Zagreb club Bugalu opens its autumn concert season on September 25 with a tribute night dedicated to Dino Dvornik. Doors at 8pm, the show starts at 9:30pm, and the choice of band to open the season says something about what the Zagreb crowd wants to hear once the festival summer is over.

Dino Dvornik was the Split singer and producer who, through the eighties and nineties, brought funk into Croatian pop music at a time when that was not the obvious move. His body of work stayed recognisable for grooves that sound closer to the American scene than to regional showbiz, and after his death in 2008 the songs kept living through performers who bring them back to the stage.

That is exactly what the Dino Dvornik Tribute Band does - a group that builds its entire repertoire around his songs. The difference between a tribute night and karaoke is whether the band has a sound of its own or just repeats the recording, and a tribute act opening the season at a club like Bugalu clearly has the promoters' confidence.

Bugalu is among the best known club stages in Zagreb and exactly the place where this material works: big enough for a funk section, small enough that the audience is not watching the concert through a screen. Tickets through entrio.hr run around 18 to 20 euros, or roughly 1,109 to 1,232 denars.