Doo’s Blues: Unveiling the Rare Belgian Recordings of Jazz Legend Dusko Goykovich

Sdban Records present Doo’s Blues, a collection of previously unreleased Belgian 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. 

Born and raised in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dusko Goykovich 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 on the West German jazz scene, where he played with the renowned big bands of Kurt Edelhagen and Kenny Clarke & Francy Boland and made appearances at the world’s largest jazz festivals such as Comblain-la-Tour in Belgium, Antibes in France and Newport. Goykovich then 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). Today this release 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. For the first session Goykovich was accompanied by Belgian vibraphonist Fats Sadi’s quartet. Later that same day Goykovich was also joined by the BRT Jazzorkest. Less than two months later Goykovich found himself once again ensconced in BRT’s Brussels studios, this time heading up an international quintet that also included Bent Jædig (tenor saxophone and flute), Scott Bradford (piano), Jimmy Woode (bass) and Al Jones (drums). 

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 was compiled by Lander Lenaerts. Lander’s a DJ and writer who plays an important part in documenting the rich jazz history Belgium has to offer.