According to the Store norske lexikon, Novi Sad is a city in Vojodina in Serbia, located on the Danube, 70 kilometers northwest of Belgrade. The city has 380,000 inhabitants at the latest census (2020). This makes the city the country’s second largest city.
Novi Sad is, in principle, an industrial city with a varied business sector, including petroleum refining, chemical, engineering and food industries, plus the manufacture of ceramics and electrical appliances. An annual international agricultural fair is held in the city, so your delegate should fit in well here. The city has a river port and railway connections with, among others, Subotica in the north and Belgrade in the south, and the city has several bridges crossing the Danube.
The city became a free city in 1748 and developed into a Serbian cultural center, which also attracted many Hungarian and German residents. The city has an excellent art academy, a Serbian National Theater, and several museums, including a city museum and a regional museum of modern art.
The city was, together with two other cities, the European Capital of Culture in 2021. The University of Novi Sad, which was established in 1960, is the second largest state university in the country with more than 50,000 students, which has made the city a vibrant city with many young residents, and thus a city with a bustling nightlife.
And the extremely charming old town, with its narrow alleys and countless restaurants, makes the city buzz with life and movement in the evenings – in a charming and smiling way.
The Novi Sad Jazz Festival describes itself as “promoting the excellence of jazz culture, while reflecting the authentic rhythm of city life, and has established itself as one of the most important bearers of Novi Sad’s cultural identity.” They aim to “create a true Novi Sad jazz experience – in the heart of the city and in the hearts of its citizens.”
Now in its 28th edition, the festival introduces a new concept, developed through cooperation and organizational partnership between the Novi Sad Cultural Center and the Novi Sad – European Capital of Culture Foundation, with the support of the Novi Sad Tourism Organization. And there’s little doubt that the city makes big money from the festival, as you wander among the hundreds of outdoor cafes in the Old Town in the evening.
A century ago, with the industrial development of the district, Novi Sad began its transformation into a modern city. Urbanization was accompanied by jazz – a new musical language that, shortly after emerging in the United States, found its way to Novi Sad and to the Americana Club, where the local audience had its first opportunity to hear this music. In this way, jazz helped shape Novi Sad into the city it is today: a cultural center, urban and cosmopolitan, connected to the rest of the world.
In 1999, the Novi Sad Jazz Festival continued the city’s rich jazz festival tradition established by the Jazz Days in Novi Sad (1979–1988). This year, the festival celebrates its 28th anniversary by proclaiming that the festival is much more than a concert program. The festival’s new concept brings jazz into the heart of the city – to new places, public spaces and among the people. Throughout the summer, the festival connects music, art and the Novi Sad lifestyle through concerts, lectures, film screenings, exhibitions and workshops. In this way, they want jazz to become an experience of the city itself.
salt peanuts*’s staff arrived in the city via Frankfurt and Belgrade the day before the festival opened. I had planned to take a look at the city before it all started. But with a landing in Belgrade at midnight and a half-hour drive north, it was time to go straight into a coma after checking in at Hotel Veliki, instead of a late night in the city for acclimatization and transition to festival mode for your delegates.
Friday came with brilliant sun and unusual heat for someone living in an extremely rainy Vestland, but not as intense as the heat records we have read about from southern parts of Europe recently. I would call it good “Southern” temperature, and it was time to find other invited press guests. It turns out that we are only two invited “magazine fans” from other parts of Europe. Jazzwise from England and salt peanuts* from Norway, two of the most important jazz magazines in Europe today, in our, extremely, objective opinion.
Compact Games
The venues for the festival are located close to each other in the older part of the city center. And with four venues so close to each other, the risk of “traffic jams”, “sound transfer” from stage to stage, and problems with logistics are present in abundance. But this is solved with a smile and good mood and no sour faces. And I was surprised that it was possible with so little “sound transfer” as it was, since the venues were located so close to each other. But for those who live in the old part of the city, it is a big advantage if you like loud, improvised music in varying forms and packaging.
