{"id":4054,"date":"2020-12-28T18:35:06","date_gmt":"2020-12-28T18:35:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=144103"},"modified":"2020-12-28T18:35:06","modified_gmt":"2020-12-28T18:35:06","slug":"speed-picking-bosnian-emigre-named-electric-guitarist-of-the-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/12\/28\/speed-picking-bosnian-emigre-named-electric-guitarist-of-the-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Speed-Picking Bosnian Emigre Named ‘Electric Guitarist Of The Year’"},"content":{"rendered":"
Thirty-nine-year-old Igor Paspalj didn’t necessarily do it to the same drumbeat as millions of other former Yugoslavs.<\/p>\n
But the tattooed, bare-sleeved music teacher and session guitarist has picked and bent his way to global recognition at the top of his craft.<\/p>\n
An emigre whose love for his music and gigging took him from the Balkans to Dubai six years ago, Paspalj was named Electric Guitarist Of The Year this month by specialist magazines Guitar World and Guitar Player.<\/p>\n
While it’s no Grammy, Paspalj said it’s a “great accolade for me, personally,” because like so many of his counterparts around the world, he was a big fan of those publications, which shaped his musical worldview when he was young.<\/p>\n
“I was surprised they even nominated me among the top five and when they declared me the winner I was really happy for the simple reason that I grew up on those magazines,” Paspalj, who was raised in the Bosnian city of Banja Luka, told RFE\/RL’s Balkan Service.<\/a> “I read them as a boy, like all guitarists who grew up with access to them.”<\/p>\n The magazines pick their annual winners in several categories based on a poll of readers, staff, and input from three celebrity musicians.<\/p>\n The judges this year were prog metal icon and Dream Theater guitarist John Petrucci; Nita Strauss, who toured pre-pandemic with Alice Cooper; and John 5, formerly of both David Lee Roth’s and Marilyn Manson’s bands.<\/p>\n Paspalj won with nearly four minutes of a string-bending, alternately soaring and racing rendition of Into The Blue.<\/p>\n Many of the candidates for the award are longtime performers with hard-core followings on the growing market for online musical instruction but are mostly unknown to general audiences.<\/p>\n The award was announced by Guitar World — along with other annual winners in categories for young guitarists, bassists, and even guitar teachers — on December 22.<\/p>\n “With a playing style fueled by a strong cocktail of virtuoso influences \u2013 including Eddie Van Halen, Yngwie Malmsteen, Paul Gilbert, Vinnie Moore, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, and Guthrie Govan — Igor displays exceptional instrumental dominance, as well as an unparalleled compositional ability,” the magazine said.<\/a><\/p>\n Paspalj was born in Zagreb but as a young boy moved in 1991 to Prijedor, in what is now a majority ethnic Serb region in Bosnia-Herzegovina.<\/p>\n That was shortly before the breakup of Yugoslavia that sparked deadly wars and a major exodus from the Balkans.<\/p>\n He studied at the Academy of Arts in Banja Luka, the capital of the Republika Srpska entity that along with the Bosniak and Croat federation makes up Bosnia-Herzegovina.<\/p>\n