Emir Kusturica & The No Smoking Orchestra

Emir Kusturica & The No Smoking Orchestra is a garage rock band from Belgrade that mixes rock with Balkan brass, Roma music and punk energy. It was formed in Belgrade in 1993 by Nele Karajlić, who had moved there from Sarajevo during the war. Karajlić had co-founded Zabranjeno pušenje with Sejo Sexon in 1980, and the new band at first played under that name; its first album, Ja nisam odavle, came out in 1997 as Nele Karajlić & Zabranjeno pušenje.

The film director Emir Kusturica, who had already played guitar with the band in 1987, rejoined in 1998, and the group took the name Emir Kusturica & The No Smoking Orchestra. That year it wrote the music for his film Black Cat, White Cat, which won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The albums Unza Unza Time (2000) and Life Is a Miracle (2004) followed, the latter named after another Kusturica film, and in 2007 the band took part in the staging of Time of the Gypsies, a punk opera, at the Bastille in Paris.

Since June 1999 the band has toured the world almost without a break, with big followings in Italy, Spain, Portugal and France, in Latin America, above all Argentina, which it first visited in 2001, and in Eastern Europe. The live DVD Live Is a Miracle in Buenos Aires came out in 2005. In 2008 they played Kruševac, Novi Sad and Belgrade Arena, and in the summer of 2010 they made their first North American tour, where about 60,000 people came to their concert at the Montreal jazz festival.

Karajlić left in 2012. Keyboard player Dražen Janković died in 2018 and guitarist Ivan Maksimović in 2019. The album Corps Diplomatique came out in 2018. The band today is Emir Kusturica on guitar, Dejan Sparavalo on violin, Stribor Kusturica on drums, Zoran Milošević on accordion, Nenad Petrović on saxophone, Zoran Marjanović on percussion and Goran Popović on tuba and trumpet.