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Jazz.hr

Jazz.hr

http://www.jazz.hr/

In the spring of 2005, the “Zagreb” Jazz Club of the Croatian Composers’ Society launched a website with the aim of bringing some life into the medium which would cover the Croatian jazz scene and the related events. This was prompted by research or, not to sound too pretentious, a survey conducted among a considerable number of Croatia’s jazz population, such as musicians, event organisers, record collectors, enthusiasts, and journalists. Their response showed that, apart from being in minority, this group is not keen on self-promotion much. Starting from the assumption that the people-who-live-and-feel-jazz everywhere around us are quite scarce, but have always been well-connected as a group and that many of them have experienced their affection for jazz more as a lifestyle that a casual pastime, we arrived at the conclusion that an umbrella organisation was missing in Croatia. Its role would be to provide comprehensive information about the jazz-related activities at the national level as well as to help the Croatian jazz musicians to present their work.

Some of the concrete issues we have wanted to deal with are as follows:

• How individuals or organisations (especially from abroad) get in touch with Croatian jazz musicians or organisers;
• Where and how jazz aficionados could find out more about concerts or festivals taking place in Croatia;
• Where the interested individuals could access and read the reviews of jazz concerts or sound recordings, browse the gallery of photographs from a concert they missed or get timely information about the performers and time of a certain concert – and all this available from a single website;
• How to present the works of Croatian composers and arrangers to the international audiences.

The “Zagreb” Jazz Club was founded in the late 1990s by a group of enthusiasts: active and retired jazz musicians, journalists and fans, with the support of the Croatian Composers’ Society. It was intended as an organisation which would hold festivals, concerts, listening clubs, music workshops, talks, and so on. An access to all these activities would not only be granted to its membership, which now includes around 200 individuals, but also to the general public. Nowadays, the Club organises two festivals (the Jazz.hr in spring – in late March or in April and the Jazz.hr in autumn – in the second half of October), the Jazz.hr series with five to seven concerts in a season, as well as about ten other events throughout a year: listening clubs, showings, music workshops, reports, and talks.

Antun Tomislav Šaban was its artistic director in the period from 2000 until 2013, when he was succeeded in that position by Davor Hrvoj.