Kokan Dimuševski

Nikola "Kokan" Dimuševski is a Macedonian keyboard player, composer and producer, born on 26 April 1958 in Skopje. He is best known as one of the four founders of Leb i Sol, the band formed in Skopje on 1 January 1976 with guitarist Vlatko Stefanovski, bassist Bodan Arsovski and drummer Dimitrie Čučurovski.

He played keyboards on the band's first three studio albums, Leb i Sol and Leb i Sol 2 (both 1978) and Ručni rad (1979), all released by PGP RTB. In 1979 he left for a steady job in the Entertainment and Revue Orchestra of Radio Television Skopje, where his interest in other forms of music, above all jazz, grew. He later returned as a guest on Leb i Sol records such as Zvučni zid and on the live project Live in New York.

In 1993 Kokan Dimuševski became the first of the four founders to release a solo album. On Double Life he played every instrument and also did the vocals, arrangements, production and cover design. It came out on his own label, Aura Records, like Music for... the same year, over an hour of themes he had written for the theatre. Live followed in 1995, recorded at a concert at the ARM Home in Skopje on 18 January 1994 with guests including Bodan Arsovski and Garabet Tavitjan, and in 1997 Octoechos, a work built on church music, which the Macedonian Wikipedia calls the most ambitious project of his career.

With Bodan Arsovski he reworked old Leb i Sol material on Sketches from the Past (2006), and the two also worked together on the projects Nedogled and Skršeni ritmi. He played in the Labis Trio, arranged and produced records for many Macedonian singers and groups, and presented his music in installations and performances at home and abroad. Several of his themes appear on a limited edition released by Yamaha, for which he was a concert promoter in the region.

From 2000 he held production posts at Macedonian Television, and in 2001 he became director of the Skopje Festival; under his leadership Macedonia took part in the Eurovision Song Contest 2002 in Tallinn. In 2023 he received the Order of Merit for Macedonia for his part in Leb i Sol. His music is mostly instrumental, mixing rock, jazz and Macedonian traditional music.