The thesis presents an overview of jazz music in Slovenia. The beginnings of jazz in Slovenia go back to the Twenties of the 20th century with the appearance of first musical groups performing dance music and attempting to introduce elements of jazz into their music. The pioneer of this phenomenon was Miljutin Nagode who brought the first saxophone to Ljubljana, then regarded as a jazz instrument. Development went on and in the 1930's and even more later in the 1940's Bojan Adamič, one of the first Slovene jazz improvisers, came to prominence, heading the forerunner of the later Radio Ljubljana Dance Orchestra that he would found after WW2. In the post-war years, when jazz was persecuted in our country, Adamič takes credit for its survival. In the 1950's a number of smaller groups that performed true jazz appeared. The first Slovenian jazz record was released in 1959, while 1960 saw the 1st Yugoslav Jazz Festival in Bled, which popularized jazz in Slovenia even further. In 1963 the Dance Orchestra was taken over by Jože Privšek who, thanks to his brilliant leadership, took the orchestra to the pinnacle of European jazz orchestras. During that era the orchestra was joined by first musicians who had studied jazz and who became leading Slovene jazz musicians (Tone Janša, Ratko Divjak, Andrej Arnol, Petar Ugrin …). The 1970's witnessed the development of jazz-rock and the 1980's the emergence of avant-garde jazz bands, while in the 1990's the Jazz Department of the Secondary Music and Ballet School of Ljubljana was founded, resulting in an increase of Slovene jazz musicians with secondary level academic jazz education.
|
