Mario Zbijski was born on November 11 1975 in Osijek. The first steps connected to music and tamburitza were made in Tamburitza school of Franjo Batorek, the renowned and acknowledged tamburitza player and pedagogue of Osijek.
In 1986 he moves to Antunovac, where he plays in the cultural club, meets the old players from this place and gets in touch with the regional traditional music. In 1989 he starts the collaboration with tamburitza players of Ivanovac, then known under the name “Sokoli” and plays with them till 1992.
In the same year he joins the cultural club “Osijek 1862”, where the artistic director was, and still is, Duško Topić, the excellent ethnomusicologist and pedagogue, and where one simply had to make progress. Concurrently he plays with few more bands and all tamburitza players who played in Osijek at the time (Tamburitza group “Javor”, Batorek band, Mr. Stjepan Slivka, Joško Batorek, Ivo Čabaj and all others - meaning no disrespect, but the list would be long).
After finishing military service, in 1995, his first real and professional career starts. Mario goes to Đakovo and joins the famous tamburitza group “SLAVONSKE LOLE”. About Slavonske lole and their whole joint collaboration, which has been going for the 12th year, could be written a lot of things, but one thing is for sure, Slavonske lole are the synonym for the Slavonian, but also Croatian tamburitza music.
But the story doesn’t end here, but continues in few directions. Back in 1995 he meets the county tamburitza builder, Andrija Franić, and here starts long-standing collaboration in the field of tone, tamburitza, strings and all that belongs to tamburitza music.
In 2005, in a collaboration with the vocal solo-performer Blanka Došen, he receives, as a producer and a composer, a record award ”PORIN” for the best folk-music album “STAROGRADSKI BISERI”. In the same year he gets rewarded by the Croatian Musical Union for the best instrumentalist in the field of tamburitza as the musical instrument.
In 2006, “Ledina”, one of the successful albums in the row of Slavonske lole, is recorded in the studio of Željko Nikolin and produced by Miroslav Škoro and “Cantus” house.
In his free time he works on the instrumental music, and records, in collaboration with the Hungarian musicians Atila Kustro and Jozef Kovatsc, the album called “CSARDASI”, which is released through the Internet.
The year 2007 started with hard work, lots of stage appearances of Slavonske lole and studio work. May this story have its sequel and many more successful years to come.