Zagreb Jazz Festival: Some of the World’s Best Musicians Are Coming to Zagreb

This year the Zagreb Jazz Festival will welcome some of the world’s best musicians of the jazz music scene, making Zagreb the centre of jazz music and its fans between 17 and 25 November.

This year’s edition of the Zagreb Jazz festival, which has taken place in Zagreb for fifteen years, will start with the performance by Bassekou Kouyate &Ngoni Ba on 17 November. This great of world jazz is a master of the traditional African string instrument (ngoni), a Grammy nominee and a holder of several BBC awards.

The next concert, by Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith, will take place on 22 November. Vijay Iyer won the title of the best jazz pianist in the world and the artist of the year in America in 2018 and on this occasion he will perform with the legendary trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. Two days later, on 24 November the Zagreb audience will have a chance to listen to the Aaron Diehl Trio. Pianist Aaron Diehl is one of the best interpreters of the Great American Songbook who also performed George Gershwin’s music with the New York Philharmonic and Los Angeles Philharmonic and cooperated with some legendary musicians.

The fourth and the last concert of this year’s Zagreb Jazz Festival will be held on 25 November. This will be a performance of a Brooklyn bassist Omer Avital Qantar who will take the Zagreb audience to a musical journey through everything that inspires him, from hard-core jazz, Israeli heritage, North African rhythms and Middle Eastern scales.

The Zagreb Jazz Festival has taken place since 2005 and has brought to Zagreb not just the biggest jazz icons of the 20^th century but icons of all musical genres of the 20^th century. More than a hundred concerts have been organised so far, which year after year attract jazz lovers from the entire Croatia as well as neighbouring countries.