JAZZ PIANIST Bojan Zulfikarpasic - or Bojan Z as he's known - began seeking out the sounds he so distinctively creates when he barely stood tall enough to reach the keyboard of his parents' upright piano in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia. 'There was a trick my father used to play on me when I was young,' he says, his whisky voice punctuated with coughs. 'I would reach up and play a note, and my father [whose hands I could not see] would improvise some chords and melodies around it, giving me the impression that it was me who made that music.
'Then when he wasn't there,' Bojan continues, 'I would go back to the piano, certain that I could make the same music. Of course I couldn't, but I kept trying.'
That childlike compulsion to bang out noises that pleased his ear intensified over the years, driving Bojan Z, now 36, to become one of his generation's most acclaimed and innovative jazz pianists, a musician distinguished by his playful fusion of contemporary jazz and multicultural folk.
Since moving to France in 1990, he has earned first prize three times at the Concours de la Defense, a Paris jazz competition. He has also been awarded a Django Reinhardt prize for Musician of the Year by L'Academie du Jazz, as well as a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.
Born into a music-loving home in what is now Serbia-Montenegro, Bojan Z grew up surrounded by Balkan folk music ('I was not a big fan of it, but it was the local noise'), and the latin rhythms of his father's beloved Brazilian record collection. Mix in some modern classical pieces by Ravel and Debussy, and the swing-era recordings of Oscar Peterson and Ella Fitzgerald, and it's easy to understand how these early influences evolved into compositions that combine Old and New World sounds.
'I lived in a parallel world of classical and rock music,' says Bojan Z, who also became a fan of The Beatles after starting piano lessons at age five. 'All this developed on both sides for a while. It was very logical that I would end up in jazz, which is somewhere in-between this music.'
In 1986, he obtained a scholarship to study in the US, but was forced to return home after only three months to complete his military service. Still, the wanderlust had set in. By the time he left the army one year later, Bojan Z felt ready to take on the world. Having studied French as a third foreign language at school, he decided to move to Paris, drawn by the city's lively musical culture, and 'a very sweet French girl'.