Jazz Interview with jazz pianist, composer Dimitrije Vasiljević

1. First let’s start with where you grew up, and what got you interested in music?

I grew up in Belgrade, Serbia and have lived there until I was 22 when I moved to USA. My dad is
an opera singer, but also a jazz aficionado as well, so he got hooked me on music at the early
age. In Serbia, we have public music schools that you can attend along with traditional
elementary and/or high schools. I passed the audition for a music school in Belgrade when I was
6, and started learning classical piano, ear training and theory right away. For the next ten years,
I attended the music school (6 grades of elementary and 4 more grades of high music school),
after which I enrolled at Faculty of Music Art which is a college of music in Belgrade. Later on, I
continued my music education in USA, getting another BM from Berklee College of Music, MM
from NYU Steinhardt and DMA from University of Illinois. During my childhood years, I mostly
played classical piano, since that was the only offered musical genre in the music school system
of Serbia at that time. As a teenager, I got interested in pop, rock, funk and other more popular
and modern styles of music, so I started picking up songs by ear. Soon enough, I discovered jazz,
again thanks to my father who played me jazz records and took me to jazz concerts. I have
always known that music is a path I will be walking on my entire life. That fact was somehow
clear to me even when I was still a kid. So, I guess, it was just matter of how and where, now
what will be my life’s calling.

2. What got you interested in picking up the piano? What teacher or teachers helped you
progress to the level of playing you have today? What made you choose the piano?

My mother played the piano when she was a young girl, so we already had a piano at home. My
parents used to play children’s songs to me when I was only a baby, and I think that sound
entered my ears and then stayed there. When I started music school, piano was a natural choice
of instrument for me. Besides, I always liked how piano had the ability to imitate the whole
band or orchestra and I also appreciated the fact that as a pianist you inevitably have to go
through an intensive theory and harmony training in order to be able to play well, which as a
result makes you an overall better musician. My first teacher was Milana Ulmanski, an older
lady with a great reputation among classical teachers in Belgrade and a very strict professor. She
made me love piano and she set up the foundation of my piano technique and a basic sense of
musicality. When I got to America and started playing jazz, I had the opportunity to study with
some world-class jazz pianists such as Ray Santisi, Jean-Michel Pilc, Danilo Perez, Laszlo
Gardony, JoAnne Brackeen and Andy Milne to name a few. All of these piano teachers (and
many more whom I’ve crossed paths with during my years of study), contributed a great deal to
my pianistic skills and overall musicianship.
 3. How did your sound evolve over time? What did you do to find and develop your sound?

I remember exploring different sounds and harmonies at the piano when I was a kid and also
later as a teenager. At that time, I didn’t know much theoretically about what I was doing, but
these first sincere and innocent contacts with the instrument allowed me to subconsciously
express myself in the purest of ways. It turned that memories of these spontaneous excursions
into the unknown realms of sounds stayed with me for all these years and I started
rediscovering them much later when I was already a trained pianist. All the structured and
conventional jazz knowledge actually only helped me to start being aware of what lays deep
inside me and what wants to be resurfaced which was about to become my personal voice in
jazz. Of course, I was influenced by many different artists and genres of music I’ve been listening
to over the years. Another thing I realized was that life experiences, adventures, both inside and
outside of me, as well as all kinds of strong emotions I felt toward dear people in my life,
influenced the depth of jazz language and stylistic vision of the music I composed. Furthermore,
incorporating the traditional musical heritage of Balkans and Serbia, and mixing it with the
modern jazz language and classical influences I acquired from years of attending Serbian music
school, all started to blend together and thus created what will become my personal style of
playing and making music.

4. What practice routine or exercise have you developed to maintain and improve your
current musical ability especially pertaining to rhythm?

