Artistic director Vojislav Pantić can recount all sorts of stories about the jazz greats who have played the Belgrade Jazz Festival, now in its 35th edition. There was the time in 1971, the festival’s inaugural year, when trumpeter Miles Davis wouldn’t go on until he was sure that his pianist, a very late Keith Jarrett, had arrived at the concert hall, straight from the tarmac. Another time, in 1980, saxophonist Sonny Rollins continued playing on a dark stage without amplification, well past the government curfew that mandated lights out at midnight. Later, in 2009, saxophonist Joe Lovano insisted on playing with his arm in a cast, having suffered a fracture on tour the day before. And trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who first played the Belgrade festival in 1971, returned to play it four more times—more often than any other artist—before political upheaval in Serbia shuttered the event for 15 years.
Pantić, who’s been with the festival in various capacities since 1988, took over as artistic director in 2005, at the end of the 15-year hiatus. In a nod to the festival’s anniversary and its improbable longevity, this year the festival will run for six days instead of five, from Oct. 22 to 27, vaunting the slogan “Jazz Celebration.” This slogan reflects the triumph that the festival organizers feel, not just that the festival has persevered over five decades, but that it thrives.
“Of course, we are thinking that if there hadn’t been that break, we would be nearing our 50th anniversary. But we’re happy that it survived,” Pantić said in a phone interview from Belgrade. “And this year the capacity at every venue is 85% [sold out]. This is incredible.”
Pantić’s careful curation is doubtless one of the big reasons for the festival’s large draw. As per usual, this year’s lineup reflects the talent mix that Pantić likes—roughly one third U.S. musicians, one third European musicians, and one third local Serbian musicians, many of whom studied abroad at notable U.S. and European jazz schools. “The names in the first concerts were so big, we have a responsibility to carry on that tradition,” he explained. “But we don’t want to just look to the past, at jazz 50 years ago. We want to look at jazz now.”
For this year’s festival, “jazz now” includes a glittering constellation of headliners at all levels of celebrity, representing many different types of jazz. All told, almost 30 acts will share the festival’s three concert stages over the course of the six days, among them vocalists Dianne Reeves and Jazzmeia Horn, bassist Stanley Clarke, and reed players Charles Lloyd and Steve Coleman, from the U.S.; Francesco Diodati’s Yellow Squeeds, violinist Théo Ceccaldi, trumpeter Henry Spencer, sax player Maciej Obara, and pianist Michael Wollny, from Europe; and the ensemble Nikolov-Ivanović Undectet, sax player Rastko Obradović, and pianist Milan Stanisavljević, from Serbia.
Of all the visiting musicians, only one has played the festival before—saxophonist Lloyd, who returns for his third appearance. “I first performed in Belgrade in 2011 with [my ensemble] the New Quartet,” he wrote in an email from Taipei, Taiwan, where he was on tour. “We had a wild and wonderful concert in the festival theater, a rather depressing, concrete building. Many of the concert halls in the former communist counties have this same feeling. We tried to blast through the cold, gray walls and bring in some light—we [heard] the cries for freedom that are imbedded in the walls and [tried] to release them through sound.”
For Lloyd, whose heavy touring schedule has him jetting from one international capital to the next for much of the year, the Belgrade date stands out for its diverse, jazz-savvy audience and the skilled management of the BJF team. “[Pantić and program manager Dragan Ambrozic] have a deep love of jazz and music,” he noted. “They run the festival extremely well, with an openness to new experiences and expansion of ideas.”
On Oct. 27 Lloyd and his newest ensemble, Kindred Spirits, will play from their upcoming release, 8 (Blue Note) in Kombank Hall—formerly known as Dom Sindikata, a historic Soviet-era trade union building that underwent a modernizing facelift in 2017-18. This time Lloyd’s view from stage will be different: Kombank Hall is now a chic performance space that gleams with possibility and optimism. Venues aside, though, some things about the Belgrade Jazz Festival remain unchanged. Pantić and his team continue in their seemingly indefatigable efforts to honor their city’s proud jazz traditions—and to fill its walls with great new voices.
(Reprinted from November 2019 issue of Downbeat magazine)