A Walk Through Danilo Kocjančič’s Evergreen Legacy (2013)

Arhiv Arhiv Last updated 11 June 2026

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik

Location: Postojna / Titov trg / Slovenia
Concert date: August 31, 2013
Attendance: 200
Ticket price: €0.00 (free admission)

Danilo Kocjančič Friends! Friends united in a posthumous battle cry and howl, and a tribute to the person and work of Danilo Kocjančič, one of the finest songwriters that Slovenia’s mid-tempo-minded (read: radio-friendly) music scene has ever produced in the last five decades. From the late sixties to the dawn of the new millennium, and really all the way up to Kocjančič’s far too early death at the start of this February (Danilo was in fact working on material for a new album)! Remember the bands Kameleoni, Halo, Bazar, Labirint, Boomerang and…? Prizma, of course. The unforgettable evergreens born from the pen and mind of their ultimate father and creator Danilo Kocjančič live on. In every one of us.

A crew of legendary faces who left their mark on the Slovenian music scene alongside Danilo (through the years – you’d say Avtomobili), made up of Ladi Mljač (Prizma, Danilo Kocjančič & Friends …) on lead vocals and drums, Slavko Ivančič (Bazar), a Crikvenica native, on lead vocals and acoustic guitar, the renowned sound engineer and bassist Jadran Ogrin (Kameleoni, Halo), guitarist Zdenko Cotič (Bazar, Halo), and last but not least, a former member of the famous fans of Maya the Bee Wellblott, a grandmaster speed demon on the six-string wonder, Matjaž Sterže (Danilo Kocjančič & Friends)! All of them responsible for keeping Danilo Kocjančič’s work alive on stage too!

Despite a clear Saturday evening, which was, by the way, the last one in August this year, Titov trg drew a more modest crowd than you’d have expected at first. The organizer had set out, about 10 meters from the stage, »a row of unidentified objects« wrapped in clear polyethylene. They looked like freshly wrapped hay bales, or even worse, like freshly seized stacks of some good »white« stuff. Whatever. A closer look revealed they were meant as seating. And it was precisely this element that oddly pushed the audience back to a spot 10 meters from the stage, and the feeling was extremely strange. As if the band were playing a concert on the square all by itself. To itself. Right up to the very end, when Ivančič invited the crowd to come closer. Oh well. Little things. The crew opened the concert with one of Kocjančič’s last creations, the easygoing, cheeky song Daj daj daj, laid over a reggae rhythm. Right from the start, they used it to signal that the story is by no means over and that they intend to finish what they started with Danilo on his last studio album. It’s supposed to come out in the middle of next year. So Danilo Kocjančič Friends really do plan to finish it!

From there, the seasoned and battle-hardened masters strung together a run of evergreens all too familiar from radio rotation, such as Bazar’s Portorož 1905, Poišči me, Amerika, Tina, DobAr dan, and Halo’s, led by the famous Anita ni nikoli. The indispensable Prizma hit classics naturally followed: Pogum, Senca, Ta moška, Zasidran, along with the legacy of Danilo Kocjančič’s partnership with Tulio Furlanič, anchored in the song Si še jezna name.

There were also two brand-new ones, Moja Jana ne pada, and Nisi prva, nisi zadnja in the middle of the set, both of which suggest that in recent years Danilo flirted again with the hard-hitting sound of hard rock-flavored arrangements built on a guitar riff. That’s the lineup Danilo Kocjančič Friends took to the stage with, too. No keyboards, two guitars. That fact certainly gave Sterže plenty of room to fill the transitions; he tore the instrumental passages open and scattered a sea of notes around as much as he could – foreign and well-known hard rock bands would »eat him alive« if he ever tried to market himself abroad. A truly perfect guitarist, yet in Slovenia he remains unjustly overlooked, suppressed, passed over in silence. Damn it! That’s not fair! The good ones play for beer and personal satisfaction, while the »corrupted« who don’t belong in the music world in the first place rake in the money. So all the songs got a rocker’s complexion. That showed especially on the Prizma songs, where the keyboards play an important part of the soundscape in the originals.

The band plays superbly. Slavko and Ladi pair well with their contrasting vocal colors; Ladi in particular is fiery whenever he steps up on the lead numbers with his recognizable »gently singed« voice, a man behind the drums with extraordinary fire and heart. The guitar duo is like a textbook picture. You’d name the school »Malmsteen meets Eric Clapton«. That’s a somewhat bizarrely simplified take on Sterže’s and Cotič’s musical backgrounds. A collision of old and new, but a collision of great juiciness and fun musical therapy! The sound was nicely calibrated throughout the concert. Sterže naturally pushed to the front whenever possible, especially during the solo escapades that took your breath away.

What’s a particularly fine trait of the Danilo Kocjančič Friends crew is their command of multi-part vocal harmonies. Already in the opening Daj daj daj, and then throughout the whole concert, the harmonies sounded brilliant. I’d actually recommend that every younger rock band go see Danilo Kocjančič Friends play to learn this virtue, which is so often missing from the otherwise interestingly conceived ideas of promising younger-generation rock bands, who too often lack the dot on the »i« needed to deliver on the idea of studio perfection. Want an example of how this used to work abroad? Once, a young Kip Winger wrote a humble fan letter and addressed it to the great sound guru Alan Parsons, the man behind the sound of The Beatles classic »Abbey Road« and Pink Floyd’s timeless masterpiece »Dark Side Of The Moon«, saying he was a huge fan of the Alan Parsons Project and that…the rest is history. Today Kip Winger, otherwise the head and beard of the famous glam metallers Winger, is often the lead vocalist on Parsons’ concert tours. Our rock brats, sadly big-mouthed far too often, can’t be bothered to haul their behinds even a few kilometers to the nearest live lesson to see how »Eagles like« harmonies work with Danilo Kocjančič Friends. Hard math, isn’t it.

A concert evening for all the nostalgics. An exceptionally nice experience that brings no disappointment whatsoever. It’s a pleasure to watch the expertise, the seasoned toughness, and at times the Gandalf-like wisdom of the Danilo Kocjančič Friends crew. Only one shortcoming was noted. The band had learned too few songs. They shouldn’t have had to play Anita ni nikoli and Tina twice in one evening, because Danilo Kocjančič’s legacy is still much, much broader and more colorful than what the concert repertoire of this evening covered.