Part 1

Name: Leonardo Pavkovic
Nationality: Bosnian-born, global citizen
Occupation: Label founder at MoonJune, booker, concert organiser, promoter
Current Release: MoonJune's latest releases include Beledo's Flotando en el vacio, remastered versions of Soft Machine's Drop and Floating World, Gary Husband & Steve Hackett's "Skazka For Boys (No. 13)", and Mark Wingfield's The Gathering.

[Read our Beledo interview]
[Read our Soft Machine interview]
[Read our Steve Hackett interview]
[Read our Mark Wingfield interview]

If you enjoyed this Leonardo Pavkovic interview and would like to know more about the releases he's currently working on, visit the official MoonJune website. The label is also on bandcamp.

For the views of other artists on the MoonJune roster, check out the following features:

[Read our Stephan Thelen interview]
[Read our Stephan Thelen interview about Rothko Spaces]
[Read our Markus Reuter interview]
[Read our Dewa Budjana interview]



Jazz has always had an interesting relationship between honoring its roots and exploring the unknown. What does an ideal balance between these two poles look like from your perspective?

Jazz is the music genre which allows, but not in all cases, freedom of musical expression. But there are still jazz police snubs who would criticize those who take extra mileage to explore the limitless exploratory dimensions of the unknown, claiming that there is no respect for roots and tradition.

Miles Davis was slammed when he released ‘Bitches Brew’ and ‘On the Corner,' fusion was vilified, as well extreme improvisation of icons such as Derek Bailey or Ornette Coleman. Jazz musicians playing electric instruments bordering rock, or rock and ethnic musicians navigating in jazz waters were seen with suspicion and often disdain by the jazz police.

I think everybody should play what they want to play and how they want to play and with whom they want to play and using instruments they want to play. While it is fine to to honour the roots, I do not see anything wrong with departing from the roots and leaving a bit or nothing related to the past.

I am all for the future, I miss the future, I do not miss the past. While I will love forever Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington or Keith Jarrett, I welcome to my own jazz world also Cream, Jimi Hendrix, King Crimson 1970-1974, and in recent years Yussef Dayes or the futuristic music of Markus Reuter such as the Truce and Anchor & Burden projects or Dwiki Dharmawan’s unclassifiable ‘Hari Ketiga’ musical adventures.

I am more enthusiastic and excited about the unknown than about the known and familiar.

[Read our Yussef Dayes interview]

What, would you say, are some of the most interesting and inspiring ideas behind the improvisations of some of your favorite artists?

I like to feel a sense of adventure and freedom, but that doesn't mean that's the only musical philosophy I like.

I'm realizing, as I get older and more mature as a listener, that I still want to hear something new. A lot of ‘mainstream’ progressive rock, fusion and jazz recorded and performed in the recent 1-2 decades doesn’t excite me so much. I am a huge fan of all those 3 genres but what is accepted in the micro-mainstreams of those two genres it’s more often than not boring to me.

But thankfully, there's so much wonderful music being made lately that I'm relieved I don't have to waste my time listening to what "everyone else" is listening to, following trends. There's so much amazing music being made right now, more than ever before in the history of music. But of course, no one can know everything that's going on.

There is a total oversaturation in music. Once, the market was dominated by artists from the United States and the United Kingdom and a small group of other countries. Now, the world is much much bigger, with great music coming from 200+ countries worldwide. I have released albums of artists coming from Indonesia, Spain, Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Slovenia, Belgium, Spain, Uruguay, Japan, Israel, Iran, and not only from Italy, Germany, UK and the USA.

Jazz, or the kind of jazz, or the kind of fusion that MoonJune Records promotes, is not the kind of jazz that would make the often narrow-minded gatekeepers of jazz happy. I am happy and proud to expose the truly innovative and futuristic approach to improvisation and jazz, especially in the cases of Indonesian pianists and keyboardists, the greats Riza Arshad and Dwiki Dharmawan, American-born English poet and guitar innovator Mark Wingfield, and German guitarist Markus Reuter.

