Interview by Davor Hrvoj with Karlo Ilić on the publication of Taksim Bop, published in the "Mediterran" supplement of Novi list, Rijeka, 21 June 2026.
Davor Hrvoj: What was your vision in shaping these texts?
Karlo Ilić: I never consciously chose to write about music. Because of its subject matter, Taksim Bop is usually classified as music writing or cultural journalism, whereas it is really nothing more than prose, with a small amount of poetry. Admittedly, everything in it is true. If, at any moment, you think it isn't, what you have really concluded is that reality itself must be lying.
Let's say I wanted to convey a fragment of my own understanding of music, which I experience as evidence that beauty and meaning exist, as a sign of Truth or a reflection of Mystery, as "the last magic," and so on. Yet nothing in the book is truly secret or esoteric. It has simply been abandoned to oblivion from the very beginning, often considered inappropriate or merely out of step with the spirit of its own time, and ours. I could invent expressions like these indefinitely, but only one point really matters: what we call magic does not remove us from reality. Quite the opposite, it returns us to it. We need it precisely where language ceases to suffice and where rationality is no longer the only meaningful way of understanding. Otherwise, we would not be having this conversation at all, nor discussing our need for art.
How did you choose your subjects?
Everything that appears in the book imposed itself upon me as part of everyday life, whether as a musician, a writer, an antiquarian bookseller, an ordinary person, or a parent. If this is magical realism, then reality itself is magical, and perhaps nowhere is that easier to discover than through music.
Music opened me to everything that eventually found its way into the book. Some people would describe that level as spiritual, others simply as human, but the distinction hardly matters. Even musical instruments absorb sound—that is, physical vibrations. They gradually acquire a character of their own and forever retain the human traces of those who have played them, transcending their merely instrumental function.
Music cannot exist without duration, which is why it has been called "the art of decorating time." Yet it unfolds above—or even against—minutes and seconds, as though it governed time rather than obeyed it. This is especially evident in rhythmic cycles: music constantly departs only to return to itself, exposing the impotence of chronology. Even if everything that exists is subject to the passage of time, the ease with which we impose our own rhythm upon it—our music—feels like uncovering one of life's deepest secrets.
One of the book's themes is also the almost surreal possibility of utopia, something I experienced while playing music. Its reality is directly proportional to the freedom and communicative capacity of everyone involved. If I imagine such a utopian human community, stripped of money and competition, where instead of expanding emptiness through artificial intelligence we enrich one another with beauty through intelligent art, then music would represent the highest form of communication: synchronized rhythms without a metronome, alongside poetry as its verbal counterpart, both striving to express the essence of things.
If we lack the ear—or the capacity—for such an experience, that does not necessarily mean we believe we dislike music. We still listen to it. Yet we may hear nothing of what makes it transformative. Instead, we seek comfort, personal associations, entertainment, productivity, perhaps even justification for our own alienation, or, worst of all, reinforcement of our existing worldview.
What inspired you? Why did you choose these particular musicians and works?
Whether we look at the unique work of a painter or the repetitive ornamental patterns on a traditional folk costume, in both cases we receive information of some kind. Listening to music is no different. We learn something about its source, but also something beyond it: we experience a portion of the inspiration behind the work and may ultimately become inspired ourselves.
Take, for example, the composition "Tunji." It was recorded in 1962, yet even today it sounds neither outdated nor contemporary. It is as though it arrived from some distant future. In the story of the same title, I acknowledged some of my greatest influences, which I have never tried to conceal—from John Coltrane's Afrofuturism to Ursula K. Le Guin's Taoist science fiction. The narrator arrives at this circular conclusion:
"Behind everything stands rhythm. Behind rhythm stands time. Behind time stands infinity."
What is the relationship between music and time?
The sound recordings produced in recent years by generative audio models, devoid of any awareness of love or death, are harmful to the human being because they deprive us of rhythm, leaving us breathless in time. The statistical plausibility or resemblance of such products to the creative work they imitate cannot be compared to music any more than it can be compared to intelligence.
Love cannot be reduced to instructions, nor can beauty. But if we derive even the slightest enjoyment from art—or if it has gone so far as to shape our lives—then it becomes essential to ask what gives it meaning and value, much as we do when choosing food or other necessities. This is not an abstract question. Quite the contrary. When we listen to a melody, we do not consciously measure the intervals between notes, just as we do not count syllables while reading a poem. Yet we still assign meaning to symbols and rhythm to time. The only true connection between music and time is human experience.
What is the relationship between music and literature?
