October 1-3, 2026
BP Club
Kick off October with jazz: JazzHR returns to BP Club!
Six concert programmes, three festival nights, and musicians from the Croatian, regional and international jazz scenes are coming to Zagreb as the autumn edition of the JazzHR Festival returns to the legendary BP Club from 1 to 3 October! In a venue that has played an important role in Zagreb’s jazz history, JazzHR brings together three nights of distinctive musical voices, generations and approaches to jazz – from contemporary jazz and post-bop to looping, improvisation and original music that moves freely across genre boundaries.
The Festival opens with the Ratko Zjača Trio, led by one of Croatia’s most internationally recognised jazz guitarists and composers. Ratko Zjača’s distinctive musical voice has grown out of a combination of strong artistic individuality, improvisational freedom and many years of experience on the international jazz scene. Later that evening, the stage belongs to the Mario Bočić Quartet, featuring Bočić alongside Hrvoje Galler, Zvonimir Šestak and Kruno Levačić. They bring to BP Club music from their debut album Wheel of Fortune, released in late 2025 – contemporary jazz firmly rooted in tradition, yet open to risk, spontaneity and the freedom of creating together in the moment.
The second festival night opens up a very different sound world. Guitarist and composer Ivan Kapec, recipient of the Status Award and the Miroslav Sedak Benčić Award, presents his new solo project, Baritone Loops. Drawing on more than two decades of exploring live looping, Kapec turns the baritone guitar, looper and effects into a small orchestra, building rhythms, bass lines, harmonies and melodies live on stage, layer by layer.
Next comes Nhau, the project of Pula-based singer-songwriter and musicologist Nuša Hauser, bringing to Zagreb a selection of songs from the albums Vetva (2023) and Look What I Found in the Forest (2025). Hauser writes the music and lyrics and performs on vocals and piano, joined by Gabriel Radović on guitar, Miron Hauser on trombone and Mattia Mioli on percussion, with Blackhill responsible for sound design and programming interventions. It is yet another side of this year’s JazzHR – one in which singer-songwriter sensibility, jazz, sonic exploration and improvisation meet without the need for rigid genre boundaries.
The third evening opens with Slovenian saxophonist Jure Pukl, one of the leading voices on Slovenia’s jazz scene and recipient of the Prešeren Fund Award. He comes to BP Club in remarkable company: the Jure Pukl Special Trio also features American bassist Joe Sanders and drummer Gregory Hutchinson, with whom Pukl recorded the acclaimed album Doubtless. Their meeting of contemporary jazz, post-bop and free improvisation is built around what makes jazz such a compelling live experience – listening, reacting, taking risks and embracing the unpredictable.
The Festival finale belongs to the Vladimir Kostadinović IRIS Quintet, arriving in Zagreb as part of the international concert tour for the album IRIS, with special guest, American vibraphonist Joe Locke. The programme draws on compositions from the album, which the quintet continually opens up and reinterprets in concert, leaving ample room for improvisation and inspiration in the moment. The result is a modern jazz sound in which tradition and the contemporary are not opposing forces, but starting points for something new – sophisticated and communicative music made to be experienced live.
From Zjača’s guitar and Bočić’s quartet to Kapec’s loops and the distinctive musical world of Nhau, all the way to the international line-ups led by Jure Pukl and Vladimir Kostadinović, three nights of autumn JazzHR reveal just how many different forms jazz can take today.
And it would be difficult to imagine a better setting for such a programme. JazzHR’s return to BP Club, a venue inextricably linked to the history of Zagreb’s jazz scene, brings the music back into an intimate club setting where there is almost no distance between performers and audience. It is precisely here that improvisation finds its natural habitat – in the interplay between musicians, the risks they take together and all those moments that can never be fully planned in advance.
The autumn edition of the JazzHR Festival takes place from 1 to 3 October at BP Club. Each evening, the first concert begins at 8 PM and the second at 9 PM. Tickets are now on sale and, with limited capacity at the club, we recommend securing your place early.
Three nights. Six concerts. One club – and plenty of reasons to spend the beginning of October with jazz.
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