With the exception of Riza Arshad, all the other afore mentioned maestros have one thing in common: the incredible Israeli drummer Asaf Sirkis, Soft Machine's new drummer, who replaced the legendary John Marshall on drums, deserves a special chapter. With Sephardic and Mediterranean roots and a love of Indian music, and being influenced by giants like Tony Williams, Gary Husband, Bill Bruford and Chad Wackerman, and with a Holdsworthian mentality in the harmonic approach to performance and composition, this quiet and absolutely great soul is an erupting volcano of innovative jazz and ideas that go beyond jazz.

Undoubtedly one of the geniuses of modern music, Markus Reuter has benefited greatly from his 15+ year association with Stick Men, one of the most influential bands I have ever had the chance to hear and work with in my life. But it was his association with Asaf Sirkis that catapulted Markus Reuter into a new universe of sonic exploration and far-reaching improvisation.

Markus’ projects such as Truce, Anchor and Burden, Oculus, and especially his collective project such as Lighthouse, The Stone House, and Dwiki Dharmawan’s Hari Ketiga, are examples of the monumental interaction that Markus and Asaf have in common. I call it 23rd century jazz.



Maybe I’m a little too biased because I’m mentioning my own productions, but those are projects that would never have happened if it weren’t for me. They were my friends and I wanted them to be organically and spontaneously free to uncompromisingly express their inner freedom.

That’s jazz to me.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to running a label?

In one word: unorthodox. I may not know how to run a label like any “label boss” would. I’m more of a person who makes projects possible, which then end up on CDs or LPs, those projects have a catalog number and a barcode, and are distributed and sold to small niche audiences.

I’m not sure I ever wanted to have a label, it just happened, and while it gave me a lot of personal satisfaction, it cost me a lot of money, because most of the albums I was putting out, with a few glorious exceptions, are projects, and not touring artists with marquee value. But I am happy and proud of each of my releases.

But maybe I need to drastically change my approach. I'm more of an A&R person and not someone who can run the label. My booking business is my main activity, not the label. I do it all by myself, a one-man-run record label, and not because I'm a control freak, but simply because there's no money to hire other people and I'm not sure anyone can do what I do. Because it’s so unorthodox! But it’s time for a change.

Also, I’ve been told by many professionals in industry that my big mistake was not taking any percentage or commission from their publishing pertinent to MoonJune releases, being a facilitator, executive producer and the project enabler. I actually do not own any publishing whatsoever, zero publishing. And I have no idea why. Maybe because I never understood publishing and was giving all digital rights to all musicians. Despite the fact that I probably own 25+ masters, I never got any benefit from it.

My duty was was to make things and projects possible without thinking so much about the consequences or how to make money. But I’ve generated a lot of buzz and my albums have been reviewed and aired on every continent, in over 60 countries around the world, from Jamaica to Malaysia, from Costa Rica to Uzbekistan, from Iceland to China. Naturally, much more so in the first 15 years of the label, then things were going badly due to the oversaturation of products in the market and the “death” of many print and online magazines and specialized radio stations. But I still get a lot of important coverage, and MoonJune Records is highly praised by various polls, such as Downbeat’s Reader’s Poll, and others. Some musicians know how to maximize benefits of it, but some, unfortunately not.

There is a question that I ask myself lately and very often: why do I do it?

(For an interesting perspective, we recommend our interview with Laurent Bizot about his NØ FØRMAT! Label]

What were some of the musical experiences which planted a seed for your interest in jazz?

I think that watching Louis Armstrong on TV when I was a child was my first "contact" with jazz. Maybe I wasn't aware that it was jazz, I was attracted by a nice, smiling black guy who played the trumpet and sang in an unusual way. Later I was told that this was jazz.

