as “the biggest jazz concert ever held in Belgrade!”, was held in November 1970, when Earl Hines, Anita O'Day and Charles Mingus performed on the same evening. One year later, Duke Ellington and His Orchestra opened the first Newport Jazz Festival in Belgrade. Four days of jazz at Trade Union Hall cast a light on the en- tire history of the genre, from the Dixieland Innocence of Kid Thomas and the Preservation Hall Band, through the boppers’ fire of the Giants of Jazz (Dizzy, Blakey, Monk) and Gary Burton's intimate impressionism, to the avant-garde traps of Ornette Coleman and the wild jazz-funk of Miles Davis. That first edition was part of the “American Jazz Week in Eastern Europe” programme, but Belgrade was the only place to host Miles, thanks to Živković's personal intervention, with the State De- partment having refused to “send him to Europe” due to his controversial views. While the famous trumpeter performed music that no one was prepared for, every- one was nonetheless aware that they were witnessing a change of history. Belgrade became a metropolis of world jazz, while the festival immediately placed a heavy obli- gation on itself: to watch world trends closely and to be a chronicler of those trends. Živković was appointed selector the following year and put together the “orchestra of dreams” line-up – as the first Yugoslav All-Stars band. Most of the rest of the programme was nonetheless proposed by George Wein, while visiting guests included famous publicist Leonard Feather and radio host Willis Conover. For the third edi- tion, the festival was called the Newport-Belgrade Jazz Festival, only for it to finally become the Belgrade Jazz Festival in 1974, marking the coming of age of the team at the Belgrade Dom Omladine Youth Centre to take on the festival’s organisation and the selection of art- ists. The main programme was held at Pionir Hall, and apart from Americans (Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, McCoy Tyner), performers also included artists from Argenti- na, West Germany, several countries of the then East- ern Bloc and SFR Yugoslavia.
HALF A CENTURY OF THE BELGRADE JAZZ FESTIVAL
ETERNAL RADIANCE OF THE JAZZ FLAME
“Filled with excitement and a new tide of hope, for the first time we are welcoming to this city some of the greatest living figures of jazz... We already have Bitef, Bemus and Fest: now we are also getting Newport in Belgrade, with the hot hope that it will also become an inalienable tradition of the culture of this region,” wrote publicist Žika Bogdanović on the eve of the premiere edition of the festival, half a century ago. And that was how it came to be... T he first Newport Jazz Festival in Belgrade was held from 31st October to 3rd Novem- ber 1971. The event represented the culmi- nation of a cycle in the work of the Belgrade Youth Centre, where people who had a clear affinity for jazz gathered, such as programme editors Guta Grdanički and Milan Šević, as well as jazz expert Aleksan- dar Živković, a journalist for Tanjug. On the back of the success of the Podium Jazz concert series, Živković wrote to George Wein, director of the famous Newport Jazz Fes- tival, expressing the company's desire to work with him on more ambitious projects. The first such project, billed
Ljubitelje džez avangarde čekaju susreti sa najboljima u žanru Fans of avant- garde jazz are awaiting the best in the genre
Belgrade » Beograd | 61
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator