Lithuanian representatives: Viacheslav Ganelin and Oleg Molokoyedov

Heli Reimann

‘We were performing just before Lloyd. When we were told that the Americans would follow us … well, I didn’t really care. Later we were told that we were similar in style. But I think Lloyd played his music and I played mine,’ explained Viačeslav Ganelin, the leader of his group the Ganelin Trio, and a Lithuanian representative at the festival, at the beginning of our Skype talk.¹ In 1967, Ganelin was a student of Classical composition at the Vilnius Conservatoire, an ardent Voice of America listener, and familiar with recent Classical music trends thanks to Polish radio. Despite that, he called his experience at Tallinn’67 revolutionary, in the sense of musical understanding, since:

'... we had a chance to hear for the first time live the type of music Lloyd and Jarrett played and their new approach to musical material … that freedom … it was a real shock for me. I felt that after Lloyd first inhaled, for the next forty minutes, he did not inhale again … you were drawn into the flow. It was like therapy.'

Reflecting on the festival’s particular musical qualities, Ganelin made critical comments on the American-oriented stylistic approach of the Russians.

It was fashionable to be a shtatnik² … especially for Leningrad musicians: they wore American clothes, and they wanted to be propagandists for American jazz by imitating the Americans to a very great degree. America was like the moon for them, and they wanted to be representatives of the moon.

Estonian musicians differed from this general trend, since ‘... they had their own style and did not follow the Americans. They were a bit cold, but intellectual and tasteful.’ Ganelin’s experiment-based free jazz deviated significantly from Soviet trends in general, and his appearances always evoked a certain surprised reaction, as though to say, ‘So here you are again with your music.’

A feature of Ganelin’s free-style jazz was its individuality. His academic training enabled him to compose music of great sophistication, similar to Classical music. For him, composing and improvising were ‘... the same process, but just at a different speed’. Another idiosyncrasy of his was his manner of naming his pieces. ‘I don’t like literature in music,’ he claimed. ‘Titles have no importance for me. The musical language itself is self-sufficient, and all those associations … I use provocative titles in order not to be precise ... the roar of silence, or the colour grey for instance … I like Italian titles, such as ancora, poco a poco, da capo.’ The pieces in his programme at Tallinn were called "Synonyms", "XY" and "Banderilier". Listening to them confirms the fundamentally composed nature of the artistic output of Ganelin’s trio. "Banderilier", for instance, has a clear form of ABCA, with each part using distinctive expressive devices.

In the mid 1970s, the Ganelin-Čekasin-Tarasov Trio became one of the first Soviet jazz groups to tour extensively abroad.³ Their first trip took place in 1975, following two unsuccessful invitations from Ernst Joachim Berendt to visit ‘das Buene’, one of the biggest international jazz festivals in the former East Germany. But soon Ganelin realised that ‘... they are taking advantage of us: we are like a visiting card for the Soviets to show that we have freedom here and we are playing free music.’ After realising that the Soviets were using GTC for political ends, Ganelin began to detach himself step by step from the official touring business. As a sign of intolerance towards politically oriented games, he declined the honour of the Soviet award "Zasluzhenniy artist" (Honoured Artist) for outstanding individuals in the performing arts in the Soviet Union. As he reflected, ‘There were lot of people who longed for a 'Zasluzhenniy', and they were offended when another person got the award. I didn’t want to be part of that propaganda."

On the issue of the relationship between music and politics, Ganelin expressed a clear opinion. "I have been interested only in pure music," he insisted, serving musical and not political aims. "I know that Western authors writing about music issues in totalitarian societies tend to interpret every act diverging from the ideological line as resistance. This seems wrong to me." He gave the example of his Romanian friend, a poet, who said he was free to write anything and to travel anywhere he wanted during Ceausescu’s regime, because of Ceausescu’s support for culture.

By way of conclusion, Ganelin expressed his gratitude for the opportunity to live in Lithuania, where, like all the Baltic States, individuals enjoyed much more freedom than in Moscow. Tallinn’67 has remained in his memory as a kind of crazy party, an enormous celebration, and the high point of the jazz culture of the era. In the next few years, many musicians began to search for new sounds.

The second representative from Lithuania I was able to talk to was Oleg Molokoyedov, who was at Tallinn’67 as the second representative of Lithuania, with his own group. As with many others, his best memories of the festival are associated with the performance of the Charles Lloyd group, and especially the mastery of Keith Jarrett:

"Lloyd’s group was a shock to everybody who heard and saw it … and I was one of the lucky ones who saw it. It was the first time I saw Jarrett playing live, and I was deeply impressed. It turned upside down our Classical understanding of how to play the piano: how to use the hands, how to play staccato. He had mastered his technique to the highest level of proficiency. He could basically play under the piano, or standing on it, and it was done not just as a kind of circus, but he was singing and jumping to increase his expressiveness. His technique was crazy, and nobody really understood how he could play that way. Of Lloyd’s pieces, I remember his 'Love Song' … we saw somebody playing the alto flute for the first time: it was long, long, with a very nice sound. McClure’s bass sound was amazing."⁴

