Committee finally brought all regions of the mountainous interior and rocky coast under state political control, Bassanda had been the home of a wealth of highly regionalized and distinctive music, dance, and song traditions. Recognizing that centralization of state communications risked the erosion of regional styles and resulting “cultural grey-out,” Nasilsinez, who came from a family of traditional bards but who had also trained in Paris in the ‘20s with Boulanger, and had been an early informant of John Lomax senior, argued passionately for the recognition and protection of these local traditions, both through an ambitious though underfunded field-recording program and through the foundation of a state ensemble showcasing these idioms. The BNRO board and programming committee were the site of ongoing, sometimes contentious debates between Nasilsinez, who fought for the integrity and inclusive presentation of the regional idioms, including those which came from Bassanda’s often-persecuted ethnic minorities, and state commissars, who insisted that the Orchestra must present a unified, “sophisticated” and culturally-competitive face of the Nation to the rest of the world. By the late 1980s, with the growth of glasnost and perestroika, and the example of the Bulgarian and Cossack state ensembles before them, the very elderly Nasilsinez and his musicians’ leadership committee made the decision to divest of the last vestiges of state funding and control, and go into exile in the West. They began a peripatetic “never-ending tour” of the rest of the world, as a cooperative and collective enterprise, under the name of The “Elegant Savages Orchestra” (the new title was a paraphrase of a possibly-apocryphal quote from one of Nasilsinez’s anonymous musical sources, who, upon hearing his lyrical description of the BNRO’s mission and plan, commented sardonically “well, yer a foine buncha elegant savages, are ye not?”). Especially in the wake of the disintegration of (most) colonial states, Nas1lsiniz and his musicians intentionally broadened their sources of repertoire, explicitly in order, they said, to "obliterate the boundaries between musics that want to be free." Also over time, the personnel evolved as elder musicians retired or deceased, but the ESO’s core principles, as envisioned by Nasilsinez and evolved and carried forward by his musical lineage and the musicians’ cooperative committee, continued: ‘No boundaries. Fierce dedication to the traditions and to one another.’