Then, as a teenager, I was introduced to jazz by watching some black and white American and French films with my maternal grandmother, the soundtrack was jazz music, that’s what I was told by my grandmother, that’s jazz, when I asked about the music. My first, most interesting jazz experience was watching a concert of the Oscar Peterson trio on Italian TV in the mid-70s together with my Italian stepfather, and I remember also Sarah Vaughn. And then, in the late 70s and early 80s, I started getting into rock music of the 60s and early 70s. Most of my friends were 10 or 12 years older than me, and thanks to them, I started liking and buying albums by Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

My first real jazz concert was Weather Report in October 1980, which was one of the most brutal and intense live concert experiences I have ever had. My 18 years old mind simply has exploded by watching and hearing Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul, Peter Erskine. Being more and more into jazz-rock-fusion and collecting albums by Return To Forever, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Soft Machine, Frank Zappa, Italian bands Perigeo and Area, Yugoslavian band Leb I Sol, led me to discover and dig jazz artists such us Keith Jarrett, Sun Ra, Gil Evans, Keith Tippett, Freddie Hubbard, CTI and Blue Note record labels.

And then I saw the Pat Metheny Group and discovered ECM, entering into a very new dimension of the music which became the soundtrack of my life with jazz and beyond jazz artists such us Terje Rypdal, Jan Garbarek, Eberhard Weber, Egberto Gismonti, John Abercrombie, John Surman and many others.

[Read our Steve Rodby of the Pat Metheny Group interview]

At certain point in my life my physical album collection approached close to 7-8 thousand units and a good 30-35% of it was jazz or sort of jazz. Now, my BandCamp digital collection is more than 3500 albums and I believe 55-60% of it can be considered jazz.

I like many genres of music, but I think music with some or most jazz elements is the one that is closest to my heart, and the vast majority of the 140+ albums released on MoonJune can be considered as such.
 
How do jazz and jazz culture factor that influence your record label activities?

I see life as jazz, life is nothing but improvisation from the moment you come into this world. If it weren't for that factor, life would just be uniform and boring and would probably never exist.

The Big Bang is the beginning of the improvisation of the universe. The universe exploded and everything that came after that took a bunch of different directions, creating the cosmos of which we are direct descendants. But cosmic chaos has its own rules and they are all natural. Once Homo Sapiens decided to impose some unnatural rules, cosmic jazz was about to be endangered. But once the business started to dominate the artistry, the artistic human mind again risked to be jeopardized.

The mid- to late 1960s and early 1970s were probably the only period in the history of the entertainment business when the business allowed freedom of expression and when the mainstream media - press, radio and TV, were friendly to In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Bitches Brew, Tubular Bells, Köln Concert, Tales of Topographic Oceans.



Psychedelia, Woodstock, early Progressive Rock, freer Jazz, early Fusion, the arrival to the world markets of Blues, Afro-Caribbean music, Bossa Nova, Tango, Reggae, Afro Beat, Indian Music, Gamelan in addition to technological discoveries, advancement of human rights, interest of Western civilization to embrace the rest of the world rather than continuing to live in a bubble - this was the key factor to hope in a better planet for everyone.

But then accountants and bankers started to control everything in the music world and it coincided with the arrival or Reaganism and Thatcherism, which temporarily benefited economies of two major entertainment business power countries, the USA and the UK. And slowly but surely the adventurous spirit of music and arts started to decline. Yes, a lot of mainstream music made major money in the 1980s, and there was industry in the 1980s and 1990s which permitted many (but not all) to prosper.

But the industry was dictating musicians both directly and indirectly to be entertainers and not artists, to create product to sell to uniform masses and to satisfy masses - give the people what they want, not to give them what the artist want -, that was the motto. Meanwhile, thanks to promotional propaganda, the mainstream industry was brainwashing the masses, forcing them to accept what they wanted to sell, not allowing so much freedom for people to think, accepting anything that was offered to them in prefabricated packages.

What gave hope to music, in my opinion, was the CD revolution, which exploded in the late 80s and early 90s, and the trend lasted for two decades. Bands were getting back together, musicians started to regain their intellectual properties and rights (of course not all of them), forgotten music resurfaced, and the whole trend influenced a lot of young artists to believe in progressive music and jazz, and quality music in general. And independent record labels were gaining momentum.

I realized all that when I came to New York in the summer of 1990. I already knew a lot of music recorded before, but the 1990s was when I discovered tons of old and new music, I started collecting CDs like crazy. I think all that led me to get involved in what I'm doing now, organically and spontaneously.