The Flying Pekingese on June 15th, 2016
In Our Own Words:
We are a swing-jazz band from Macedonia. The name means Flying Pekingese and it was chosen before the band even existed. One of the reasons for choosing the name is to break the ongoing tradition in jazz where you have a leader and the band carries his name and the number of musicians that are playing with him. This ongoing cliche somehow made todayís jazz groups sound predictive and killed the sound of a collective. Jazz became music for soloists and only that.
Listening to most of the groups on todayís jazz scene we realize that we are a not fully satisfied how the jazz evolved and our main goal is to right the wrongs as good as we can by learning the craft through the wisdom of old jazz (swing) music masters. But that doesnít mean we are only paying tribute to the music and them. Our statement is that if everybody keeps playing the same songs (standards) they are admitting that the music is dead, that ís why ì The Flying Pekingeseî is a band with a huge repertoire of original compositions and we donít intend to quit adding new originals to it. In charge of creating the bandís repertoire are Bojan Petkov (guitar) and Ivo Soldatovic (clarinet), but every song is rehearsed till it finds its own sound by the whole band: Petar Hristov (tenor saxophone), Kiril Tufekchievski (double bass), Slavcho Kocev (drums); and in that way the arrangements are made.
The reason we label ourselves as a swing band is because we donít perceive it as a music genre, and we are open to all music genres. For us ìswingî is a rhythmic expression. Every music can swing and that doesnít depend of the music genre. Every musician, every person has his own ìswingî and it is up to him to find a way to express it.
We have released two albums for Skopje Jazz Festival Records. Letecki pekinezeri (September 2011) and Dog Show (November 2014). Since our debut album, we have toured Balkans(Macedonia,Slovenia,Montenegro,Albania), Luxembourg and The United states of America (New York). At this moment we are working on recording our third album
