Ana Popovic Opens Belgrade Jazz Festival on October 21
The full schedule is out: performers from ten countries play the Belgrade Youth Center from October 21 to 24, and the program opens with the blues guitarist born in Belgrade herself.
There is something fitting in the fact that a woman who first picked up a guitar in Belgrade, in a city that spent decades listening to her blues arrive from other continents, is only now stepping onto the stage of a festival that carries that same city’s name. Ana Popovic opens the 42nd Belgrade Jazz Festival on October 21, and for an event that has existed for more than half a century, that is no small piece of news.
The festival runs from October 21 to 24 at the Belgrade Youth Center, and organizers have released the full schedule, day by day and hour by hour. This year’s theme is “Jazz Confluence,” called “Usce dzeza” in Serbian, taken from a visual built around a stylized trumpet at the point where the Sava and Danube rivers meet, right below Kalemegdan fortress. The image also carries the idea behind the program: for decades the festival has worked as a meeting point for entirely different strands of the genre, from blues to free improvisation, where almost no one in the audience listens only to “their own” kind of jazz.
Concerts are split between the Great Hall, host to the bigger names and larger ensembles, and the Amerikana club, reserved for later time slots and a more intimate sound. The first evening, October 21 at 7 p.m., opens with the Vladimir Nikolov Nonet performing “History Now.” Two hours later, at 9 p.m., Ana Popovic takes the stage, this time under the joint flag of Serbia and the United States, where she has lived and built her career for years.
Popovic built her career in reverse order from what might be expected: rather than waiting for recognition at home before moving on, she made a name for herself on the American blues scene, performed alongside artists who shaped that genre, and only now is returning to a festival stage in the city where she started. Her opening slot is not a courtesy gesture from organizers toward a homegrown artist. It is an acknowledgment that someone who left and built a career on foreign ground still belongs, first and foremost, to this scene.
On the second day, October 22, the Great Hall hosts Tino Tracanna with his band Panorchestra from Italy at 7 p.m., followed at 9 p.m. by the Chicago Underground Duo, Rob Mazurek and Chad Taylor from the United States. The program then moves to Amerikana, where Andreas Schaerer and Daniel Garcia Diego, a duo pairing Switzerland and Spain, perform from 10:30 p.m., and the night closes at 11:45 p.m. with the Arun Ramamurti Trio.
The third day, October 23, opens at 7 p.m. with the Ivan Radivojevic Quartet, joined by guest Rastko Obradovic. At 9 p.m. comes the duo The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis from the United States, and from 10:30 p.m. Amerikana hosts “Seifert Night,” an evening dedicated to the Polish scene through the bands Akimbo and JuMa.
On the final day, October 24, the program opens at 7 p.m. with the Joao Paulo Esteves da Silva Quartet from Portugal and the United Kingdom. At 9 p.m. comes the Marquis Hill Blacktet Revisited from the United States, and from 10:30 p.m. Amerikana hosts the Djordje Kujundzic Quartet. The festival closes at 11:45 p.m. with the traditional jam session, where performers who have been in Belgrade over those days typically stay on to play.
Add it all up and the schedule comes to thirteen booked concerts plus the closing jam session, spread across four evenings and two stages. Alongside Ana Popovic, three more acts from Serbia are on the bill: the Vladimir Nikolov Nonet, the Ivan Radivojevic Quartet and the Djordje Kujundzic Quartet, meaning the domestic scene is not a guest at its own festival but carries a quarter of the program.
What makes this schedule more interesting than a plain announcement is its range: on the same stage, across the same run of evenings, stand an Italian orchestra, a Chicago electronic jazz duo, a Swiss Spanish dialogue, a New York blues guitarist and Poland’s improvised music scene. The Belgrade Jazz Festival long ago stopped being a place where audiences wait for one big name; it has become a space built so that every evening offers at least two entirely different approaches to the same genre. Opening with Ana Popovic only confirms that principle, since the blues she plays has never been pure jazz, and that very friction between genres is exactly what “Jazz Confluence” is meant to capture.
