Divanhana was formed at the beginning of 2009 by a group of students from Music Academy in Sarajevo. The band performs traditional music from Balkan in their new recognizable arrangements influenced by Jazz, Pop and Classical music. They especially focus on nurturing and presenting sevdah, the urban traditional music of Bosnia & Herzegovina. In addition to a very dedicated and exploring approach to tradition, Divanhana enriches their creative opus with originally written music inspired by traditional songs.
Divanhana developed their concert activities by taking part in prestigious festivals such as 12 Points in Porto and WOMEX in Thessaloniki. Besides that, Divanhana dedicates to creative work, and recording of new songs.
At the beginning of 2019 Divanhana had started a new chapter marked by work on original music, which is the result of ten years of ethnomusicological research. Thus, they have published their first originally written songs Zova and Voće rodilo in collaboration with a young performer of traditional music Danica Krstić. The year was marked by many concert activities on festivals all over Europe, the first overseas tour of the band in Canada, including work on original music and writing of the last compositions and arrangements for the new fourth studio album.
At the beginning of 2020, the band met a recognized Slovenian producer Janes Križaj with whom they traveled to studio MC Pavarotti in Mostar on demo recording. By the beginning of the next month they finished their new album at METRO studio in Ljubljana. On their return from Ljubljana on February 29 the band had a concert at the Vatroslav Lisinski Concert Hall in Zagreb, which was their last concert before the Coronavirus pandemic started. Being kept from performing, traveling and even rehearsing in their studio in Sarajevo, the band members, thanks to modern technology play music from separate locations from the comfort of their homes and exchange audio materials which they turn into Quarantine EP by the end of the year and release it on the music platform BandCamp.
At the beginning of 2021, in collaboration with the band’s long-term associate Borjan Milošević, the band finished the mix of the new album, which, due to all circumstances under which it was completed, they symbolically named Zavrzlama.
“Zavrzlama represents our lives in Bosnia and Herzegovina which are so tangled and influenced by different traditions, religion and culture. It represents our rivers, their tributaries, and streams which thigh our mountains that reach so high from where we can see the whole planet. Zavrzlama is also our sevdah tangled with instruments brought from east and west, rhythm structure from different ends of the world, lyrics with a pinch of love, a pinch of joke and a pinch of tragedy. In the end Zavrzlama is the music of this album.” said the members of the band about their new album.\