Time to go to Birštonas! Spring jazz is coming!

The article was prepared by the journalist Dalė Lazauskienė of the newspaper "Gyvenimas" https://www.gyvenimas.eu/2024/03/15/laikas-i-birstona-kviecia-pavasario-dziazas/

- Jazz is not pop music, so it cannot find its audience in every city. Before the political thaw in the 1960s, there was a period when this music that represented American culture was both unsafe to play and listen to. How did your acquaintance with jazz begin? - I ask the godfather of the festival, Zigmos Vileikis.
- While studying at the Klaipėda Conservatory, our paths crossed as Lithuanian theater artists and jazz musicians. Saulius Šiaučiulis, Arvydas Jofė, Romas Malinauskas, Stepas Januška, Pranas Narušis, Vytautas Grubliauskas actively expressed themselves as jazz musicians. It was played in Klaipėda cafe "Laumė", we used to go there. We used to go to jazz festivals in Riga, Tallinn, Vitebsk, and other cities, we listened to Luxembourg radio, and in this way we got in touch with the music of this genre. Musicians used to catch records bought by sailors abroad, from them they learned to improvise and create their own music, after all, there were no contacts behind the Iron Curtain or Google searches... In order to be able to jazz and improvise freely, you had to acquire a high-quality education and gain a lot of experience, and here people created "boiling in their own juices." But even in such circumstances, Lithuanian musicians were valued extremely highly. The Jazz Cathedral was established in the port city, and a big band was assembled.
A small jazz festival organized in Elektrėnai in 1968 was the first and only one, and it was followed by stagnation. In the 1980s, after starting to work in the culture department of Birštonas, I took the initiative to organize a jazz festival in the resort. This festival gave impetus to other festivals: in 1987 – in Vilnius, 1991. – Kaunas, 1994 – Klaipėda.
- Was it difficult to follow a unique, untrodden path?
- When I found myself in Biršton in 1979, I already knew the musicologist Liudas Šaltenis, who worked in the Ministry of Culture, in the Music Department. I think, thanks to the intercession of this person, the jazz movement gained momentum in Lithuania. He dared to say: we are doing jazz. Then I was 25 years old, I had enough courage, the idea turned out to be interesting, and it all started. Especially the interest in jazz was great, this music genre was raised to a higher level by V. Ganelin's trio, which received international recognition. A little later, P. Vyšniauskas, V. Labutis, L. Šinkarenko, G. Laurinavičius, S. Sasnauskas started appearing...
Liudas Šaltenis was able to support youth music groups and encouraged their creative pursuits. Together with Mindaugas Tamošiūnas, Gracijus Paugas, and Mikalojs Noviks, he was also a member of the evaluation committee of the first Birštonas festival. We established the main prize of the festival, which is still being awarded.
- This year, the tradition of the festival is 44 years old. What has changed through them?
- Over the decades, the city itself, its streets, and the outside and inside of the Culture Center have changed, but the basis of the festival has remained the same: in addition to concerts on stage, every time we open an exhibition of photographs on the theme of jazz, we give the best musicians the main prize for their contribution to jazz in the last two years, we present original scenography, posters, calendars, the author of which is the artist Rimvydas Kepežinskas, very creatively exploiting the theme of the festival from the very first event. True, this year due to the Easter holidays, we moved the permanent date of the festival from the last weekend of March to the first weekend of April.
Anyway, the date of the festival at the end of March was not set by chance. In the beginning, we didn't even have a place to accommodate the musicians, they hid in the Olympic rowing base and the Kapsuks automatic machine factory prevention room, we coordinated with the school holidays, because the dormitories also became vacant during them. Now there is a considerable selection of hotels in Biršton, and previously, as incredible as it sounds, it was also the case that festival fans huddled in the stairwells of apartment buildings at night.
Another thing that is changing is the yearly growing estimate of the festival, this year's budget should reach 100 thousand. euros.

Read the entire interview https://www.gyvenimas.eu/2024/03/15/laikas-i-birstona-kviecia-pavasario-dziazas/