Serbian jazz trumpeter, composer and band leader Dusko Goykovich (1931-2023) established himself as one of Europe’s most distinctive jazz artists.
Dusko Goykovich was born and raised in Jajce, Bosnia and Herzegovina, at the time part of Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He studied at the Belgrade Music Academy from 1948 to 1953, playing trumpet in Dixieland bands and joining the big band of Radio Belgrade at the age of 18. After leaving Yugoslavia in 1956, Goykovich spent the next ten years developing his sound. Moving to Frankfurt he first established himself on the West German jazz scene, where he played with the renowned big bands of Kurt Edelhagen and Kenny Clarke & Francy Boland. Then, after appearances at the world’s largest jazz festivals such as Comblain-la-Tour in Belgium, Antibes in France and Newport, Goykovich moved stateside where he spent four years studying at the world famous Berklee College and worked with the likes of Woody Herman and Maynard Ferguson.
Returning to Europe in the mid-sixties Goykovich soon introduced the world to his innovative Balkan jazz sound with Swinging Macedonia (1966), an album characterised by the melancholic melodies and sophisticated rhythms reminiscent of his native land. Today Swinging Macedonia still stands as one of the most important and sought-after works of European folk inspired jazz and demonstrates how Goykovich was not merely an excellent instrumentalist, but also a gifted composer and versatile artist in his own right. Whilst the metaphor ‘jazz with an accent’ has been widely used to describe the music that European jazz artists created in the 1950s and 1960s, it fails to do justice to the entirely new language that Dusko Goykovich was developing. No mere dialect Goykovich’s jazz was a delicate, multi-layered language, one that owed just as much to the folk music of the Balkans as it did to the modern music of America.
