free online edition
The 24th International Music Festival Sarajevo Jazz Fest 2020 will be held ONLINE from the 19th to the 21st November.
Considering the given circumstances, this edition of the Festival had to be organized online, so we tried to go the extra mile to offer premieres, produced in different locations, recorded in 4K technology, and to present concerts in a 30 minutes format not only to our regular Jazz Fest audience but to audiences around the world.
The Jazz Fest Sarajevo 2020 will present concerts of international and Bosnian artists produced especially for the Festival on three continents: in Sarajevo, Amsterdam, New York, Berlin and Jerusalem.
A special program of the Festival is titled Sevdah at a Distance, and it gives Bosnian musicians a chance to play during the pandemic and offers them an opportunity to create new projects and new music. The Sevdah at a Distance program will present three concerts.
On the 19th of November, a solo piano concert of Adis Sirbubalo at the Sarajevo City Hall will open the Festival. Also, there will be a premiere of Iranian virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor, a kamancheh player and composer of the Silk Road Ensemble – best world music album Grammy winners. This Kayhan Kalhor’s concert was recorded at one of the most important European concert venues – Bimhuis in Amsterdam.
On the next day of the Festival, vocalist Tijana Vignjević and cellist Belma Alić will perform in a duet in the Sarajevo War Childhood Museum, and afterwards the audience and the festival will travel to New York. A concert of the two guitarists Mary Halvorson and Miles Okazaki will be premiered at the EastSide Sound Studio, while the famous MoMA PS1, New York’s Museum of Contemporary Art, will host a premiere performance of Amir ElSaffar, an American trumpet player, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist.
On the third day of the Festival, the 21st of November, the program will start at the Berlin Pergamon Museum, in front of the Ishtar Gate, where trombonist Nils Wogram and drummer Dejan Terzić will have their performance. The Jazz Fest will then move to Jerusalem, to the Tower of David and the Jerusalem History Museum that will be a venue for a concert of Mark Eliyahu. A duet of Zanin Berbić and Adis Sirbubalo in the Sarajevo War Childhood Museum will be a closing act of this edition of the Festival.
All programs will be free of charge and available to watch via social networks and platforms, our official YouTube channel and Facebook page. The special program of the Festival, Sevdah at a Distance, will be premiered on Face TV during the Festival.
We wanted to provide the audience with the FREE exciting and diverse program filmed at spectacular locations, while giving the musicians an opportunity to play, write and record music, as well as to carry out and prepare new projects for some more favorable times when they will have a chance to perform before live audiences again and present their music, created upon an initiative of the Jazz Fest and in its production, as a lasting testament not only to this edition of the Festival but to the contemporary world.