E-Play Hands Its Stage to Young Musicians on October 3
Bassist Maja Cvetkovic announces a concert where kids under eighteen won't just watch from the crowd, they'll join the band that invited them after the 'Samarcina' episode.
A few years ago, at one of E-Play’s concerts, an eleven year old boy stepped down from his seat next to his drum teacher and walked out in front of the audience. He was a student of Goran Ljuboja Trut, and that night he played “Samarcina” alongside the seasoned musicians. Bassist and vocalist Maja Cvetkovic says that from that moment on she knew the stage was asking for a sequel, just a more serious one. Nine years later, on September 9, the band announced what that sequel would look like.
The concert is called “E-Play & New Generation,” and it’s set for October 3 at 8:30 PM at SOKOJ club in Belgrade. What sets it apart from the band’s usual guest format is who the guests are: exclusively musicians under eighteen. E-Play’s own members will prepare some of them for the performance, others are rehearsing on their own, and the set list draws from both the band’s most recent album and its first one. Presale tickets cost 2,000 dinars, available at Telma bar on Misarska Street 7.
Guest performances aren’t new territory for E-Play. The Balkan rock scene also remembers the band for earlier editions, when it brought established musicians onto the stage: Matija Dedic, Artan Lili and Bana of the group Sunshine. It was at one of those very shows that the then eleven year old Trut student made his guest appearance, the episode that planted the seed for October’s concert.
Who Can Take the Stage on October 3
The answer is simple and restrictive at the same time: minors only. The idea of handing a young musician a spot on a professional stage, rather than making them wait for an audition or a competition format, isn’t a common move on the domestic scene, where the road from playing in your bedroom to performing for an audience is usually long and uncertain. E-Play compresses that road into a single evening, and without any competitive framing, the child standing next to the bassist isn’t competing with anyone. They’re learning on the fastest course there is: a live one.
The Organization of Phonogram Producers of Serbia has backed the concert, which lifts it out of the category of a nice private initiative and places it in the broader context of support for young performers, the same context that gets talked about often in domestic cultural policy and acted on far less.
Cvetkovic explained the concept in words that sound more like an invitation than an announcement:
This is a special concert where we’ll have several guests, young, future musicians. A few years ago we had a concert with guests, when, alongside other well known musicians, we invited a student of Trut’s who was 11 at the time and played “Samarcina” with us brilliantly. Even then I thought we had to repeat something like that with kids. So this is that chance. We’ll have young guests, all of them under 18, and we’ll play our songs from the latest album, but also songs from our first album.
She repeated the same reasoning when she talked about the audience the concert is aimed at, not just the guests on stage.
“This is a special concert for our audience, but also an invitation to kids to come and play with us, and to their parents to support and cheer them on. We want to give them the chance to feel the energy of the stage,” Cvetkovic added.
Why It Matters Who Last Played “Samarcina”
The story about the eleven year old isn’t just a convenient opener, it’s also the only concrete proof that the format works. Eight or nine years after that performance, the same detail is still the first thing the band mentions when explaining why they’re doing this, which means the scene and the audience remember it better than they remember some of the band’s albums. Through its regular guest performances, E-Play has already shown that competing with its own ego over who stands at the center of the stage isn’t an issue for them. Now the band is applying that principle systematically, at a concert that carries the guest’s name from the start, not the band’s.
The test of that principle comes precisely on October 3, when there isn’t just one guest but several, and none of them went through an audition, only a rehearsal. If it plays out anything like the night with “Samarcina,” SOKOJ club will have an audience that evening that comes because of the kids, not despite them.
