Druga Godba music festival celebrates 20th anniversary

Slovenia's famous "Druga godba" music festival celebrated its 20th anniversary this year. It's among the top European festivals for ethnic and jazz music and was the festival in South-Eastern Europe to feature performers of African, Asian and Latin-American ethno-pop. This year's festival has just finished. Bogdan Benigar is its director:

"Well, the main concept of this year was more to present a really good accompanying programme, because we had the 20th anniversary and we thought this would be the right thing to do. In the main programme we presented 13 groups from 13 countries. We are first of all satisfied because we were able to realize all the announced events in the main programme and in the accompanying programme. This was definitely the main goal of the festival this year. Secondly, we are, although we don't know the right numbers yet, we are also satisfied with the financial impact of the festival, of course we are very satisfied with the reviews, we already received for this year's concerts it seems to be one of the nicest, one of the best festivals in recent years."

You mentioned 20 years. This is a really long tradition. How do you keep up with the work and with new ideas?

"As long as there are new artists and undiscovered music around us then we don't have to be afraid about new ideas. We are not afraid of having another 20 years of a really interesting festival with music coming from parts of the world, which were never presented in Slovenia yet, we are also expecting new musical styles to arise as we presented for the first time at this year's festival, like a hip hop concert or African music or Reggae, we expect to find something new in the future, too."

The festival "Druga godba" will certainly continue to take place for the next 20 years or more and to give you a taste of the music played at the festival this was Dobet Gnahore and Nadodo.