This year, the city of Mitrovica in Kosovo was host to the eighth annual North City Jazz and Blues Festival, which gathered nearly a dozen artists, including Frank Lacy, Tony Lakatos, and Triphasic. Locals flocked to the cultural centre in Zvečan, a Mitrovica suburb, to attend the international music festival, which was opened this year by Kosovo-born musician Petar Rakić and the Nušić chorus from Mitrovica, who gave the stage to Frank Lacy and Dušan Novakov Quartet as the evening progressed.

Many of the artists who played in Mitrovica are internationally acclaimed.

Frank Lacy is an American jazz trombonist from Houston, Texas. He studied music at the Berklee College of Music, where he played alongside Branford Marsalis, Greg Osby and Marvin Smith. He has also cooperated with Henry Threadgill, Oliver Lake, Julius Hemphill, Dizzy Gillespie, Abdullah Ibrahim, Bobby Watson, David Murray Mc Coy Tyner, and Lester Bowie.
 
Lacy studied the piano at music school, later enlisting in the jazz academy in Graz, Austria, where he learned to play the drums. After earning his master's degree, he began working for the Vienna Institute, where he teaches jazz, swing and bebop.
 
Naked, a band from Belgrade, also played on the festival's opening evening. The band plays a special kind of jazz, a blend of different influences. Although a risky feat, the band played so easily that they made it seem natural and uncontrived.
 
The second evening of the festival saw Tony Lakatos' quartet take the stage with Lakatos on the saxophone and Robert Magris on the piano. Lakatos is originally from Hungary, while Magris is from Italy. Lakatos was the first Hungarian musician to be listed by American Jazz Music Radio's "Gavin" Top Ten Report. Lakatos has played in Europe, the U.S., Japan, South Africa, India, Singapore, and other parts of the world during his career. 

Roberto Magris was born in Trieste. He began his career in the late 1970s. Magris was the frontman of a trio called Gruppo Jazz Marca, In the 1980s the band came out with a re-release in 2006, published by the English recording studio Arision. Magris has done over 18 albums with his band and played at concerts in over 30 countries in Europe, the U.S., Asia and Australia.
 
One of the favourites of this year's festival was Ognjan "Ogi" Radivojević, a Serbian pop musician, and former member of Goran Bregović's orchestra. Few people know that Radivojević studied in Belgrade at the Music Academy (directing) and taught the piano in the Stanković Music School's jazz department. Since the age of 13, Radivojević has played professionally in a number of jazz clubs, rock bands and as a studio musician and cooperated with numerous jazz musicians from Europe including Duško Gojković, Stjepko Gut, Clark Terry, and others.
 
Radivojević, who hadn't previously participated in the North City Festival, was surprised with how many people showed up. 
 
"It's incredible how much enthusiasm is necessary to keep a festival alive in these conditions. It takes tremendous effort and I can only imagine what you have to do to keep it going, but it's a wonderful idea. I hope that I will find the time to come here to listen at least, because I've witnessed the class of musicians who come here. If a guy can't play with them, then at least he can listen to them," Radivojević said.
 
The Gary Willis trio and Triphasic played on the festival's third and closing night, followed by Nick Donusis.
 
Donusis, a Greek blues guitar player, discussed his career at a news conference:
 
"I started playing in the beginning of the 1980s. I played in different bands. As time went on, I began moving closer and closer to blues music. This was something that I was unable to stop," Donusis said, adding that the band that he played with in Mitrovica is the same band that he grew up with.
 
"We had regular gigs in Thessaloniki and other places in Greece. We also played at foreign festivals with lots of people from the U.S. All of this was experience amassed through time. I have published five albums in my career so far. We have made four or five CDs together in ten years. After ten years, I already had my own material, songs that I released on the market," Donusis said.
 
Gary Willis, for his part, is a U.S. bass guitar player and composer, best known as one of the founders of Triphasic jazz-fusion band. Willis was more than pleased with his reception by the audience.
 
"We like audiences with plenty of enthusiasm. People here are happy when they have the opportunity to experience a good concert, since they don't often have the chance to hear such good musicians, as opposed to for example to Barcelona, where people can get bored because they have many events like this, making them, perhaps, a spoiled audience," Willis said.
 
Despite being strapped for cash, the organisers never once considered calling the festival off.
 
The organising committee chairman Nebojša Avramović says that the festival would not have been possible without the financial support of sponsors and the local authorities, who were both very supportive of the event from the outset.
 
Avramović particularly underlined the assistance provided by the European Commission, without which, according to him, it would not have been possible to organise this year's festival. The sponsors of the event included also the Serbian Ministry of Culture, the German Foreign Ministry, and the local municipality of Mitrovica.
 
An added attraction of the festival was a photo exhibition presenting the festival’s history through pictures of musicians that had previously performed there, such as Vasil Hadžimanov, Vlatko Stefanovski, Lazar Tošić, Vito Giordiano, Ratko Divjak, Rambo Amadeus, Lidia Gatto, Harry Sokal, Stjepko Gut, Sylvain Luc, Jovan Maljoković.
 
All of these people have helped to portray Mitrovica in a different light – as a city of music.