Jimi Rasta

Jimi Rasta, born Albin Jarić in 1953 in Zenica, was a Bosnian-Slovenian musician, painter and mineralogist, who spent most of his life in Ljubljana. He died in 2023.

He started playing the drums in his first year of high school, when he won an audition for the school band. In Zenica he finished high school and began studying metallurgy at the university there, then moved after a year to Ljubljana to study mineralogy at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engineering. In 1976, in a student settlement, he met two guitarists and singers, Brian from Jamaica and Ken from Africa, and with them founded the reggae band Night Duty.

In Ljubljana he rebuilt a basement in the Rožna dolina student settlement under the student organisation Forum. Within a few years it became the well-known club Student Disco, later Disco FV and today Klub K4, where he worked as a disc jockey, playing rock, reggae, dub and world music. Until 1991 he also worked as a junior researcher at the Institute of Metallurgy and Mining, and in 1992 he set up the band Planet People in Jamaica.

In 2001 he joined Zabranjeno pušenje as percussionist. He played on the band's seventh studio album, Bog vozi Mercedes (2001), and on the live album Live in St. Louis (2004), and performed at some 350 of their concerts before leaving in 2004 to give his time to painting. Over the years he played percussion with bands of many kinds, from rock, punk, afrobeat, reggae and jazz to Canadian country and Balkan groove.

In 2019 a Jimi Rasta party in Ljubljana combined an exhibition of his paintings with the release of a record. His album After Party is the playlist here, with "My Needs Are Simple", recorded with Maja Predatoria, "Trip to Zion", "Voodoo Dub" and "My Life".