I am not a big fan of structured practice, well-developed strict routines or time-measured

instrumental training. Practicing is an art for itself. It should be an exciting and enjoyable
experience of digging deep into your inner self, into your fears, desires, weaknesses or
strengths. Practicing is about getting to know yourself better and meditating with your
instrument over your musical being and ideas. Of course I had a heavy musical training for
almost two decades, especially during my Berklee and NYU years when I was learning my craft. I
used to shed piano in the practice room for 6, 7 hours a day, but it was always because I was
hungry for music and new knowledge, never because I saw it as an obligation that needs to be
done on a daily basis. But I’ve never practiced technique or chops, it came to me through
playing the music. Similar situation was with the jazz theory. After reading many books and
working with several teachers for 3, 4 years, I finally started getting it thoroughly and deeply.
Everything all of a sudden started to make sense and jazz language to me became an open
source kind of an adjustable toy, rather than a list of rules and regulations, patterns and licks.
Once I’ve picked up traditional devices of jazz improvisation and incorporated them in my
playing, I started feeling a great freedom of using jazz as way of expression which can be mixed
with my own personal sounds and tricks on the piano, rather than feeling obliged to blindly
follow the tradition and purism of the jazz genre itself. As for the rhythm I use in my music, I
heavily rely on my Serbian musical heritage and odd meters. Not because I think it’s cool or hip,
but because I can’t help it. It is rooted deeply within my musical being and I simply have to write
music that way. Of course I use traditional meters and rhythms all the time, but irregular meters
are always there in some shape or form, whether hidden or exposed. The secret of hearing and
feeling them lays in not trying to count them. One should be aware of their theoretical
structure, but for playing them, one should just close their eyes and “use the force”. This is the
only way they will work in a natural and organic way. Cause you can clearly hear when
somebody is counting and artificially incorporating all those rhythmical divisions and hip
patterns just for the sake of it, rather than for the sake of the beauty of music.

5. Which harmonies and harmonic patterns do you prefer now?

I rely a lot on modal harmony mixed with non-functional chords and compound voicings. I also
use a lot of triadic material in my music, avoiding the use of dominant chords, especially the
ones with altered tensions. My harmonic progressions are based mostly on the voice-leading of
the moment, rather than on some preplanned chordal movement, as well as on contrapuntal
devices. I always work on exploring the dissonance in different ways. It is not hard to come up
with a complex or hip chord, or harmonic pattern. What is hard is to actually fully feel and
accept the dissonance with your entire being. To believe in it. As you grow as a human being
and a musician, your level of acceptance grows accordingly. What sounded weird, awkward or
not interesting enough to you 5 years ago, can end up sounding great today or tomorrow,
because you adopted a lot more life experiences in the meantime. Another challenge that
always inspires me is how to make musically complex stuff accessible to an average listener. I
believe that every single person has a hidden potential to hear artistic music in a right way, even
if this music is sometimes not easiest to listen to at first. But using certain musical and
psychological “tricks”, I believe it is possible to get from an average (and even a non-jazz)
listener, what is always a greatest compliment after the concert to me:”Wow, I really liked your
music and I don’t know why, because I normally do not listen to that kind of music.”

6. What do you love most about your new album 2018: <Dimitrije Vasiljevic Quintet -
Accidental Nomad>, how it was formed and what you are working on today.

Accidental Nomad is my third album of original music. It was recorded with my quintet from
Illinois, a group of good friends with whom I played together for years and also attended a
doctoral program in jazz at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This album has a
story that comes with it and that story addresses an outside world of an artist. My first two
albums “The Path of Silvan” and “Metaphor” had a task to deal with an inner world of an artist,
so I felt an urge to write music that will talk about a life journey of someone who’s never
planned of leaving their home, but fate led them far from home, made them wanderers who
are always on the road searching for valuable thruth of life and existence. Therefore the title –
Accidental Nomad. From the musical aspect, this album is a further exploration in the territory
of mixing the traditional Serbian music with jazz. One of the things I tried to achieve is a
cohesion of sounds among the instruments. And I think I succeeded because, even though this
is a band led by a pianist, I try to approach things differently from a traditional jazz quintet
where one would give pianist more solos and generally save more space for the pianistic stuff.
Contrary to this, I strive for the homogeneous sound where a listener can hear a small jazz
ensemble playing MUSIC and not 5 guys blowing over changes and using song themes only as
an excuse for a solo section that comes soon after the head was played. I try to create music
that only happens to be jazz. Not the other way around. Not jazz for the sake of jazz. I am not
saying I am not a fan of virtuosic soloing, on the contrary, that was and will be the meat and
bones of jazz. But I also think that jazz as a genre evolved so much over the decades and that it
shouldn’t be mainly a vehicle for showing one’s soloing abilities, but rather to be able to tell a
story through music and to try to make a unique, structured and original compositional
statement that will keep resounding in listener’s head much after the listening of the album is
over.

