RITAM GRADA / RHYTHM OF THE CITY
Brad Mehldau, the world’s top contemporary jazz pianist, will present his magnificent trio in Serbia for the first time at a bonus Dom Omladine concert. The festival will once again offer an assortment of the best jazz flavours from across Europe. Leading the list is Norwegian veteran double bassist Arild Andersen, but this time with a new star in his quartet: saxophonist Marius Nesset. Among the more experienced performers is also German trumpeter Markus Stockhausen, whose veins flow with the blood of his famous father, Karlheinz, and who has announced a performance combining jazz and mod- ern classics. We will also welcome a true “all-star” band in the form of the Rymden trio, featuring Bugge Wesseltoft, creator of the so-called New Conceptions of Jazz, Dan Ber- glund and Magnus Öström, as well as the rhythmic pia- nists of the Esbjörn Svensson Trio, the most popular Eu- ropean jazz band ever. Fans of avant-garde jazz are awaiting the best in the genre, prior to midnight in the darkness of the Belgrade Youth Centre’s Americana Hall. Providing the fireworks of free improvisations, fusing jazz with punk, metal or psyche- delia, and plenty of dance grooves, will be the internation- al Spinifex Sextet, Sweden’s Angles 9 nonet, Italy’s joyful Ghost Horse sextet, as well as Portuguese and Austrian trios TGB and Edi Nulz. The unifying of such emotions will culminate in the performance of France’s most popu- lar jazz band, Thomas de Pourquery & Supersonic, which revives the craziness of the legendary Sun Ra Arkestra. At the other end of the emotional scale, Hungarian jazz vocalist Veronika Harcsa reconstructs the legacy of Claude Debussy, trumpeter Itamar Borochov fuses the sensibility of his native Israel with the spirit of New York, while Greece’s Petros Klampanis provides poetic images of warm harmonies and romantic melodies. Attracting spe- cial attention is the programme Seifert Night: The Best of Polish Jazz. Leading the best jazz artists from Poland will be the experienced trio of pianist Marcin Wasilewski, to- gether with esteemed guest performer Joe Lovano, while the energetic trumpeters of the Piotr Damasiewicz trio will also present themselves, as will Seifert Foundation Award-winning violinist Mateusz Smoczynski. The festival opens with Novi Sad’s Majamisty Trio, with a premiere programme and guest performers that include renowned Austrian clarinetist/saxophonist Ulrich Drechsler. The Serbian Showcase actually offers three fac- es of jazz: the free-jazz acrobatics of saxophonist Jasna Jo- vićević, electro-groove drummer Peđa Milutinović and the Drumbooty project, as well as the modern mainstream Dra- ma Quartet. Our artists proudly stand shoulder-to-shoul- der with the jazz genre’s world champions, securing Ser- bia’s important spot on the jazz map of Europe today. And if the closing performance sees Brad Mehldau play “Exit Music (For a Film)”, his interpretation of the famous Radiohead song, we will know that we’ve experienced an- other exciting jazz film, in the company of jazz greats and their top students. That music will merely present the prel- ude to the new half a century of the Belgrade jazz flame, which we await with the same excitement.
Belgrade » Beograd | 63
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