Kemal Monteno

Kemal Monteno was a Bosnian singer-songwriter, born on 17 September 1948 in Sarajevo. His father Osvaldo was an Italian from Monfalcone who came to Yugoslavia as a soldier in 1945 and met his mother Bahrija in Sarajevo. At home his father sang Italian canzone and his mother Bosnian sevdalinka.

He grew up in Sarajevo, played youth football for FK Sarajevo and began performing in the early 1960s as a singer with a guitar. At fifteen, in 1963, he won two awards at a singers' festival in Sarajevo. In 1967 his own song "Lidija", his first recording, won first place at Vaš šlager sezone in Sarajevo, where he was also named best interpreter, and the same year he won the Youth Festival in Subotica.

His first album, "Muziko, ljubavi moja", came out in 1973, followed by "Žene, žene" (1975), "Moje pjesme, moji snovi" (1977), "Za svoju dušu" (1980), "Dolly Bell" (1981), "Uvijek ti se vraćam" (1984), "Romantična ploča" (1986) and "Kako da te zaboravim" (1987). In 1976 he sang "Sarajevo ljubavi moja" at the tenth Vaš šlager sezone; it became his best-known song, a tribute to his home town. He was a regular guest at the Split, Opatija and Zagreb festivals and was nicknamed the "Bosnian Roy Orbison".

Many of his songs were sung by others: "Bacila je sve niz rijeku" became a big hit for Indexi, and "Nekako s proljeća" was a 1991 duet with Crvena Jabuka. He worked with Zdravko Čolić, Oliver Dragojević, Tereza Kesovija, Gabi Novak and Neda Ukraden, recorded duets with Goran Karan and Danijela Martinović, and dedicated "Davore" to his best friend, Davorin Popović.

He spent the whole war of the 1990s in besieged Sarajevo. In 2003 he and Paula Jusić won the Grand Prix at Melodije Mostara with "Nakon toliko godina", named song of the decade there a year later, and the albums "Dunje i kolači" (2004), "Samo malo ljubavi" (2009) and "Šta je život" (2013) followed. In 2013 he won Sunčane Skale together with Teška Industrija.

Diabetes, diagnosed in the late 1990s, brought years of dialysis in Zagreb, a heart attack at the end of 2011 and a kidney transplant in November 2014. Kemal Monteno died at Zagreb's Rebro hospital on 21 January 2015 and was buried at the Bare cemetery in Sarajevo on 28 January. A park in central Sarajevo was named after him.