21/02/2017
EUROPE JAZZ NETWORK
CASE STUDY: RE-CREATION: JAZZ AS A TOOL FOR SOCIAL COHESION JAZZ FEST SARAJEVO/BANLIEUES BLEUES
by Fiona Goh with Edin Zubcevic
JAZZ FEST SARAJEVO is EJN’s only member in Bosnia & Herzegovina and under the direction of its founder, Edin Zubčević, it has grown in ambition and success since its launch some 18 months after the end of the Bosnian war. Celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2016, Zubčević is clear that the social context for the festival is central both in terms of challenges and identity:
“Organising a festival in postwar Bosnia is a big challenge, in terms of lack of infrastructure, and the fact that we are a poor country, heavily corrupted and still a neglected society. I had the idealistic idea to celebrate freedom by creating an international jazz festival, as jazz for me is the music of the free man. My idea was to build a festival to celebrate differences because every single festival - if it’s a good festival - should do this and, post-war, we are still living in a troubled multicultural society. Our main stage is in an ex-Jewish temple in a middle of a town surrounded by other mosques and churches, so for me it’s the perfect setting. The music I wanted to present was different itself, and the musicians were not only different from everyone else but diverse amongst themselves too.”
In this challenging context, Zubčević argues that the potential rewards are also greater: “We’re living in a society which, for centuries, had a lot of differences that had brought advantages and weren’t so contested, and suddenly during the war these differences became a reason to fight and to hate each other, and in a very brutal way. I found that the most dynamic and attractive work happened in places where different influences, traditions and celebrations got together to create something new and fresh. And if that happened in music, it could happen in society.”
The ambitions for the festival are significant, although Zubčević acknowledges the festival has limited long term impact unless there is additional infrastructural change: “I never considered that it was just a festival, a series of concerts - I like to think that we’re doing something more than that. We provide people with hope and maybe it sounds a little bit ambitious or pretentious, but the festival is really important in terms of relationships inside society and really influences society in a very good way.
The festival could inspire society to be better. It’s too bad from our point of view there is nothing which can sustain the effects that we always create when we do the festival - we change society in a way for the week, people are different, people behave differently, and everything is different.”
