This year’s poster designed Ajna Zlatar, creative director at the Sarajevo based Communis agency.
“On the Jazz Fest stages in Sarajevo we repeatedly present some of the richness of the current music by reflecting a diverse variety of music styles and showing how different people of different music backgrounds, races and views-of-life communicate together and create authentic music, offering new aesthetic experiences year after year.
As different musicians create new worlds together, thanks to the universal language of music, analogically – different people can live harmoniously and together. United in their mutual differences, in tolerance and collaboration, they are capable of creating entire cultures and civilizations, as they have done many times before throughout history. Unfortunately, failing to accept those who are different and recognize the right of others to be what they are and what they want to be, failing to accept the different as equal, it is more common and much easier to fall into tyranny of the stronger against the weaker and of the majority against the minority.
So, as the insensitive ear accustomed to primitive rhythm, trivial melodies and stripped-down emotions is incapable of hearing the beauty of music of good quality in all its grandeur, those who measure the world only against the backdrop of their own believes, incapable of empathy, see the different one as Not-I whose very existence is perceived as threatening.
Clearly, a single concert or a festival or a football match cannot change the situation in the society or the world we live in but it can make somebody happier or, at least, more satisfied. Naturally, there is a very realistic fact behind all these speculations about ideals – we can shine in the November sky at least once a year in this two-decade-long Bosnian night. You can shine too, if you wish to. We will not drive the dark away but we will certainly make the darkness more bearable.
Welcome to the Sarajevo Jazz Fest!”
Edin ZUBČEVIĆ