My tastes are admittedly less Eurovision, although I could see Rambo Amadeus being very amusing,
I more or less came to this via a fairly longstanding acquaintance with Samir Fejzic - we both came out of the Sibelius community (the notation programme, not the composer 
), and we have several friends in common in the Canadian jazz scene. Samir is interesting. A fair amount of what he does is ethnic jazz in a piano trio setting, but a lot is pretty much Third Stream… if the patron saint of Third Stream had been Béla Bartók, not Gunter Schuller.
I get the impression that Samir is quite influential as a teacher in Bosnia - most of the people who chat with him there (and there are a lot) address him as “Professore” (not Italian, but vocative case Bosnian), including Muris Varajic. I first heard Muris’s work courtesy of a post by Samir.
When you start YouTubing these guys, Leb i sol eventually shows up in the recommendations:
Not the most popular band in the Balkans, but very likely the most influential. Vlatko Stefanovski was one of the founding members. I don’t know enough to know if they started the fusion of Balkan folk with rock, jazz, pop, etc., but they certainly got in on the ground floor, and very likely did a great deal to popularise it. It appears to be pretty rare for performers from that region not to touch on that kind of fusion in some form or another. I could certainly hear it in Rambo Amadeus.
