Buscemi is Dirk Swartenbroex - on his third album fusing Afro-Cuban rhythms with off-house beats. Compiling for Blue Note, DJing worldwide and working on a collection of his consistently classy remixes. And taking on a balkan sound for his next album. OnTheFlip’s Nicolai Hartvig met him at the Blue Note Festival.

“Belgium is a little bit like Ibiza. You have so many clubs here, even for such a small country and every weekend they fly in DJs from all over the world. In Hasselt, where I used to live, we now do a Squadra Bossa residency every Thursday during the holidays. We’re inviting Djs and friends from across the ocean… they’re all similar DJs and it’s nice to play together, to have this Afro-Brazil connection. I love the 60s, I love bossanova, I love Afro… and I get to do my own thing…” With the annual Gentse Feesten, the Ibiza feeling is closer than ever –only without the torments of e-heads, bad trance music and annoying drunk teenagers. The city is hot and busy, so Dirk takes a welcome breather from his DJ residency on the third day of the Blue Note Festival All that jazz? Weekender. He sits at a small table in the white tents of the backstage area, the sound of Nicola Conte’s live gig floating through the white canvas. It’s Dirk’s third year at the BNF, after a live Buscemi gig the first year and a DJ set the second.

And his Blue Note affiliation is stronger than ever, after two sucessful compilations for the legendary label. A Warm Blue Note Session took on an experimental Brazil angle whilst his latest offerring Caliente is more latin’esque. “Blue Note just asked me and gave me the artistic freedom to choose from the archives and mix them at my place. It’s great that we’ve designed the compilations for a younger public, who don’t know all these jazz artists. Jazz to me is a music for all times, it’s always on at my place and I never get tired of it, especially the sound of the 50s and 60s, but also things like Sun Ra, experimental music… or John Coltrane. I’ve listened a lot to jazz since I was 14 or 15 years old, so that’s twenty years or more now. Art Blakey is one of my all-time favourites together with Sonny Rollins.”

“There were some tracks that were difficult to clear. There was a song from Madrid, a kinda 60s/70s tune with a organ, a bit like the sound of the theme tune to the Taxi series, Bob James I think that was, that kinda style… and the label we couldn’t find any information about the track. But I picked it off an English Blue Note compilation from 10 years ago.. so it got cleared after a while. It wasn’t that I wanted some really rare tracks on it.. but A warm Blue Note Session was released on double vinyl and had some songs that had never been put out on vinyl before. So I hope that this new Caliente album will be released on vinyl too…that’s not happening right now, but I’m still asking for it…"

Dirks latest plan is to put out an album with his best remixes. A new Buscemi album slated for release in 2005 –this time with a firm afro-balkan influence. “It’s more like world music with a beat,” Dirk says. “We’ve finished half of it and we’ll have some international guests on it. I won’t tell you who, because we still need to record some tracks…we have the contacts… but I can’t promise you that this or that person will be on it if the financial thing falls through…but it will be another nice line-up. ”With this new balkan inspiration, Buscemi continues to switch influences and transcend worldwide genres. Music globalisation has reached Belgium, and Dirk is quite happy to pick up and recycle old sounds.

Much like his compadres on the innovative jazz scene, Dirk keeps himself busy. Between putting together Blue Note compilations and remixing for artists as diverse as Calexico and the Beach Boys, Dirk tours extensively worldwide. He has just come back from the International Jazz Festival in Montreal and played the legendary Montreux Jazz Festival last year with the likes of Jazzanova. To Dirk, the new jazz festival acceptance of DJ culture and the new jazz movements and the electronic jazz-beat hybrids is a necessary development. “There is a new group of artists coming up who work with digital equipment, who combine beats and dance music with jazz. It’s perfect now and it’s fresh and the festivals need to innovate. Before, many musicians and festival organisers were concerned with the whole ´what is jazz and what is not jazz, what is real jazz?’.