ABOUT
JORDAN DJEVIĆ
In Serbia he became known primarily as a folk singer; in his new home of Stuttgart he is considered an accordion avant-gardist who wants to change the world a little bit for the better with his music. His name is Jordan Djević, he comes from Čačak in Serbia and has been playing the chromatic accordion for 44 years.
Jordan Djević has made the accordion, an instrument so often ridiculed, once again acceptable in the world of Balkan jazz.
Many people still associate the accordion with its wheezing and squeaking tones with dull folk music feasts or melancholic evenings at home. Jordan “Joca” Djević, who has lived in Stuttgart for 27 years, has often refuted these unfounded prejudices. Rather, the accordionist lets himself be driven by classical music, folk, rock and, above all, rousing Balkan tunes, plays intricately, improvises with virtuoso jazz echoes. And he doesn’t just play the accordion, he uses his huge instrument – and his body as well – as a sound source for his samplers, loops, wah-wah pedals, contact microphones – who knows what lies at his feet in the spotlight.
Jordan Djević himself is as international and cosmopolitan as his repertoire. The man who describes music as his religion took up the big instrument at the age of twelve and took accordion lessons. And that, “even though I was kicked out of the school choir when I was eleven because I wasn’t musical,” he says.
Before moving to Stuttgart in 1995, he played in various well-known Serbian orchestras and lived in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Vienna, Munich, Zurich and St. Gallen. He started his musical career in Serbia as a singer of folk music songs, which propelled him to the top of popularity in the 1990s. But his great love, alongside his family, has always been the accordion. This was also the reason why in the 1990s he gave up the privileges he enjoyed in Serbia due to his success as a singer, left his homeland and devoted himself entirely to playing the accordion.
Now, almost three decades later, he is considered by many to be one of the best in his field. According to his own statements, Jordan Đević plays a huge number of pieces from memory, most of which are his own compositions. He has played at the Paleo Festival in Nyon and the renowned Montreux Jazz Festival as well as at the Frankfurt Music Fair and the Creole World Music Festival. Even in the US television series “The Mentalist” there is a 50-second clip that was composed and played by Djević. He has performed on stages large and small across Europe and made the so often ridiculed instrument once again respectable in the world of Balkan jazz. Whether with his solo project “the Pearls”, his jazz trio Balkan Train or in a duo with the American singer Tiffany Marie Estrada: when Jordan Djević plays one of his three accordions, boundaries and clichés are broken. His compositions, inspired less by classical music than by Eastern European folklore, resemble buildings cast in musical notes.
The accordionist from Serbia primarily plays the chromatic button accordion and specializes in Balkan jazz. And yet Jordan Djević has as much in common with jazz as Rick Wakeman once had with rock. And like the wakeman of this world, this doesn’t seem to bother him: he blows and blows with his bellows equipped with keys, he puffs himself up, he blows until everything that can be produced with the accordion instrument and the sounds it produces between Balkan jazz has been swept away to swing, from gipsy to folk, from Spain via Portugal to France and back to Serbia. Jordan Djević actually does nothing less than instrumentalize the body, use the latest technology, rhythmize sounds, and observe where the whole thing leads.
And how did the 56-year-old accordionist end up in Stuttgart? Jordan Djević is married to a Serbian-German woman and also appreciates the relaxed atmosphere that the city exudes: “Stuttgart suits me very well, it is the perfect city for me.”
