Please stay with me for just a bit as I tell this story. It has a geographical and historical focus, germane to the winter season. One of my favorite bands in the 80s and 90s was Savatage, a melodic heavy metal band founded by Floridians Jon and Criss Oliva. This band gave the world one of the best selling Christmas songs of all time, Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24, on the album Dead Winter Dead (linked here). Dead Winter Dead was a concept album, and you know the Christmas Eve song today as it is often performed by Trans-Siberian Orchestra, a side project of Jon Oliva after the untimely death of his brother. (Criss, a guitar virtuoso, was killed by a drunk driver.) Released in 1995, the album dealt with a serious Shakespearian theme: a Serb boy and a Muslim girl who fall in love. The backdrop of the story was the Bosnian War, an evolving genocide at the time. The U.S. eventually bombed Serbia into capitulation and Slobodan Milosevic, Serbias president, was brought to The Hague, Netherlands on charges of war crimes. The music is, of course, incredibly powerful and hauntingly melodic. The next time you hear this Christmas song you may react differently as the arrangement is imbued with purpose and pain, anguish and loss. But the coda of Dead Winter Dead was truly uplifting, signaling that hope and love could still triumph over evil.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 20:18:27 +0000
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