Belgrade Jazz Festival Eyes the Future

While last year's festival highlighted jazz styles through past decades, this year's instalment, taking place from October 28 to November 1, will shift its focus to the future of the genre.

The annual festival, now entering its 31 year, has long been a favourite with Serbian jazz fans and organisers say increased funding has enabled it to attract a much wider selection of bigger, international names.

Dragan Ambrozic, the festival's programme director, said the performances will allow people to see what lies ahead for jazz and highlight some of the best artists and sounds of the 21 century, instead of looking back to the past.

"We tried to expand our horizons this year," Ambrozic told Belgrade daily Blic on October 9, adding that the geography of jazz in this century has gone through a significant change.

While jazz will always be an inherently American art form, the rest of the world is embracing the style more than ever. With that in mind, organisers of the Belgrade Jazz Festival made a concerted effort to book performers from all over the globe.

Of course, there will be new American artists present in the line-up, but there will also be musicians from Turkey, Puerto Rico, Scandinavia and even Japan.

Thanks to the largest donation from the City of Belgrade that the festival has ever seen, organisers were able to be more ambitious with bookings and traverse the entire international scene to bring some of its brightest stars to Belgrade.

The city has given the festival a budget of just over ?140,000 for this year's event.

Organisers say that the increased investment has proven to be worthwhile as not only could they bring big, relevant stars to the festival, but tickets are moving faster than ever.

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