On the penultimate evening of the 35th annual Belgrade Jazz Festival, which ran Oct 21-28 in the Serbian capital, pianist Gerald Clayton sat alone on a darkened stage. His fingers seemed barely to touch the keys as he launched into “La Llarona,” master saxophonist Charles Lloyd’s dream-like rendition of the Mexican folk song from his 2016 Blue Note album, I Long To See You. One by one, Lloyd and the other members of Kindred Spirits, Lloyd’s new quintet, joined Clayton on stage for the tune—an exquisite encore to an arguably flawless set.
In Belgrade that week, Lloyd and Kindred Spirits (with guitarist Marvin Sewell, bassist Harish Raghavan, and drummer Eric Harland) were hardly an isolated example of such powerful playing, however. Consider the rest of that evening’s lineup: the Charles Mingus Big Band, 14 of New York’s finest soloists celebrating the musical daring of their band’s namesake four decades after his death; Portuguese saxophonist João Mortágua’s sextet Axe, a distant relative of the World Saxophone Quartet, bursting with percussive color; and French violinist Theo Ceccaldi’s sextet Freaks, with its electrifying punk-influenced repertoire of neo-jazz tunes. All this in one evening—and with six more evenings like it.
The diversity of the BJF program reflects Belgrade’s long-held identity as a nexus for American and European jazz: When the festival first kicked off in the early 1970s, US jazz superstars such as Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett, and Dizzy Gillespie decorated its stage each year. From that time, the festival grew in both size and prestige until 1990, when political upheaval in the former Yugoslavia precluded its annual staging for 15 years. Now, as a member of the European Jazz Network, BJF stands as a sought-after date for musical acts from all over Europe and North America.
This year’s festival, a special anniversary edition that ran a day longer than usual, featured more than 25 acts at two different locations. The headliners—in addition to Lloyd and the Mingus band—included the turbo-charging Stanley Clark Band; singer and US jazz sweetheart Dianne Reeves; Russian chanteuse Tanya Balakirskaya with the innovative Ilugdin Trio; and the smart, sophisticated, Belgian big band Flat Earth Society.
These performers—mainstream, popular, and traditionally groove-oriented—played Kombank Hall, the spacious, newly renovated concert space in the heart of the city’s governmental district, while the remaining acts—edgier, experimental, or up-and-coming—played the smaller Dom Omladine Beograda (Belgrade Youth Center) a few blocks away. There, photos of past festivals lined the lobby walls, documenting decades of performances by trail-blazing jazz musicians from around the world.
In this setting, each night at the Dom Omladine the festival presented creative musicians who are expanding the definitions of modern jazz. The tools they employ in this undertaking are various and diverse—groove displacement, meta-genre composing, unconventional instrumentation, improvised vocalizations, ambient soundscapes, regional folk influences—the stuff that could grab them a spot in the Dom Omladine wall alongside their prominent predecessors.
Take the Nikolov-Ivanović Undectet, the 11-piece ensemble that opened the festival. Drawing inspiration from American horn legends like Miles Davis and Stan Kenton, pianist Vladimir Nikolov and drummer Srđan Ivanović co-led a pan-European group of improvising musicians in 10 rhythmically complex, harmonically evocative compositions, all impeccably arranged. In these, they might reference Balkan tunes, rock, hip-hop, classical music, or traditional jazz—without settling on any one thing.
“I don’t identify as one type of musician, even though I work as a jazz musician,” Ivanović explained during a panel discussion on trends in Serbian jazz on the third day of the festival. “My music reflects this.”
Similarly, the Rastko Obradović Quartet, a Serbian-Norwegian collaboration forged when its players were students at The Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo, uses traditional jazz as the starting point for their smooth, refined group sound. But what set them apart on the second evening of the festival is their melding of Scandinavian and Serbian musical sensibilities—the nature themes and simple, lilting lines that tumble into darker, insistent grooves, for instance.
Leader and saxophonist Obradović, who also participated in the panel discussion, described it this way: “The music of American blacks has spread around the world and become a global phenomenon. But [today] jazz has moved far away from that.”
While the two North American singers who played the Grand Hall at the Dom Omladine might not disagree with Obradović, their sets delineate another direction that young jazz musicians might take. Both Laila Biali and Jazzmeia Horn are building international careers on the strength of indomitable straight-ahead chops and fresh originals that extrapolate from traditional song forms.
Canadian native Biali recently released the eponymous Laila Biali, her debut for the German label ACT and the first album to show off her songwriting skills. In the most pop-oriented set of the festival, Biali sang from this album, as nimble a pianist as she is a singer. For the most part, though, she covered beloved songs by Canadian artists—Feist’s “Mushaboom,” Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock,” k.d. lang’s “Simple,” Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold”—unearthing something new in each.
Horn, too, turned out select tracks from her most recent record, Love and Liberation (Concord Jazz)—also a first foray into songwriting. In contrast with Biali, however, Horn’s original tunes sound like Songbook standards with traditional phrasing and changes, even as her lyrics address modern issues. These aren’t the tunes that Ella Fitzgerald scatted over when she sang the Belgrade Jazz Festival back in the day—but Horn could make you forget that as her preternaturally spot-on vocal solos soared ever higher throughout the packed concert hall.
(Originally published on Downbeat.com on