Eurojazzist Randomizer #1: Just Good Music?
On listening, jazz, and the pressure of meaning
Eurojazzist Randomizer is a loose-format column — a space for listening notes, side thoughts, new music, and jazz across Europe.
At some point last autumn, my colleague Zlatan Dimitrijević and I were discussing what we could publish on Jazzin.rs that might actually attract a slightly larger audience than our regular readers. At that time, there was no sensational news—nothing particularly clickable. Not a single well-known jazz musician had died—thankfully. Zlatan jokingly remarked in our chat: there’s nothing, just a bunch of good music!
I laughed, a little bitterly. Because I realized that “just good music” isn’t necessarily content that will make people want to read a jazz review or news piece. It doesn’t hurt if a musician has a political stance, or if an album is conceptual, or references certain socio-cultural circumstances, Trump, and so on. But if the same musician released an album that was musically identical, full of instrumental tracks with neutral titles, and spoke in interviews and liner notes exclusively about the musical aspects of their work, would their music reach fewer people because of that? Would it get less media coverage and fewer clicks on social media?
In her excellent article on Jazzin.rs, musician Jasna Jovićević reflects on similar topics in a piece about last year’s London Jazz Festival:
“What runs through the festival is artists’ discourse about their own work, reflections on their art that often resembled a mimesis of dominant global narratives; the rhetoric and patterns of crisis and identity tensions have become not only the content of art but also its meta-language, inscribed into every artistic gesture. It seems that contemporary jazz is under pressure from a content hegemony: the expectation that an artist not only plays/executes, but also explains, justifies, interprets, and embeds meaning into the music,” Jasna writes.
For a long time, I thought the best music was the one that functioned as “pure art”, and I was youthfully proud of my (supposed) ability to separate it from any kind of reading into it. But over the years, it became increasingly clear that we don’t live in an abstract world, but a very concrete one, full of news and pseudo-news, endless social media “content”, and consequently, our judgments and prejudices. Every new experience changes the way we perceive the same piece of art, no matter how “cultured” or “self-aware” we believe ourselves to be in our reception of it.
I don’t have a definitive conclusion on these topics, but I will gladly return to reflecting and writing about jazz and its “meanings” in future columns.
Now Listening
I usually check out new music by browsing the catalogs of my favorite labels. ECM somehow always comes first by default. In the latest batch of releases, I’m personally most intrigued by Björn Meyer, a bassist whose work I came to love primarily through Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin and his essential contribution to the band’s “zen-funk” rhythm section. Of course, Meyer is active in other projects as well—some might be more interested in his collaborations with Anouar Brahem, etc. Convergence is his new solo bass album, and so far it promises a lot—I don’t get the sense that it builds on any of his sideman work, but rather highlights his own lyricism in a stripped-down context.
As I’m writing this, I’ve loaded my playlist with new albums by Dave Douglas (Four Freedoms) and Joel Ross (Gospel Music). I’ve also added Jan Bang’s new album With These Hands, released on the fantastic Punkt Editions label. Jan Bang, Erik Honoré, and the circle of musicians gathered around the Punkt Festival are currently among the most exciting forces on the European jazz scene and beyond — their approach to combining jazz, electronics, soundscapes, and improvisation, live music and sampling, still feels like a genuine innovation in a genre that has already reached its peak.
A few days ago, I reached out to Vladan Drobicki, a Macedonian trombonist who started the very interesting label PMG Jazz, focusing on musicians from his country. We occasionally correspond, and he sends me new music. The PMG catalog is now expanding to include musicians from the region, but what intrigues me most at the moment is Macedonian violinist Gligor Kondovski, whose name appears on several releases from the label. I’m currently most drawn to his duo album Inward, recorded with Drobicki, which has a bit of the Scandinavian atmospheric abstraction I tend to favor.
I’m also listening to the aforementioned Jasna Jovićević, who has a new album, Simple Joy, at the crossroads of chamber jazz and avant-garde—she is definitely one of my favorite jazz artists from the Balkans.
When I’m driving, my playlist is wide-ranging and contains music that has already passed the “first listening filter”. Among the jazz musicians there are some of the usual ECM regulars, like Matthias Eick or Tord Gustavsen, always Fire! Orchestra for lifting the mood, Vega Trails, Erik Honore, Jan Bang, Giovanni Guidi, Colin Stetson, SML, and so on.
Jazz Across Europe
There are countless jazz festivals and concerts all across Europe. The biggest and most popular are well-known, but for practical reasons, I often focus more on those close enough to Serbia or with good, affordable flight connections. Over the last 10–15 years, Romania has seen a real expansion of excellent jazz festivals, often in an ECM vibe.
Jazz in the Park in Cluj-Napoca announced an artist-in-residence program featuring Nik Bärtsch—solo, duo with pianist Tania Giannouli (whom I unfortunately haven’t seen live yet), and, of course, the already well-known Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin. Various other performers are also announced, but this program caught my attention the most. The festival runs from June 5–7, 2026, and the current program is published here.
I must admit, I really like the whole artist-in-residence concept, where one artist presents several projects from their body of work. I have the impression that 10–15 years ago, there weren’t as many festivals with such a program (excluding the megalomaniac festival appearances of John Zorn), but that trend has now been steadily growing. I fully support it.