Ardit Gjebrea's Projekt Jon

<p><b>As market reforms and migration transformed Albania in the early 1990s Ardit Gjebrea began mixing traditional folk music with world music and Italian pop. The resulting album <i>Projekt Jon </i>(1997) provided a new model for song-Western and cosmopolitan yet firmly rooted in the fertile soil of the nation-against a backdrop of deepening political uncertainty about the very future of Albania.</b> <p/>The Ionian Project announced itself with the frenetic beating of the <i>daullë</i> and the traditional cries of Albania's highland shepherd. This sprawling collaboration between singer-songwriter Ardit Gjebrea folk singer Hysni Zela producer Paul Mazzolini and a team of crack studio musicians in Italy had an outsized ambition: to transcend the small postsocialist nation-state's borders imaginatively crafting through sound a new home in Europe for its citizens. But as Gjebrea prepared to launch <i>Projekt Jon</i> violence prompted by the collapse of widespread pyramid schemes threatened to tear Albania apart. And for the intellectuals concerned about growing cracks in the symbolic foundations of the Albanian nation-state the album came to serve as a referendum on the nature of postsocialist citizenship.</p>