On 25 June, the Jazz Journalists Association published reports on several international music festivals, including the 19th edition of our Jazz Appreciation Month in Montenegro.
We would like to thank jazz critics Virgil Mihaiu for his dedicated work and continuous support of our festival.
Below you can read entire report.
Jazz Appreciation Month – Montenegro – April 1 – 30
by Virgil Mihaiu
Throughout its contorted history, Montenegro has consolidated its status as a nation capable of ethnic and ethical grandeur in a very small geographical space.
Although it has a population of only about 650,000 inhabitants, after regaining statehood in 2006 the country has asserted itself as a dynamic component of the international community. Since 2009, the local jazz life has found an adequate organisational expression through the Jazz Art Montenegro Association (JAM), founded and led by Maja Popovic, a musicologist and pianist with studies in Paris and Belgrade.
Ms. Popovic has employed her administrative and artistic skills to implement in her homeland the
generous universalist project Jazz Appreciation Month (by happy coincidence, also JAM!), which reached its 19th edition in 2026. (In recognition of her merits, she was recently awarded the Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters, conferred by the French Ministry of Culture. During the ceremony to present the decoration, the French Ambassador to Montenegro, Ms. Anne Marie Maskay, praised the honoree’s ability to make jazz music a means of cooperation, mutual knowledge and dialogue between cultures).
If elsewhere “Jazz Appreciation Month” is reduced to the celebration of the “International Jazz Day” on April 30, indefatigable Maja Popovic, supported by JAM and the KIC Cultural Information Center in Podgorica (where she has worked for a quarter of a century), respects the title of the event ad litteram. In Montenegro the jazz celebration took place, according to custom, throughout the entire month of April, with concerts and related events held in the current capital, in the historical royal capital Cetinje and in the charming old town of Kotor, in the homonymous fjord.
The motto of the 2026 edition was The Mediterranean Meets Jazz. A redefinition from a contemporary perspective of the ancient concept of Mare nostrum (= Our Sea) can be detected here: the Mediterranean understood not as a border separating the peoples around it, but as a historical bridge, a space of mutual Euro-Afro-Mediterranean knowledge. The selection of invited musicians revealed current values of jazz created in this cultural-maritime perimeter.
In the first three days of April 2026, the spectators in Podgorica, Cetinje and Kotor got to know the trio of the young performer Ariel Bart. Born in Israel, she graduated from The New School University for Jazz
and Contemporary Music in New York in 2020, and has dedicated her interpretative-compositional talent to bringing the chromatic harmonica to the forefront of the jazz scene. She has played this instrument since she was seven years old, studied and performed in the company of musicians such as Andrew Cyrille, Reggie Workman, Shai Maestro, Anat Cohen and Aaron Parks, and been a soloist of the Jerusalem Orchestra East and West. In trio with pianist Igor Yakovenko distinguishing himself with impeccable classical technique, Bart emerged as a successor of such precursors as Toots Thielemans, Antonio Serrano and Gregoire Maret, who have proved the mouth organ an instrument worthy of jazz respect.
The trio of pianist Baki Duyarlar, double bassist Umut Sel and percussionist Mehmet Akatay represented the state of the art in Turkey, merging the serenity of classical Turkish music with the polymorphism of contemporary jazz, and with the Mediterranean spirit. It is no coincidence that the three musicians had a good collaboration with the aforementioned harmonica master Antonio Serrano, who comes from the flamenco-jazz area.
The members of the Tribevibers trio hail from three Mediterranean states: dynamic pianist Karim Blal, born in Rome and affirmatively in love with Paris, French double bassist Gabriel Pierre and drummer Slaven Ljujic, a Montenegrin. The three young artists act in consensus with their name, their music born from a synergy of shared creative vibrations.
From my point of view, the most striking personality is the drummer/percussionist/composer Ljujic. Born in Niksic (the second largest city in Montenegro), he is increasingly emerging as a reference figure of the small jazz community in his homeland.
In an interview with journalist Marija Vasic (published in the prestigious daily newspaper Vijesti), the young jazzman explained his aesthetic conception in relation to the current situation of the genre: “currently, the sound of jazz has become more artificial, non-acoustic, increasingly electric. Synthesizers, prefabricated sounds are widely used, that is, in modern terms, ‘inflated music.’ Preferring the natural, acoustic ‘old school’ sound, we – the members of this trio – are oriented towards making music meant to carry with it an acoustic line and the natural sound of the instruments.” An attitude which happily also had an impact on the Tribevibers’ performance at JAM 2026.
The Blazin’ Quartet is a super-group, with a predominantly Balkan character: the leader-drummer Srdjan Ivanovic was born in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, but when he was about 10 years old he was forced by the war to emigrate. His artistic biography included formative periods in Greece, Benelux, France. Within B.Q. he collaborates with three other well-known musicians, with diverse origins: the Bulgarian double bassist Mihail Ivanov is one of the most active sidemen in European jazz; the Italian guitarist Federico Casagrande stands out for his sober-introverted approach to the electric guitar, in contrast to the global expansiveness of this instrument; and the Greek trumpeter Andreas Polyzogopoulos shows certain qualities to be recognized as an emblematic figure of jazz back at home. Their ambitious album, Cosmogony, released during JAM, draws inspiration from the founding myths of Hellenistic antiquity, relying on the subliminal background of Balkan musical traditions. According to Ivanovic, the music was conceived in 2025, as an expanded musical form for the Blazin’ Quartet’s repertoire. “Therefore,” the musician says, “there was a need for a unifying theme, and at a time when the division between people is becoming increasingly evident, I could not find anything more universal and timeless than the history of the universe itself.”
The powerful Croatian jazz school was represented by a prestigious quintet, made up of Maja Rivic/vocals, compositions, Mak Murtic/tenor sax, Hrvoje Galler/piano, Hrvoje Kralj/double bass and Borko Rupena/drums. The five musicians manifest themselves with predilection in a lyrical, interiorised, intellectualised regime, of a well-controlled intensity. The soloist, who prefers to arrogate to herself the status of a “vocal artist”, considers music as a “navigation through the spiritual and emotional ocean of the individual”. If when she sings in English she seems to assume a certain conventionalism, which stems from that idiom’s status as the lingua franca of our overpopulated Planet, on the other hand the texts intoned in Croatian, even at the risk of sounding incomprehensible to foreign listeners, display a jazzy expressiveness of considerable fragrance. To appreciate Maja Rivic’s multiple talents, it is worth watching the video Drugo sunce (Second Sun), directed by Marina Uzelac, where the protagonist dances to the sound of her own voice, subtly accompanied by the instrumentalists of the quintet.
In agreement with Maja Popovic’s concern to promote young talents, the last group programmed this year was El Sueño, led by the Swiss-Argentine vibraphonist Lucas Dorado. A musician who combines in his compositions the youthful enthusiasm with the inherent melancholy derived from the post-Astor Piazzolla variants of the tango nuevo style. This aesthetic approach (suggested by the very name of the quintet, a possible allusion to the proverbial phrase of Pedro Calderón de la Barca – La Vida es Sueño = “life is a dream”) is complemented by the inclusion of the bandoneon – convincingly played by the Argentinean Fabricio Colombo – into the band’s timbral palette.
The cosmopolitan programme of the Montenegrin festival, with its welcome references to Latino sounds, raises hopes that musicians from the fascinating universe of Brazilian and Hispano-American jazz might as well be more often invited to the festival’s next editions.
Photo credits: KIC “Budo Tomović”