The first “part” of the program is designed to draw the city’s population into the narrow streets with the region’s and the country’s own musicians, this afternoon represented by the bands Deep Steady, Valeriia Shurgalina Quartet and Boris Hlošan Sextet, before serving the day’s “main attraction” in the backyard of the city’s cultural center, before, afterwards, there is a full-on party with the “heel” on the roof that is not there, deliciously at all the outdoor cafes that are located in droves along the streets in the district, and a party that is absolutely impossible not to get absorbed in.
I must admit that I was a little skeptical about the first part of the evening. Here, the music from the three local bands was far into the realm of light, American jazz, and I was a little afraid that this weekend would be like that, but some “highlights” from the main stage at sunset. I had hoped to be served much more of a combination of the local folk music tradition from the region combined with jazz, as we have become accustomed to hearing up here in the north. But here it was the American, and a little too “confident” jazz that dominated.
The Israeli bassist
The main name on this first evening was the Israeli bassist Avishai Cohen Trio. Cohen is a “going-getter” who has appeared at a number of jazz festivals around the world for many years. He has made a bunch of records, and is probably today the most famous jazz musician originating from one of the countries we are not too excited about here at the editorial office.
With him in the trio was pianist Itay Simhovich and 18-year-old drummer Eviatar Slivnik, who were completely new names to me. And in this hour-long concert, it was the pianist who impressed me the most. Cohen is a perfectly fine bassist and composer, who creates compositions where he largely leaves much of the soloing to the pianist, but where he himself, at all times, maintains the overview and control. But there is something about his playing that I cannot quite relate to. He is, almost naturally, supposed to show off all the “tricks” he knows, and he composes in a nice way, but where he is not quite able to hand over the “control” to the pianist, he, in many ways, gets a little too close to the piano playing. But every now and then they delivered some intricate, rhythmic things that were almost reminiscent of what we used to get from the best in the field.
The young drummer is nice and close to the other two, and delivers excellent comp-playing, and when he gets to solo, he does it in an “adult” way, which the five or six hundred audience members appreciated immensely. I have rarely experienced such great enthusiasm for a drummer as during this concert. Almost standing ovation after every drum solo is rare.
Most of the compositions were done by Cohen, but they also include a Chick Corea composition, which I obviously don’t remember the name of, but which is on a record Corea made with bassist Christian McBride and drummer Brian Blade. And when Cohen opens the encore section by performing as a vocalist in what could sound like an Italian composition in duo with the pianist, I was actually more than satisfied. This form of “crooner” singing should be left to the Italian Paolo Conte. But the extremely enthusiastic audience wanted more, and finally got a Cohen composition (?), which sent the satisfied audience out into the night with big smiles on their faces, where you could read from the looks that here it was going to be partying for hours into the night.
Party, party
At the smallest stage around the corner, in Laze Telečkog Street, your envoy managed to find a place in the middle of the crowd on the smallest stage where the party band Bullet for a Badman (main picture) had managed to squeeze together on the small stage. Baritone saxophone, tenor saxophone, trumpet and guitar in front of drums and electric bass, and songs and a cook that suited the situation perfectly. The dancing adults and children (who should have been in bed a long time ago), sloshing beer glasses and big smiles on the small street corner that, at best, was severely undersized for such a party.
The music was energetic, it swung, we sweated and everything was a rolling party that it has been a long time since I have experienced at an outdoor concert. You can imagine a late night in Alexandraparken in Melde or at Klubi at Tampere Jazz Happening, and multiply the crowd by 10, and you’re almost there. An absolutely wonderful end to the first evening, which Jazzwise and salt peanuts* had to eventually get out of, if we wanted to have a camera, head, body and soul intact before the rest of the weekend. So we found ourselves a free table at one of the old town’s many outdoor restaurants (we avoided the ones showing the World Cup on a big screen), where we could evaluate the first day of the festival over a glass of local beer, before we strolled the few meters back to the hotel to prepare ourselves for the rest of the festival.