7. What’s the balance in music between intellect and soul?

That is probably the most difficult question for a musician and also a never-ending story. While I
was intensively studying music, I was convinced that, in music, the importance of intellect
prevails over soul at any time. And that is because, I believed, soul can be abused and misused
very easily if there is not enough intellectual support and understanding of what is being played
or composed. If that happens, banal music happens. Kitsch happens. That is why I was sure that
intellectual side of music is much more important because it ensures the artistic value in music
and makes it sound more profound, smart and interesting. When I started doing more
professional playing after I finished my music studies, I completely changed my opinion because
I realized that some of my most successful compositions came mostly from the soul and
intuition, and not from my theoretical knowledge of music. That is why I started completely
disregarding everything I’ve learned to that point about theory and used only common sense
and, of course, applied theory that was already built in my muscle memory while I play.
Sometime after, I came to what I believed was the right balance – using the soul to explore new
musical territories, but then using the intellect to chart it out and claim it. Now I believe that,
even there can’t be a precise recipe of what is the right balance between intellect and soul in
music, one should rely on both at all times, since both of them are powerful allies which need to
be used together in synergy, and not exclude each other.

8. Please any memories from gigs, jams, open acts and studio sessions which you’d like to
share with us?
In 2008, I was playing in the semi-final night of the Montreux Solo Jazz Piano Competition in
Switzerland. I remember that I was scared to death, because other pianists I competed with
were all much older and more experienced than me at that time. They all sounded great and I
was pretty sure I don’t belong there and that I will never make it to the finals. In that same
period I was reading a lot about what some pianists call “The Zone” which is a very particular
state of mind which you can enter right before and during your performance. It is not about
disconnecting from the audience, it is rather more about focusing so much on the music and the
timelessness of the performance while you play, that is helps with fighting the nervousness and
gives an artists a key to the hidden world of ideas which makes him play effortlessly and stay
super-focused and inspired during the performance. I am not sure whether my extreme
nervousness triggered it, or maybe my intense interest for it, yet, when my turn to play came, I
spontaneously entered “The Zone” for the first time in my life. I don’t remember my
performance that well since I truly was both present and elsewhere at the same time, but I
made it to finals and later won two prizes. Since that time, I always try to remember that playing
music for people is supposed to be fun and rewarding for both me and them. I try to remind
myself that performing music is supposed to be a spiritual experience, a unique journey through
time and space, and not a mental torture of being afraid to mistake a note or play a wrong key.
“The Zone” kept helping me through the years of playing, up to this very day.

9. How can we get young people interested in jazz when most of the standard tunes are
half a century old?

It is simple. Jazz is not only standard tunes. Jazz is not only this or that stream, style or genre.
Jazz grew to become much, much more than that. Jazz have changed its appearance every
decade since its beginnings through its many forms and subgenres. Then, after the emergence
of fusion-jazz in 1970s, it has taken a different path. From that time on, it started developing
itself more as a certain infinite but structured language and a way of personal musical
expression of each individual artist, rather than a strict genre with predefined stylistic
boundaries. Jazz is many things nowadays and it is becoming what classical music used to be for
centuries. It adopts the characteristics of the time it is played in, but at the same time it is not
losing its original sense and essence. If we compare it to a language, we can say that the words
and grammar always stay the same, only a dialect changes. Jazz is now successfully mixed with
world music, with hip-hop, with pop, rock, funk, classical, even electronic music. And I think we
should acknowledge this organic will of jazz itself and not try to stop it on its path of becoming
the world’s most successfully used universal language of music that connects people, traditions
and cultures all around the world.

