33 1/3, Ardit Gjebrea’s Projekt Jon

As market reforms were transforming citizenship in post-socialist Tirana, Albania, and Europe transitioned into its post-socialist state, Projekt Jon (1997) interrogated European identity formation. The resulting muzikë e lehtë (light music), with regional and wider-European influences, reflects an ideal undermined by political unrest and uncertainty.

Projekt Jon-the Ionian Project-announces itself with the frenetic beating of the tupan and the traditional cries of Albania’s highland shepherd. The sprawling collaboration between singer-songwriter Ardit Gjebrea, traditional singer Hysni Zela, and a team of crack studio musicians in Italy, had an outsized ambition: to transcend Albania’s borders, imaginatively crafting in sound a new home in Europe for the post-socialist citizens of the embattled nation-state. But as Gjebrea prepared to take the album on tour, the homeland itself verged on the cusp of complete collapse. A civil war, the result of the cascading failure of pyramid schemes enabled by deep political corruption and massive social dislocations, loomed, and the tour became-at least for Gjebrea and other urban intellectuals-a referendum on the future of Albania.