Sdban Records is proud to present Doo’s Blues, a collection of previously unreleased radio recordings capturing Serbian jazz trumpeter, composer and band leader Dusko Goykovich (1931-2023) at the moment he definitively established himself as one of Europe’s most distinctive jazz artists.
During the mid-sixties the world was introduced by Goykovich's 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.
Not long after Swinging Macedonia’s release Goykovich was invited to record two sessions for BRT (Belgian Radio & TV), which he performed with three different ensembles. Compiler Lander Lenaerts got his hands on these recordings and decided to collaborate with Sdban to release them for the first time. Lenaerts is a DJ and writer who plays an important part in documenting the rich jazz history Belgium has to offer, he was involved in other Sdban compilations like Hip Holland Hip, Utopic Cities and Let's Get Swinging.
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. And to the blues. For this is Doo’s Blues.
Doo's Blues: The 1967 Belgian Radio Recordings is out today via Sdban records.
Available on vinyl and digital, listen and order here.