Del Arno Bend Turns 40 With Concert in Botanical Garden
The anniversary concert is set for September 19 in Jevremovac Botanical Garden, tickets go on sale tomorrow at 2,000 dinars, and Jovan Matic promises former members back on stage.
In February 2019, in the “Amerikana” hall of Belgrade’s Dom omladine, Jovan Matic was the first to walk on stage, and from there he called out the members of his band one by one, so the lineup assembled in front of the audience’s eyes. Seven years later, Del Arno Bend is stretching that same gesture across an entire evening and moving it outdoors: on September 19, at Jevremovac Botanical Garden, the current lineup will be joined on stage by former members, among them musicians who have long led solo careers of their own.
The concert is conceived as the closing event of the anniversary year the band has spent touring the country, with the production house Long Play as organizer. Tickets go on sale Friday, August 7, at a promotional price of 2,000 dinars, online and at all Tickets.rs outlets. The price is marked as promotional, meaning this is only the first round of sales.
Forty Years, One Unchanged Direction
Del Arno Bend has been around for four decades, but it built its status and popularity in the 1990s, at a time when reggae here was still a genre that needed explaining before anyone would play it from a stage. Matic does not talk about that persistence as something that simply happened to him, but as a decision the band renewed every season. His own description of it is unusually harsh toward the band itself:
“For forty years we have stayed faithful, almost to the point of masochism, to the idea we believe in, and we look back on the past decades with pride. We never strayed from the path we set for ourselves and, more importantly, we played a significant part in establishing reggae music as an equal genre on the region’s musical map.”
The word masochism, coming from a musician marking an anniversary, is not a flourish. It describes the economics of a genre that never had the radio support or festival infrastructure that rock, and later pop production, enjoyed here, which makes forty years of work in that register a matter of endurance more than a career plan. “This anniversary is, at least in my impression, worth attention and respect,” the band’s leader says in the concert announcement.
How Did Reggae Find Its Place in the Region?
Matic looks for the answer in infrastructure, not in audience taste. As the oldest reggae band in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, he says, they followed the work of younger performers from Slovenia down to the southern parts of the region, and it was only from that vantage point that they could see what had actually come of the effort invested.
“Bands, festivals and sound systems were founded, much to our delight. Despite the disbelief our artistic venture provoked at the start of the road, and later too, reggae’s messages of understanding, tolerance and love reached every part of the former country, despite the bloody events that, unfortunately, accompanied our journey.”
Concrete traces of that process exist and can be named. Serbia hosts Natural Mystic, the most significant regional festival of the genre, and Matic also points out that the country was, at one point, the first in Europe to raise a monument to Bob Marley, built with the support of Jamaica’s consulate, which, as he notes, was for years a mainstay for local reggae musicians.
From Defending a New Album to Leafing Through the Archive
The comparison with that 2019 Belgrade concert explains what has changed in the meantime. Back then, Del Arno Bend first played its entire new album, Ako ne znas sta da radis (If You Don’t Know What to Do), in the exact track order of the release, and only afterward moved on to well known songs, because the album had arrived after a thirteen year pause and had to earn its place in front of the hall. This time the order is reversed: the retrospective is not the introduction, it is the whole program.
The setlist covers a cross section of four decades, from songs from the nineties to newer material. Among the titles announced are D.A.B. je tu da spaja (D.A.B. Is Here to Connect), Verujem (I Believe), Vise nego zivot (More Than Life), Svakog dana reci hvala (Say Thank You Every Day), Jos uvek ima nade (There’s Still Hope) and Dim iz moje lule (Smoke From My Pipe). A program built this way carries one risk: a concert made up of the best known songs can easily slide into a revue, a string of numbers with no dramatic arc. The return of former members is the argument against that here, since each of them brings a specific period of the band’s history to the stage rather than just a guest verse.
The venue was chosen deliberately. Jevremovac Botanical Garden is not a concert hall but a scientific institution with a garden at the center of the city, so the sound there inevitably mixes with the setting, which for a reggae show is more of an advantage than a problem. Matic called the choice of venue probably the best in the city for his band’s performance.
“Del Arno Bend has always been a gathering place for people who share similar musical interests, so every generation has come together around this band. It will be a great pleasure for us to leaf through our 40 years of work together with our audience. We can’t wait to mark, in our own city, an anniversary that many lineups can’t boast. Cheers!”
What remains is the question of what is actually being celebrated on September 19. Not nostalgia, since the band never stopped working, but the fact that one lineup kept the same genre alive for four decades in an environment that was never in its favor. If the evening is carried by that argument, and not by a list of hits, it will be a concert that has something to say.
