The Vladimir Samardzic Trio plays the Blues and Beer club in Belgrade on 28 September from 8pm. The bassist from Novi Sad, a Berklee graduate, arrives with a band featuring Marko Antonio da Costa on vocals and guitar and Vladimir Kostadinovic on drums.

Samardzic was born in Novi Sad in 1970 and belongs to the kind of musician whose name shows up in album credits more often than on posters. He leads the quintet Panonija Projekat, writing and arranging its music, and that band released the album "The Bridge" in 2010. He has worked with Luis Bonilla, Tana Alexa, Mokhtar Samba, Felipe Salles, Vasil Hadzimanov and Amira Medunjanin - a list covering three continents and at least four different musical traditions.

The record he is best known for is "Catching the Wind", released in 2022 by SKC Novi Sad. It is the first instrumental album recorded in Dolby Atmos anywhere in the former Yugoslavia, a fact that sounds like a technicality until you hear what it means in practice: the space in the recording is laid out all around you, not just left and right. For jazz, where the interaction between instruments is the entire point, that is not a marketing extra.

Blues and Beer at Cetinjska 15 has been running an almost daily jazz, funk and blues programme since 2016, and is one of the few Belgrade venues where local jazz bands play to an audience that came specifically for them. A trio in a room like that means the bass is heard the way it was written, not as a bed under everything else.

Tickets through tickets.rs start at 1,200 dinars, about 630 denars. A Monday night, a club with a hundred seats, and a band whose leader teaches bass at workshops across Serbia. Not an evening for people who wandered in.