The jubilee 25th edition of the Novi Sad Jazz Festival will be held from November 15 to 18, 2023, organized by the Cultural Center of Novi Sad. This year’s edition of the festival will offer fans of jazz eight top concerts on the Great Stage of the Youth Theater, including drumbooty – one of the most powerful domestic original jazz projects, which will have the opportunity to be presented to the audience on November 16.

Drummer Peđa Milutinović with two keyboardists, the talented Stevan Milijanović and Bojan Cvetković, Luka Ignjatović on saxophone and bassist Akoš Forgač, will perform at the Novi Sad Jazz Festival on November 16 from 10 p.m. This performance is realized in cooperation with the national platform Serbia Creates Music within the competition Serbia Creates: The Spotlight.

The force with which drummer Peđa Milutinović entered the scene at the beginning of the last decade left few domestic jazz fans indifferent. At that time, a young man in his early twenties, with a feeling for hard-bap like a seasoned American session veteran, soon dominated the Belgrade club scenes and then became a popular member of numerous local jazz lineups. At that time, he conquered the audience with the Qzama Quartet (Luka Ignjatović, Filip Bulatović, Pera Krstajić), the Vasil Hadžimanov Band, and finally the fluid line-up Schima, again with Luka Ignjatović, who will remain his most faithful musical companion to this day.

And yet, for what would become a recognizable author’s expression of Peđa Milutinović a few years later, the collaboration with the very influential American saxophonist David Binnie, one of those musicians who enjoys an exceptional reputation among his colleagues, for which there is also a convenient foreign phrase musician’s musician, was crucial. In the middle of the last decade, Bini was unusually active in these parts – he performed and played with Vasil Hadžimanov, and then gathered the original trio Avenija with Peđa Milutinović and bassist Per Krstajić, with whom he worked for the next few years.

A former hard-bopper and out-of-series stylist in the manner of the sixties and the golden era of the Blue Note publishing company, Milutinović moved more and more at the intersection of the traditional fusion of the seventies and eighties (which was most successfully reinterpreted by Hadžimanov on the domestic scene) and what are new-century interpretations of this jazz style, based on combining electronica and modern New York neo-bap sound. He had been baking for a long time, and it was the conversations and work with Bini that encouraged him to take a key step forward in his career, as an author and bandleader.

This is how Milutinović’s project drumbooty was born, which on the first album “Veritas Vincit” (Orenda Records, 2020) brings together an imposing and very colorful list of guest musicians, without a fixed line-up. Already here, the drummer’s authorial process based on playing and experimenting in the Logic Pro computer program, combining rhythms with different piano melodies and synth sounds, can be seen, which will turn the usual jazz logics and procedures upside down. At least the ones we have seen and heard in these areas.

In this sense, drumbooty is not a pumpkin without roots, and it is even less strange that we could draw parallels first with the original projects of drummers from the American scene such as Mark Giuliana, Louis Cole, and Makaya McCraven, who went from being an underground sensation to the mainstream by publishing for a revitalized and diversified Blue Note.

After the author’s slightly more hesitant debut, on which he seemed to examine possible options, procedures and directions of research, this year’s album “Creality” presents drumbooty in a more focused expression, turned to a compact retro-futurism in arrangement. This is especially embodied in the harmony of synth basses and keyboards, which stand in fine balance with Milutinović himself, i.e. Luka Ignjatović as the dominant brass player, here, however, somewhat more reserved than in the Schima line-up. In the band’s music, echoes of old fusion and funk meet with jazz tradition and the present, that is, electronic sound manipulation with a conventional approach to jazz instruments.

Author of the cover photo: Ivana Čutura