OGNJEN TVRTKOVIÆ (Ljubljana, Slovenia / Sarajevo, BiH)

The Phenomenon of Sarajevo Pop Scene and Group Indeksi as Initiator

In the period of transition from the 1950's to the 1960's we can see the first breaches of rock culture in Yugoslavia. Sarajevo wasn't exception and in the beginning of the 1960's in town beside Miljacka river a very powerful local rock scene was formed.

The first period of imitating foreign idols of rock music was in Sarajevo much shorter than in other Yugoslav cities. The bands like Indeksi, Kodeksi and Oak, including some others, started writing their own compositions, they adopted the standards of the world trends, but in addition they have also produced a very specific sound.

Considering this fact much more happened. The first fact was that Sarajevo and the whole Bosnia and Herzegovina had always been one of the ideologically most powerful centers even though very distant from other world centers and sources of information. While in that time groups from Zagreb, Belgrade and Ljubljana could keep track with current trends in the rock world, new songs were regularly played on the radio, that kind of things didn't go through the public media in Sarajevo (San Remo pop festival had the strongest influence). They were listened in small centres ran by youth organisation out of a range of different ideological Kerber's. There were many such centers in Sarajevo.

Pop group Indeksi was formed in the beginning of the 1960's and the group achieved a very high grade of instrumental and performing skills. At the same time in various editorial departments of Radio Sarajevo, specially those connected with the popular music, the youth began to experiment.

Indeksi made their first recordings of original songs, at first instrumental and after a while also vocal-instrumental, producing original sound based on intelligent ranges of rock of that time, instrumental creativity and distinguished by interesting voice of their singer.

This was the first original Yugoslav rock group, which showed a perfect feeling for the authorial work and profiling sound. After that other bands came to the scene including Bijelo dugme (White Button) one of the most specific rock groups and from that period we should talk about Sarajevo pop school. Sarajevo got the nickname "Yugoslav Nashville".

We can detect following processes:

• a great deal of authors who were trying to invent a formula which would be successful all over Yugoslavia;
• the deficit of institutions which would be able to follow the musical development, which made rock music a big selling industry (media, studios, producers, publishers);
• problems with the government and the official ideology;
• departure of groups and authors for other centers;