The sound and rhythm of a written word—whether spoken aloud or heard only in the mind's ear—matter to me just as much as its context and meaning. Stylistically, I wanted the prose to be read immediately, rhythmically.
Oral tradition remains by far the longest and most formative period in the development of both civilization and humanity itself. That is true of literature no less than of music, from singing and playing instruments to storytelling around a fire. Writing relocates living art from the community by freezing letters or musical notes onto paper or a screen. That is not necessarily a bad thing, although it did indirectly contribute to the disappearance of improvisation within the European classical tradition.
Viewed across the broader history of music, taksim was transmitted and developed orally for centuries without notation. Jazz, to this day, resists notation in many essential respects because of its rhythmic subtleties, phrasing, and blue notes. Rhythm is just as important in a text as meaning itself. That is why, in every sense of the phrase, it matters to "have good timing."
How and why do music and literature intertwine in your life and work?
I don't separate my writing from my music, just as I don't separate myself from my work. That is why I refuse to hold a book launch unless I can also perform music there.
Not because it is indispensable, nor because I play better than I speak—although that happens to be true—but because performance allows me to enrich and deepen what I want to communicate through direct artistic action. It lets me return to the original source of my inspiration instead of merely delivering theoretical explanations or autobiographical anecdotes like these.
The beauty of improvised music is that every performance is unique, regardless of the instruments involved. The same is true of speaking about a book. A conversation or monologue need not be confined to a script. The only constant is my gratitude for being able to do any of it at all: to offer someone, in my own way, a small share of all that beauty.
Why did you include themes and historical figures connected with the cultures of the Middle East?
Music unites the world more easily and more quickly than the cheapest airline ticket.
And yet, ever since Taksim Bop came out, people have been telling me that the book reveals countless unknown threads connecting East and West, even though I never conceived it as a dialogue between opposing worlds. Your question itself is revealing, because it defines everything outside the Western cultural horizon as "Oriental," even when we are speaking about artistic achievements that belong to humanity as a whole.
Take Umm Kulthum, the great pan-Arab contralto, whose performances held an entire nation spellbound for half a century. Singing of unhappy love in the tradition of One Thousand and One Nights, she exercised a social and political influence that is almost impossible to imagine in our own context. No equivalent exists. Not even the Beatles, let alone Edith Piaf or Maria Callas, commanded quite that mixture of reverence and authority.
Yet there is no genuine boundary where one culture ends and another begins, however much nation-states may try to persuade us otherwise. Our own culture is filled with so-called foreign words and foreign influences that have long since become part of our inheritance. Accepting music from elsewhere does not negate whatever music may be indigenous to us. The more important question is this: what kind of culture are we willing to embrace, and do we hold our own culture to the same standards?
What is the relationship between jazz and other cultures, besides the fact that it is played and loved all over the world?
One of jazz's defining characteristics—and the reason the great historian Eric Hobsbawm called it, as early as 1959, "a phenomenon of crucial importance to anyone studying twentieth-century society and art"—is precisely its extraordinary capacity to absorb influences. I might even say all the music of the world.
It is no accident that Yusef Lateef is regarded as the father of world music, irrespective of his influence on John Coltrane, who himself studied Indian ragas. Likewise, what Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry created can be called many things besides jazz, which itself emerged from folk traditions, the blues, and countless other sources.
Some define jazz as modern improvised music in a state of perpetual development. Others regard it as the world's shared ethnic music. Still others insist, quite responsibly, that jazz cannot exist without swing and the blue note inherited from the blues. In different ways, all of them are right.
Only those who know virtually nothing about jazz imagine it to be either an outdated form of popular entertainment or a fixed, established art music. That is the paradox.
For that reason there is no real dichotomy in the title Taksim Bop. Its meaning emerges through the dialogue between two musical languages, just as the sounds of the Janissary bands eventually became an integral part of European classical music and, later, of jazz itself.
What fascinates me most about taksim is its centuries-old tradition of complex musical improvisation, preserved primarily through oral transmission. In contrast, the Western art music tradition largely abandoned improvisation until the arrival of jazz. Both taksim and bebop are, at heart, languages—or perhaps systems—for musical improvisation and communication. In both cases they express "nothing more" than music, just as you and I are "nothing more" than human beings who acquire meaning only through successful communication with one another.
How did you learn about those cultures?
Beyond listening, I devote myself to everything I consider essential to understanding music. Ideally, for the same reason, I would know every language perfectly—Arabic, Turkish, Greek, for example—even though it has become fashionable to say that music transcends language altogether. In many respects, that is true. But there are other forms of understanding for which language remains indispensable.