As an admirer of American style jazz, Molokoyedov defines his group in stylistic terms as representing Coltrane aesthetics: Koltreinovshchina, as he jokingly calls the style. The repertoire of the quintet at Tallinn’67 consisted of three pieces, of which "Legend" was awarded the prize for the best arrangement based on a folk melody. Molokoyedov nevertheless remained modest: "We practised a lot … but almost every group played better than we did." He expressed his dissatisfaction with the poor swing feeling of his quintet, which, in fact, was not their problem alone, but at that time "Soviet groups in general played with a bad swing feeling." The main reason was the absence of live examples. The moment of enlightenment for the entire Soviet jazz community was an appearance by the Finnish drummer Matti Oiling at Tallinn’66, astonishing Russian musicians with his swing. There was yet another reason for the poor swing feeling of Molokoyedov’s group in Tallinn. The drummer of the group became friends with Czesław Bartkowski, the drummer in Namysłovsky’s group, and learned some new techniques from him, which he immediately tried to integrate into his performance. Unfortunately, the attempt turned out to be unsuccessful, because he played differently to the way they had rehearsed, and as a result the rhythm section was out of sync.

The prize-winning piece "Legend" was based on a simple Lithuanian folk melody "The Squirrel", unusually based on the first four degrees of the minor scale. What made the arrangement special, and the reason, according to Molokoyedov, for it being given the award, was the harmonisation of the theme in fourths, played by the flute in the top and the trombone in the bottom. The piece was introduced by a short free jazz style opening, which the author calls musical pointillism. The motif was later used in Leningrad’s film onTallinn’67. https://arhiiv.err.ee/video/vaata/jazz-67

Among Molokoyedov’s recollections was the meeting at the Town Hall, where the orgkomitee and the leaders of the groups decided whether or not Lloyd would perform. Although officials made excuses, such as the unexpectedly large audience, difficulties with organising the event, or the shortage of time, Lloyd was nevertheless given permission to perform. To find space in the programme, Herman Lukyanov gave up his second spot to Lloyd. But, as Molokoyedov pointed out, virtually anybody would do this for Lloyd.⁵

A somewhat curious aspect of Molokoyedov’s memories was his thoughts on the heavy smoking during the concerts in the Sports Hall, which he interpreted as a sign of the freedom of the era:

"There were 3,000 people in the Sports Hall, and everyone was smoking during the concert … it was allowed at that time. You couldn’t breathe … the air was grey and foggy with smoke, but it was a sign of freedom for us. To smoke in the Kalev Sports Hall during a concert: it was a very special sign of freedom. I don’t remember that they smoked on stage, but backstage definitely. I also remember I was smoking on the TV shows I participated in … although I was not a smoker. Everybody smoked. It was the same in Germany. I remember visiting music stores where you could always find boxes of cigarettes available for customers. Music and smoking belonged together back then."

The brief story of how Molokoyedov’s group formed tells how its membership was based on the jazz musicians who gathered in the first jazz club in Vilnius, the Tchitalnyi (Reading) Cafe, in the mid-1960s. The appearance of this venue was related to the appearance of youth cafes as a collective mode of cultural activism across the Soviet Union, emerging together with the shestidesyatniki (Sixties) movement at the beginning of the 1960s. The cafe became a venue for the shestidesyatniki intelligentsia in Vilnius, for reading poems and literature, playing chess, and listening to jazz. The level of skill among the musicians who joined Molokoyedov’s group varied: some were more experienced in improvising, but others were neophytes in the jazz world. Molokoyedov himself was a student of Classical composition at the Vilnius Conservatoire. Unusually, his fanaticism for jazz was not inspired by Conover’s Jazz Hour, as with most Soviet jazz lovers; instead, the source of his inspiration was the music from LPs sold by local Jewish dealers and by the Lithuanian community abroad.

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¹ Skype interview with Ganelin (1944), 10 April 2018.
² Derived from the Russian word shtat (the state), a shtatnik was a supporter of the United States.
³ Ganelin and Ganelin-Čekasin-Tarasov played a major role in Lithuanian jazz. These three Russian-born musicians earned the first international acclaim for Lithuanian jazz. Furthermore, they are considered founders of the whole Lithuanian jazz school, both through their music and later their educational activities. See: Ritter, Rüdiger. 2010. Der Kontrollwahn und die Kunst Die Macht, das Ganelin-Trio und der Jazz. Osteuropa 2010(11), 223–234; http://www.mic.lt/en/discourses/lithuanian-music-link/no-19-january-december-2016/ruta-skudiene-con-anima-metamorphoses-jazz/
⁴ Skype interview with Molokoyedov (1947), 14 March 2019.
⁵ The Memorandum of Participants does not confirm this.