Miroslav Evačić
Biography
Miroslav Evacic was born on 30th March 1973 in Koprivnica, a small town in Podravina (north-west region of Croatia by the Drava river). The first music influence came from his grandfather who played accordion and often used to sing old folk-songs. Early, at the age of eight, along with his older brother he began collecting LP-s of eminent rock, country and blues artists. He himself started playing guitar at the age of thirteen, completely on his own, with no tutor. He intuitively found his own approach and expression which he developed trough his years of growing up.
Along with his passion for guitar grew his awareness of his own traditional background so he also became a member of traditional folk ensemble of his region. There he played tambura bugarija, found many interesting themes, songs and dances that years after he conjucted with his specific guitar playing. He also made enormous effort to find cimbule (hammered dulcimer) that used to be common instrument in folk-ensembles in 19th and early 20th century, but in the 80-s was almost completely lost.
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His passion for music led him even further-he began playing different types of tamburas, percussions, guitar tunes...
In his early teenage period he played in a few local rock bands, but even then in his mind he started to create a vision of music that would unite those great two loves: blues-rock and traditional music. Soon he formed Scukin Berek - a blues-rock trio that played cover of traditionals. Later on the band began to grow, it included more and more members, folk instruments and became well known in the whole country.They made some recordings, but the album was never released.
By that time Miroslav started intensively work as a sound engineer and producer in a professional studios. Interesting is the fact that there also he was self-educated. He formed his own home studio years ago and explored ways of getting quality and warmth in sound recording. Soon he became known as a fine producer and was invited to many recording projects. Some of them were some old folk bands that still are active and there he made new relationships and friendships with the people who created Croatian folk music in the middle of 20th century. During that time he went deeper and really touched the roots of his tradition and, spending lots of time in his own studio, experimenting with ideas, he found a way to express his vision and he came out with music he called Chardash Blues.
He found that roots of the blues and his own traditional music are almost identical so Chardas Blues came out as something natural, simple, pure music without any makeovers and massive orchestrations. The simplicity of his expression is almost shocking, and those who live in Podravina can almost describe the nature of this people and land only by listening this music. Those who know the blues say that they can see Mississipi river flowing trough the valley while cows are slowly walking by... Croatian audience was a bit confused with this music. There was nothing to compare it with, there was no specific genre to put it in. The world music movement was something quite unknown in Croatia so it took some time till a response from the world came. Then the Croatian medias started to appreciate it, too. fROOTS magazine and BBC Radio made a great contribution in presenting it to the world, and everything went to follow...
At this point Miroslav Evacic is eminent Croatian world music artist. He performs all over the world, solo or with Chardash Blues Band (guitar, bass and drums). At the special events the band enters a virtuous cimbule (hammered dulcimer) player and vocalist Gordana Evacic who is also a winner of the national Status award for the best instrumentalist playing traditional instruments.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.