The Son of Branko Pavlovic
By Željko Pavlović · October 28, 2026
St. Louis, September 12, 2026. Playing my father’s music with Branko “Bako” Jovanovic.
When Branko “Bako” Jovanovic announced our concert in St. Louis, he did not introduce me as a violinist from Houston. He did not mention Carnegie Hall, or Vienna, or anything I have done in the last thirty years. He introduced me as the son of the famous Branko Pavlovic.
He had it right. For that room, that was the introduction that mattered.
You have to understand what that name means in that world. I come from a Roma family, and in my family, if you are breathing, you are playing music. Going back almost 250 years, my ancestors have all been musicians — my parents, my aunts and uncles, my grandparents, my great-grandparents. You get the idea. My earliest memories are of music, because my childhood revolved around performing and touring.
My father played the tambura. His band, Sar e Roma, was famous — not a little famous, famous the way things were famous in Yugoslavia, where everybody knew the same songs because there was nowhere else to hear anything else. I grew up backstage at sold-out stadiums, watching my dad play concerts to twenty thousand people at a time. His records sold in the millions in a country of twenty million people. The odds were good that if you lived there, you had heard my father play.
His brothers played beside him — my uncle Stevo on bass-prim, my uncle Ljubomir on kontra. Three Pavlovic brothers in one band, and a kid backstage who thought this was what the world looked like.
My father had a broader vision for me. He wanted me to play something that could cross cultural lines and open up a wider audience, so he steered me to classical music and started my education on the violin. It worked out the way he planned. The violin took me to Liège, then to America — orchestras, concert halls, the Mendelssohn in California, stages in Vienna and London. I have spent thirty years on the road my father chose for me.
On September 12, 2026, I finally played the other road.
The Tamburitza Association of America brought Bako to St. Louis, and Joe King Kirin brought the two of us together. I was Bako’s guest. The program was the old repertoire, the music my father played for a living. Among the songs that night was Djelem Djelem, the Roma national anthem.
And here is the part I still think about. Bako plays the tambura — my father’s instrument. We had never met before that weekend. We had never played together, not once, not even a rehearsal. We walked on stage, and it felt like we had played together for generations.
After the concert, audience members came up to me and told me they were emotional from the music we played. I understood them. Bako is an incredible musician — a top 0.1 percent talent in the world. When a man like that plays your father’s music on your father’s instrument, and you are standing next to him with the violin your father gave you instead, the years arrange themselves.
Talking that weekend, we figured out something neither of us knew. Our great-grandfathers had performed together. And our grandfathers after them. Bako had heard the stories from his grandfather, the same way I heard them from mine. Two men meet in St. Louis, Missouri, in 2026, and it turns out their families have been sharing stages for four generations.
Maybe there is something to the saying that music runs in the blood.
Bako introduced me as Branko Pavlovic’s son. He was not being polite. He was being accurate — and in St. Louis, that night, it was the biggest introduction I have ever had.
We will perform together again, on incredible stages.