I am nowhere near such a polyglot. My point is simply this: as long as we continue saying things like "minor keys sound sad," "major keys sound happy," or "this music is difficult to listen to," we are not necessarily mistaken. We simply need to remember that we are operating within a musical grammar valid only inside a particular cultural practice, and only in relation to our own knowledge and experience.
What first compelled you to write these texts? Why does John Coltrane occupy so much space in the book? Why is he important to you? Was he a kind of preacher? How did he promote spirituality through music?
Although Taksim Bop is my literary debut, its origins reach back to high school, when I first heard John Coltrane.
At the time, I had no idea I was writing a book. I only knew that something in my life had changed. Coltrane opened within me an entirely unfamiliar, immeasurable space for experiences and insights I had never imagined possible. From that moment onward, I could begin connecting those experiences with others and, eventually, perhaps even pass them on through music or literature.
Alongside Yusef Lateef, Coltrane was among the first jazz musicians to confront the question of expressing one's humanity—and therefore one's spirituality—through music itself. They consciously sought to communicate a lived spiritual experience through sound.
In that sense, Coltrane was never preaching. He simply offered his own experience. We may describe it as human, spiritual, or musical, and every one of those descriptions is both accurate and ultimately inadequate.
In what sense can music be healing?
I assume you are not referring to complementary therapies or contemporary music therapy—as used, for example, with patients suffering from Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease—but rather to music as it exists in the everyday lives of musicians and listeners.
It is true that musical hospitals existed throughout the Ottoman Empire until the twentieth century and the arrival of modern Western medicine. Yet there is no need to mystify either those institutions or the practical system of maqam on which their therapeutic methods were based. Following thinkers such as Al-Farabi and Avicenna, these practices were not opposed to modern medicine. In many respects they were complementary. Rather than eliminating individual symptoms, they sought to restore balance—to re-establish homeostasis.
In truth, the matter is quite simple. Once we begin to recognize the real potential of sound frequencies and treat music with the same seriousness that we afford food or drink, the healing qualities of sound cease to appear particularly esoteric.
Why is spirituality in music important, and how does it manifest itself? What have you learned about it, and what do you hope readers will take away?
The very fact that we consciously ask about the relationship between music and humanity tells me the book was worth writing.
Especially now, when we sacrifice our own children to corporations in exchange for the statistically acceptable production of sequences of sounds that merely resemble music—without the slightest trace of human error, blistered fingers, interrupted breath, or, for that matter, swing.
That is why jazz will continue to represent the possibility of utopia: a place where everyone is free to express their own experience of beauty—or anything else—provided we remember that such freedom emerged from a painful history, in opposition to an unjust system that still attempts to co-opt this music, making it acceptable only insofar as it can be commercialized.
Jazz, in that sense, can only truly be played by believers—not in any religious sense, but because it demands the devotion of an entire lifetime while rarely offering anything resembling financial security. Musicians such as Sonny Rollins and Wayne Shorter often equated practising their instruments with meditation, and performing live with a spiritual experience. For them, music was literally a way of life. Action is belief, and belief is action. Humanity itself is spirituality.
Every major leap in the evolution of jazz—from New Orleans through urban bebop to free jazz—was fundamentally an act of resistance carried out by social outsiders.
On the level of language itself, especially with the openly political voice of free jazz, the word jazz acquired negative connotations as a label imposed by white Americans upon music created primarily by African Americans. Rather than continuing to use what he called "an insignificant four-letter word," Yusef Lateef, whose modest literary work I collected and translated into Croatian in 2019 under the title Autophysiopsychic Writings, attempted to introduce his own term into English dictionaries: autophysiopsychic music—music arising from the physical, mental, and spiritual self of its performer.
Lateef believed that too much blood, sweat, and suffering had gone into the creation of this music for it still to be called jazz and played merely in places where people drink and smoke.
Among today's major musicians, Nicholas Payton insists instead on the term Black American Music. Here, black should not be understood as a racial category but as a historically grounded designation opposing the whitening of both the music itself and the hard-won legacy created by its original makers, to the benefit of those who inherited the privileges of plantation owners.
How much of this is connected with your playing the oud? How did you learn the instrument? Why the double bass as well as the guitar?
Art has been a necessity for me for as long as I can remember. Like almost everything else in my life, I have approached it as an autodidact.
Creatively speaking, improvisation has always been my point of departure rather than my destination. A destination is comparatively easy to imagine; the path by which we arrive there is not. That path depends upon chance.
As for performance, I would happily play every instrument in the world. Time, however, limits me mostly to the double bass, the oud—a fretless lute—and the guitar, which I first began learning in primary school.
