Moving borders through music at first World Music Festival in Serbia

The musical programme included traditional music from Lapland, Jewish klezmer, Roma music from the Balkans, traditional Serbian music, mixed with jazz, pop, rock and elements of punk, embodied in the unforgettable performance of the band from Norway Bengalo on Saturday night. The Serbian Roma band KAL also showed why they recently have gotten a lot of international attention and praise for their music.

The World Music Festival was organized by Jovan Pavlovic, Slobodan Bozovic, Anne Fossen, Inge Danielsen and Olav Goberg representing the NGO Tutti Serbia in co-operation with the Municipality of Gornji Milanovac and local partners. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Norway provided funding for the event.

”We wanted to present Roma music in interaction with other forms of music, and make a World Music Festival that moves borders, and this we definitely achieved”, said Olav Goberg, one of the organisers, upon the closing of the Festival on Sunday 31. May. 

NPA’s Roma partner organisation CEMROP from Pozega, showed the photo exhibition ”They are Roma too” during the World Music Festival. ”This music festival is a perfect setting for showing this exhibition composed of world famous people with Roma background, breaking down some of the prejudices that many people have towards Roma”, said Dragan Vasovic from CEMROP.

”We live in a world with more interaction between cultures than ever, we need to understand these cultures in order to be able to communicate and understand each other. One way of gaining knowledge about other cultures is through music, and this is what we wanted to achieve with this first Serbian World Music festival”, said Inge Danielsen from Tutti Serbia.

Jovan Pavlovic expressed hope that the World Music Festival will become a tradition, ”This is a great start for something that we hope will become an annual event, the only thing we would wish for next year is better and more stable weather!”.

For more information see http://www.serbiafest.com/

Bengalo from Norway playing with Srdjan Azirovic's band from Serbia

Gipsy Aleksici from Serbia

Photo exhibition by NPA Roma partner organisation CEMROP "They are Roma too"

Musical director of the festival Jovan Pavlovic under a jam session Sunday afternoon "I only hope for better weather next year"!