10. John Coltrane said that music was his spirit. How do you understand the spirit and the
meaning of life?
I think that every person has their own understanding of these metaphysical and existential
topics such as spirit and meaning of life. John Coltrane certainly was a personification of music
itself which we can tell from many of his interviews and articles about him, as well as of course,
his timeless and genial music. However, I have a slightly different opinion about what spirit is,
and I believe that music cannot be a defining force of a human being, but rather a reflection of
nature and a key to the much bigger truth that lies somewhere within the ethereal plane of
existence. On a spiritual level, we are all interconnected and music serves as a coded language
of nature that helps us understand and recognize the harmony around us which makes things
and life flowing, functional and beautiful. So, those who were gifted with greater ability to
understand or even create music on a higher artistic level, serve only as conduits of nature or
God, to spread the truth and beauty among other people. They’ve been gifted to understand
deeper levels of nature’s harmony, but also cursed to feel the divine power only so much and
yet never be able to reach further, because, music as powerful as it is, is only a window to
higher planes. That is, I think, a big part of the reason why many great artists in history had such
a fruitful and rich spiritual lives on the inside, but were at the same time deeply unhappy on the
outside, with many of them ending up in the most tragic of ways. For me, meaning of life is
about finding one’s life meaning. Truly understanding what you are made of and what you are
made for, and then fulfilling the “personal prophecy”.

11. If you could change one thing in the musical world and it would become a reality, what
would that be?

I know this will sound like utopia, but if I could miraculously change one thing in music, that
would be a business aspect of it. To be a successful musician in modern day and age, you have
to be many more things than just a good performer or writer. You have to be able to negotiate,
advertise yourself, manage all kinds of websites, social media and other means of marketing,
you need to have a basic understanding of law, of finances, to have a bunch of intermediaries in
the form of agents, lawyers and managers who will take care of your bookings, image, accounts,
copyright, etc. All of this, in my opinion, takes not only focus, but also the magic away from
music and art. If artists could be funded from a magical third-party budget source in order to
freely create and perform, and then share their art for free with all people without the need to
actually live from their art, I feel that there will be much more good music happening, and much
less crappy, shallow and kitsch music that surrounds us in big amounts nowadays.

12. Who do you find yourself listening to these days?

I always listen to many different genres, styles and artists. Not just jazz and not exclusively jazz.
So, on my iPod (yes I still use one of those) I have anything from Brad Mehldau and Fred
Hersch’s albums to Yaron Herman, Tigran Hamasyan, Ari Hoenig, Vardan Ovsepian, Tomasz
Stanko, Marcin Wasilewski, Itamar Borochov, as well as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bartok, Brahms,
but also Serbian traditional music, world music from many other parts of the world, electronic
music, rap, etc.

13. Let’s take a trip with a time machine, so where and why would you really wanna go?

My favorite era of human history is medieval ages. Becoming a knight who fights for honor or
ideals, or a lonely warrior who wanders the world knowing no pain, always seemed much more
appealing to me than being a spoiled modern citizen of present day and age armed with a cell
phone, all kinds of gadgets and ever-evolving talent for complaining about life and his
surroundings. I also tend to use medieval and mythical references for the background stories of
the music I write and am a big fan of all kinds of movies, books and games put in this kind of
time frame and setting.

14. I have been asking you so far, now may I have a question from yourself…

As a jazz critic, you must have come in contact with a great number of all kinds of different jazz
musicians from all around the globe. Even though we all play and compose differently and there
is a great deal of variety in approach to music, jazz and life for each one of us I would be
interested in what is it that you find most in common for all of us jazz people who you
interviewed so far?

Best regards!!! Simon Sargsyan

Celebrating jazz 24/7 since 2007. Editorial offices in Boston – MA – USA, Paris – France and in
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