Srdjan Ivanovic

Sara­je­vo-Athens-Ams­ter­dam-Paris — this is the bio­graph­i­cal map of musi­cian Srd­jan Ivanovic. He and his par­ents — his father was a musi­cian — fled the war in the Balka­ns to Athens in the 1990s.He was a stranger to his new home for a long time until, at the age of thir­teen, he dis­cov­ered his love of sound, the sound of the drums. Athens, a musi­cal cross­roads, shaped Srd­jan Ivanovic’s approach to music. Even­tu­al­ly he moved to the oppo­site end of Europe, to Amsterdam.There he com­bined his unique vision of sound with mod­ern jazz to cre­ate his dynam­ic, inno­v­a­tive interpretation.

Dur­ing his stud­ies in the Nether­lands, he met his first fel­low musi­cians in the Blazin’ Quar­tet, with whom he won the Dutch jazz com­pe­ti­tion. The jury praised the organ­ic sound of the com­po­si­tions and the inter­ac­tion with­in the group.They went on to record sev­er­al albums and played on five con­ti­nents. He also received the Hol­land Casi­no Jazz&Pop Award and a schol­ar­ship from the Prins Bern­hard Foun­da­tion to study in New York.

Final­ly, in 2014, he found a mul­ti­cul­tur­al, inter­na­tion­al jazz scene in Paris.In his music, he process­es his child­hood in Greece and the lit­er­a­ture of Kazantza­kis (Kapetan Mihalis, Sweet Home Lagka­da); his home­land Bosnia and the tra­di­tions of the Balka­ns (U Stam­bolu), but also his life in Paris (Sous le ciel de Paris, Le Jon­gleur) as well as the ideas of cul­tur­al resis­tance (Résis­tance) and the feel­ing of the birth of a child (Fee Fee, ded­i­cat­ed to Fil­ip Ivanovic).

Srd­jan Ivanovic’s melodies and rhythms, born in the Balka­ns and admirably unit­ing the sen­si­bil­i­ties of East and West, are a bold and spir­it­ed tes­ta­ment to his com­mit­ment to explorato­ry, pio­neer­ing and inno­v­a­tive jazz. Srd­jan makes the dor­mant phoenix of jazz fly. As a musi­cian and drum­mer, he draws inspi­ra­tion from his own back­ground, espe­cial­ly on his lat­est album MODULAR. “Mod­u­lar is a title that I like because of its many mean­ings. Mod­u­lar in the sense that we shape the form of a piece spon­ta­neous­ly; mod­u­lar when we also fluc­tu­ate nat­u­ral­ly with our intu­itions. We mod­u­late through our ears, our instru­ment, the present moment. The final inter­ac­tion is with the lis­ten­er, who also per­ceives and mod­u­lates the sound in their own way.” Srd­jan Ivanovic

Since his arrival in France, he has col­lab­o­rat­ed with var­i­ous musi­cians, includ­ing Bojan Z, Christophe Pan­zani, Mag­ic Malik, Fed­eri­co Casagrande and Marc Buron­fos­se. He is co-leader of the large ensem­ble Nikolov-Ivanovic Undectet and also found­ed the world rock group Xénos.