PRESS

I don’t know if there is any musical genre for which the travel experience is more important than jazz. And I don’t know if there is an expression in music that is richer in cosmopolitan spirit. Perhaps this is because jazz, in the wide range of musical styles known to this day, already in the last century acquired the status of a kind of dialect, a meta-speech, which – although it can also use words in a narrower sense – is basically non-verbal, and which all its lovers and connoisseurs understand and can use it with each other, regardless of nationality, skin color, religion and other preferences. Jazz is equally intellectual, emotional and instinctive and therefore engages all three key centers of expression in man. However, if someone had to introduce it in one word, the only appropriate word would be the one from the beginning – travel. Authors and performers devoted to jazz are almost as a rule planetary travelers, ready to stray geographically far away, in search of impressions that they will later use as an impulse for creation. On the other hand, the compositions they create and those in whose interpretation they passionately participate – are themselves based in form and content on the possibility of an exciting and unpredictable journey. There are mandatory reference points – the beginning, the end and experiences between the two – but what will happen along the way always remains the most attractive promise and unknown when you use the communicative channels and expressive means of jazz.

It is no coincidence that Serbian bass player and composer Vladimir Samardžić started his first self-titled album in the past twelve years while traveling. Among other activities and obligations, Vladimir used this considerable piece of free author’s time in a strong creative life for dedicated mentoring work and concert and studio collaboration with other musicians. Listening to his new album, Catching the Wind, will tell you that this sensitive man of superb musical talent was only really indebted to the artist in himself, because he used all those years in which he did not publish to help others and thus, quite naturally, gained the recognition and respect that he commands significantly further from the music genre he opted for. More precisely, to which he was bound by fate.

The creative capsule burst during Samardžić’s stay in Istria, in the town of Grožnjan, which appears in three titles on the album, written in the Italian form of Grisignana. Mediterranean toponyms will appear again in songs as inspiring motifs, in the form of Tuscany and Siena. The trip to Grožnjan not only brought Samardžić the initial spark for compositions but – as often happens with people who cherish music in themselves and unmistakably recognize it in others – enabled contact with guitarist Marco Antonio da Costa and singer Thana Alexa. It was her voice, not quite of this world, that opened the album with an incantation of summoning earthly and otherworldly forces to be integrally involved in the compositions that will follow. The second geographical axis of Samardžić’s edition is Latin American, and the third one is made up of interweaving of African and European influences. Of course, a person who grows up in the Balkans feels very well what contact culture is, and Samardžić’s tendency to inherit various folklore and multinational incentives that are refracted through the prism of his urban consciousness and his distinct gift as a composer is in accordance with the settings of the modern understanding of jazz, but it is also completely in the spirit of the complex climate in which he grew up as a man and as an artist.

Catching the Wind is a multi-layered work that cannot be revealed by one thorough listening. It’s a general point, but it should be emphasized in a time of insatiable hunger for consumable instant experiences, an album like this cannot be understood nor can the full extent of its meanings be felt and adopted if approached superficially. In an age where it seems that nothing is sacred anymore, Vladimir Samardžić is looking for a dedicated and fundamental listener, and when he finds one, he generously shares with him the fruits of his great creative and performing talent. As he shares the beauty of working together with guitarist Nenad Gajin, drummer Dado Marinković and percussionist Andreja Krstić. Their mutual fusion – and this is a word that has long been domesticated precisely in jazz – made it possible, along with the extraordinary production of Vladimir Moritz, for the man who for more than ten years shared his knowledge and skill unsparingly with others, to finally record the author’s album that he missed as much as and Serbian jazz music.

Sensitive, layered, passionate, pulsating, intense, associatively riotous – that’s Catching the Wind by Vladimir Samardžić. But behind all that, beats his bare love, for music, for life and man. It would be quite predictable to say at the end that Vladimir Samardžić recorded a world album. Such impressions will certainly not pass him by. That is true, but jazz does not love predictability. That’s why it’s better to turn things around and say that Catching the Wind is essentially what it has to be above all else – Samardžić’s deeply personal work of art of exceptional value, in which the whole world can take a dignified reflection.

June 23, 2022

MILOŠ  ZUBAC

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