On January 5, 2025, I went for breakfast at the New York Café in Budapest.

The café is inside the Anantara New York Palace hotel. It is famous — people call it one of the most beautiful cafés in the world. Gold on the ceilings, marble everywhere, the kind of room where you sit up straighter without deciding to. I went for breakfast. That was the whole plan.

A Roma orchestra was playing, the way house orchestras do in that café. I ordered, I ate, I listened.

I come from a family of Roma musicians going back more than two hundred years — in my book I counted almost two hundred and fifty. My father, Branko Pavlovic, played bass-prim, in Sar e Roma and for twenty-eight years with the Tambura Orchestra of RTV Sarajevo. Twenty-eight years is a working life. That orchestra was the center of his, and in Sarajevo that music was on radio and television, in people’s homes, part of the furniture of the city.

It was also the sound of our house. I started violin at three years old, inside that sound, before I understood that other houses sounded different. My father and I played together at home my whole life. So a Roma orchestra is not background music to me. It is not atmosphere. When I hear those instruments, I hear my father, and the men before him. I hear Sarajevo. I hear being a kid.

Somewhere during that breakfast, I ended up playing with them.

It was not arranged. Nobody had booked anything, nobody was expecting it, least of all me — I had come in for coffee and eggs. It just went the way it goes with musicians who speak the same language. One minute I was a guest at a table. The next I was playing.

That is how this music has always worked in my family. It does not wait for a stage or an invitation printed somewhere. It starts where people are — in a house, at a table — and whoever plays, plays. In Sarajevo it reached whole cities through my father’s orchestra. In that café it plays under breakfast, for people eating and talking. It is the same music either way. It does not get smaller in a smaller room.

Somebody filmed a short piece of it, and I put it on Instagram. It got 201 likes, more than anything else I have ever posted. Two hundred and one is not a big number by the standards of the internet. It is the biggest number on my page, and I think I know why, and it is not complicated. There is no stage in that video. There is no concert. There is a breakfast table in the most decorated room in Budapest, and the music my family has played for over two hundred years, being played in the middle of the morning.