I think what all of us truly love is the process itself: playing, creating together, learning and practising throughout our lives. I know from personal experience that this has nothing to do with ambition. If ambition had been my driving force, I would have published something long ago.
I learned the oud the same way I learned every other instrument: by listening and transcribing recordings, from the earliest sound documents to the present day. It is a pity that this ancient lute remains exotic throughout Croatia—and indeed across much of the Balkans, despite surviving in traditional music as far north as Macedonia. It is an instrument of extraordinary beauty and, historically speaking, roughly as significant to world music as the piano, though vastly older.
If you ask why I play any instrument at all, the answer is not the instrument itself but the music. I honestly could not say whether I would rather play one than another. I have no particular goal except to continue doing so. I am grateful simply for the opportunity—and for everyone willing to listen without prejudice, and with genuine understanding.
You have also become an organiser. How did you come to organise concerts at the Ex libris antiquarian bookshop in Rijeka, where you worked until recently?
I started working at Ex libris when I was twenty-two. Before that, I had worked as a stagehand in the theatre and on construction sites, while continuing to read, listen to music, write, and play. I never went to university. I would save whatever money I could and hitchhike somewhere.
Thanks to Željko Međimorec, the owner and editor-in-chief of Ex libris, I was given remarkable freedom to pursue whatever interested me, provided I didn't bankrupt the company. That meant I could devote myself to publishing books on jazz from the very beginning, with the support of friends such as Vojo Šindolić, who translated and edited the first title in our Jazz Beat series, from which the collection itself took its name. Later came Charles Mingus's Beneath the Underdog, translated by Saša Drach. I had the privilege of selecting the interviews for Davor Hrvoj's Frozen Music, translated several books myself, and, as we speak, another Jack Kerouac title is about to appear.
After a handful of spontaneous performances in the antiquarian bookshop, I couldn't help noticing that the space possessed extraordinary acoustics and an intimacy that suited both musicians and audiences alike. From then on I organised twelve concerts there, as circumstances allowed.
Curiously, I never had to work particularly hard to find performers. In most cases, they approached me themselves.
I'm especially pleased because every concert attracted a wonderful audience despite receiving very limited media attention. All of them remain available to watch and listen to on my YouTube channel under the rather casually invented title Jazz By The Book. I intend to continue organising these kinds of small, intimate performances regardless of where they take place.
The Rijeka jazz scene?
Rijeka is a relatively small city with the ambitions of a much larger one.
It seems to me that scarcely a week goes by without jazz being played somewhere. At the same time, the public often refuses to recognise the connection between punk, rock, and jazz. Ever since I became involved in this world, I've heard people lament the disappearance of rock from the "former city of rock" and mourn the closure of the city's only jazz club—Tunel, which, although it existed for only three and a half years, achieved something genuinely remarkable.
What makes this strange is that for the past thirteen years we've been able to hear—and play—jazz every Thursday as something perfectly ordinary in the city centre. That tradition owes above all to the efforts of saxophonist Denis Razumović Razz, its driving force, together with drummer Rajko Ergić and everyone else who has participated in the hundreds of jam sessions held at Book Caffé Dnevni boravak, and more recently at Klub mladih Rijeka.
Beyond that, there are many other dedicated enthusiasts who organise concerts throughout the year alongside the better-known festivals. Vladimir Matošević, for instance, tirelessly curates the Friday Jazz in Zamet series at the Baptist Church. Then there are smaller events with every chance of becoming lasting traditions, such as the outdoor concerts organised by Vedran Ružić—Jazz va njivah, Jazz va Bregeh, and others—featuring the JazzIstra Orchestra and numerous guest musicians.
For a local scene of this size, it hardly makes sense to insist on rigid genre distinctions, which in the end are usually maintained for opportunistic reasons anyway.
I value every musician with whom I have played—and continue to play—precisely because they are such different people. Every one of them has something to teach, both about music and about life.
My own path to jazz was somewhat backwards. As a teenager I came to it through improvised, experimental, and so-called extreme music, then through new and old free jazz, before discovering the classics of the 1950s and 1960s, when the West first began both discovering and orientalising the East. From there I moved towards metropolitan bebop, only to find myself returning to Europe—between the classical avant-garde, ECM, and the native guitar hero Django Reinhardt with all the Romani musicians who took up abandoned brass instruments left behind by disbanded military bands after yet another war, much as the impoverished and ethnically diverse communities of New Orleans did at the beginning of the twentieth century when, without prejudice, they created jazz and changed the world forever.