Guča Trumpet Festival Galleries

[Guča Trumpet Festival Galleries]

Sanja Ilić & Balkanika, Guča

Sanja Ilić & Balkanika are a Serbian band. They play traditional music from the Balkans combined with modern elements. Their opus comprises old music tunes from the Balkans with splendid musicians playing traditional instruments, performing music which conjures the atmosphere of the Balkans region, in a new attire for the new millennium.

Aleksandar-Sanja Ilić is one of the most famous composers of pop and rock music of former Yugoslavia, and, nowadays - Serbia. His career started in the band San in Belgrade. He has composed songs for almost all major singers. Many of his compositions won the title "The Hit of the Year". He has won many awards at festivals in former Yugoslavia.

With the band Aska, he participated at the Euro-vision Song Contest 1982, held in Harrogate, United Kingdom. Their song, "Halo, halo" ("Hello, Hello"), ended 14th, being awarded with 21 points.

Sanja Ilić writes music for theater  film and television, and his instrumental music "Delta Project" is the all-time most frequently broadcast and best selling project of instrumental music in former Yugoslavia.

Writing music scores for theater performances also brought songs which have become very popular and have outlived the performances for which they had been written, as, for instance, "Plava ptica" ("The Blue Bird"). Sanja has also worked with actors who sing, and has made a significant opus in that field. Each year at the Herceg Novi Music Festival (Montenegro), the first evening of the festival is reserved for actors. This musical spectacle is designed by Sanja Ilić. In April 1999, during the bombardment of Serbia, he composed the song "Moj grad još peva..." ("My City is Still Singing..."), referring to Belgrade. The performing artists were the very actors who had for years been cooperating with Sanja. Recently, he has been obsessed with ethnic music of the Balkans, which resulted in his writing the original music for the BALKAN 2000 project.

Šaban Bajramović - The King of Roma music

Šaban Bajramović is the most prolific and the most celebrated Roma singer, composer and poet in the Balkans. Among thousands of articles and studies written throughout the world about this author, there is not a single one which does not link his name with the expression "The King of Roma music".

Šaban Bajramović was born on April 16, 1936 in Niš (Serbia). He almost did not attend the school while picking up musical education, alike many of his people, on street.

When he was nineteen, he deserted the army because of love, and later was sentenced to three years imprisonment at the Goli Otok isolation facility on an island in the Adriatic sea. However, as he told the military court that there was no sentence long enough for him to serve it, the sentence was extended to five and a half years.

However, while serving his sentence at the Goli Otok facility, Šaban Bajramović founded a prison band which played, among other music, jazz, Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra songs, as well as Spanish and Mexican melodies. Nowadays, he says that Goli Otok was his life-university, where he formed the way he thinks. He made his first record in 1964, and nowadays, his discography consists of some twenty albums and more then fifty singles. He wrote and composed, as he said, about seven hundred songs. For more than twenty years, he has led “Crna Mamba” (Black Mamba), touring half of the world with the band. Upon invitation of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, he visited India, where he was named for The King of the Gypsy World Music.