Šaban Bajramović - The King of Roma music

Šaban Bajramović is the most prolific and the most celebrated Roma singer, composer and poet in the Balkans. Among thousands of articles and studies written throughout the world about this author, there is not a single one which does not link his name with the expression "The King of Roma music".

Šaban Bajramović was born on April 16, 1936 in Niš (Serbia). He almost did not attend the school while picking up musical education, alike many of his people, on street.

When he was nineteen, he deserted the army because of love, and later was sentenced to three years imprisonment at the Goli Otok isolation facility on an island in the Adriatic sea. However, as he told the military court that there was no sentence long enough for him to serve it, the sentence was extended to five and a half years.

However, while serving his sentence at the Goli Otok facility, Šaban Bajramović founded a prison band which played, among other music, jazz, Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra songs, as well as Spanish and Mexican melodies. Nowadays, he says that Goli Otok was his life-university, where he formed the way he thinks. He made his first record in 1964, and nowadays, his discography consists of some twenty albums and more then fifty singles. He wrote and composed, as he said, about seven hundred songs. For more than twenty years, he has led “Crna Mamba” (Black Mamba), touring half of the world with the band. Upon invitation of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, he visited India, where he was named for The King of the Gypsy World Music.