DESCRIPTION:
This was the first bigger show for the new improvising band featuring the Panonian/ Serbian/ Balkanian and global heavyweight champions Stevan Kovač Tickmayer and Boris Kovač, together on stage after many years. I was almost in tears when the show was announced and it lived to my expectations. Here's some press release goodness:

Boris Kovač -- soprano and alto saxophone, bass clarinet
Stevan Kovač Tickmayer -- piano
Miloš Matić -- double bass
Lav Kovač -- drums

More: http://ringring.rs/node/265

Composers and instrumentalists Boris Kovač and Stevan Kovač Tickmayer have been engaging themselves for at least 3 decades in improvised music and researching the relations between improvisation and composition. In their common project, the first since Ritual Nova in 1987., called ULTIMA ARMONIA - with the participation of Miloš Matić, double bass player and composer, and Lav Kovač, one of the most talented Serbian young musicians, drummer and percussionist - in the phase of their creative maturity they decided to create a collaborative musical act, with an open shape, starting from improvisation.
In the poetical sense, they find an ontological "background" in the traditional music and culture of the Pannonian-Carpathian-Balkan area, which represents their common spiritual, cultural and historical context. The music of this quartet is a collective attempt to redefine and reaffirm the idea of equal improvisational music based on the dialogue among the musicians, who are equal, a dialogue whose has its deep roots in the musical tradition of the above mentioned areas. One of the usual prejudices concerning the term "improvisation" is the immediate connection of this musical practice with jazz music. Even though the musicians who take part into this project do not dissociate from some jazz influence while developing their musical expression -- ULTIMA ARMONIA cannot be classified as jazz only . With their musical hermeneutics, the musicians add to the tradition new directions and guidelines, taking from it only what they consider vivid and inspirational for them. At the same time, they try to "revive" it, using the contemporary course of musical thinking: the language of structural improvisation enriched with positive experience of musical modernism and post-modernism as with some elements of the heritage of older musical periods, especially the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the early Baroque, times during which improvisational approach to musical creation was still taken in account, and which later inevitably atrophied, in accordance with Western specialization and labour division on composers and performers. In this sense this project also represents a contribution to redefine the very basis of Western musical practice.