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Bilbil Vlora

“Bilbili’s Kaba” is another masterful achievement of Tosk Kaba with saze, especially Përmeti’s Kaba with clarinet, violin and saze. “Bilbili’s Kaba” is performed in two parts: kaba and dance.

Bilbil Vlora wares a genius in the findings and combinations he made in the structure of the kaba of all the melodic spaces of Southern Albania. He did not simply create a new kaba, but he searched and successfully realized the possibilities that kaba gave him to take advantage of. There are some motifs that highlight its origin, but also some new ones from Bilbil Vlora that enrich this kaba, especially in two aspects. The first aspect is related to the insertion of a descending Lab motif (later reused in “General Gramophone’s Kaba”) and the second is related to the introduction of the turn in Kaba, initially as a Përmet dance and later with a Lab motif’s cadence.

This is the enrichment that Master Bilbili made the kaba, not only with the addition of the rhythmic dance that we do not find in the earliest phase of Selim Leskovik’s Tosk kaba, but also with the polystylistics of the musical materials that are intertwined within the structure of the first part of Kaba-s. His kaba is a more advanced stage of Kaba with gërnets and violin, as it is clearly felt the further development of their instrumental musical facture using the entire “clarinet-gërnet” register.

Convincingly, Bilbil Vlora can be considered not only the consolidator of the hard Tosk Kaba with gërnet and Saze but also the founder of the Lab Kaba, referring to the “vënҫe-labҫe” lamentation with gërnet as a new type of Kaba he created.

Besides him, his brother, Asim Cenko played violin and the other brother played the lute.

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