Jerry Grcevich

Jerry Grcevich (Grčević in Croatian) is a Croatian-American tamburica player, composer and bandleader, born in 1951 in Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. He belongs on Muzika-Balkan through his family: they were Croatian emigrants from Ozalj, Karlovac and Podravina, and his grandfathers brought their tamburica instruments with them from Croatia. He lives in North Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, in the Pittsburgh area.

He learned the tamburica from his father and his uncle, both musical directors and players with the Sloboda Tamburitza Orchestra, and at ten he was already playing in his father's orchestra. At 21 he went to Yugoslavia to study with prim player Janika Balaž in Novi Sad, the first of many trips to Croatia. There he met Zvonko Bogdan, with whom he later toured the United States and Canada, and during the 1980s he made several research trips around Croatia to study its folk music.

Since 1980 he has composed and recorded his own music. He plays all five instruments of the tamburica ensemble, from the small prim to the bass, and often records whole albums alone, layering his own parts one over another. In the late 1980s he began working with Miroslav Škoro, which led to Škoro's first album, Ne dirajte mi ravnicu; Grcevich is co-composer and arranger of the hits "Moja Juliška" and "Ne dirajte mi ravnicu". On a visit to Slavonia in 1994 he found many groups playing his own compositions.

Since 1993 he has led the Jerry Grcevich Tamburitza Orchestra, which has played widely across the United States and Canada. In 2001 he was inducted into the Tamburitza Hall of Fame as its youngest member, and in 2005 the National Endowment for the Arts gave him a National Heritage Fellowship, the first for an artist from Western Pennsylvania; the Endowment calls him generally recognised as the premier prim player in the world. His albums include New Traditions (1992), Croatian Dances Vol. III (1997), Mila Moja (2008), Kao Nekad with Sonya (2011) and Tamburitza Dance Tonight (2013).

Jerry Grcevich's playlist is his own channel: tamburica kolos, Christmas songs such as "Božić je stigao", and official videos for "Let", "Mjesec" and "Čardaš".