Nisville Swaps Blues Brothers for Incognito, Daltoni Return

Sometime in the early seventies a band from Nis walked onto a stage at the Sokolana hall and walked off it twenty-eight hours later. The setlist held roughly 500 songs, and the plan was not to repeat a single one. This August the same men get half an hour at the Nis Fortress.

“Back then we played 28 hours straight at the Sokolana. At Nisville we will play about half an hour.”

That is how Zarko Bajagic of the band Daltoni summed up the distance between two eras of the local scene at a press conference. The Daltoni are returning to the stage after 50 years, which makes them the least promoted and probably the most interesting line on this year’s bill.

When Nisville runs and where

The 32nd Nisville jazz festival runs from August 8 to August 16 in Nis, with the main program starting on August 13 at the Nis Fortress. Festival director Ivan Blagojevic put out the numbers that explain why the schedule needs nine days.

“At the 32nd international jazz festival we expect close to a thousand performers and around 300 programs.”

Across more than three decades Nisville has staged some 5,000 programs, hosted more than 20,000 artists and drawn around four million visitors. A single edition therefore carries about six percent of everything the festival has ever done. Growth like that usually gets sold as a success story in cultural policy, but what it really means is that Nisville stopped being a concert a long time ago and turned into nine days of infrastructure the city has to absorb.

Who is replacing the Blues Brothers?

Incognito, the British acid jazz outfit, and the Vlatko Stefanovski trio will play on August 13 in place of The Original Blues Brothers Band. The Americans scrapped their entire European summer tour for private reasons, even though the Nis date had been announced and paid for in advance.

Rather than chase another marquee name, the organisers went back to a band that had already passed the test in Nis. Incognito returns after 20 years, and their previous appearance at the city’s Summer Stage lasted more than two hours and was played through heavy rain. That single detail explains the choice better than any press announcement could.

Who else is coming

The main stage this year leans on names spanning disco to Latin jazz:

• Boney M with Maizy Williams
• Paquito D’Rivera
• the original band of Amy Winehouse
• Incognito and the Vlatko Stefanovski trio

By tradition the local band Ivo Basic opens the festival and the group Bohemija closes it. That frame has not changed in years and it is the one part of the program Nisville keeps as a hometown matter, whoever is being paid to headline.

The Daltoni, half an hour after half a century

The Daltoni’s return is the closest thing here to a local canon. The band that played twenty-eight hours without a break at the Sokolana comes back after five decades, and does so without any of the usual comeback-tour machinery around it.

“We had a list of some 500 songs back then, and we intended not to repeat any of them”

Dragan Nikolic Nune, also a member of the group, described the rehearsals plainly.

“We started rehearsing and working together after many years.”

At the same press conference he added the part bands of that vintage usually keep to themselves.

“The emotions are working, no question about it. It is an honour for us to perform here”

What the Nisville Jazz Theatre is doing

The festival’s theatre program is run by Maja Mitic, director of the Nisville Jazz Theatre. This year’s theme is phrased so that nobody can read it as neutral.

“Theatre of an anxious world. We are all terribly anxious citizens”

The theatre strand has been the quietest and the most dramaturgically daring layer of Nisville for years, and it is the only program that gives the festival something no guest fee can buy.

If this edition is remembered for anything, it will more likely be half an hour of the Daltoni than one American cancellation and the tidy substitution that followed.