The international festival of contemporary jazz and improvisational music, starting next week, will last for eight days. Its organizers supplemented the music program with film screenings and lectures, which will invite jazz lovers to untested spaces of the festival.
Already on October 14 "Vilnius Jazz Screen Beats" festival film series will begin in the capital's "Skalvija" cinema center, which includes five films on the theme of jazz by the famous documentarian Dick Fontaine (1938 - 2023).
October 18-19 "Vilnius Jazz" will enter the MO Museum space where he will present three intriguing lectures. Their lecturers are French jazz expert Terry Quenum, British photojournalist Philip Arneill and Lithuanian philosopher Kaspars Pocius.
In his lecture "The Art of the Arragers", T. Quenum will introduce the historical development of the art of arranging, European and American traditions, genre subtleties and challenges. The topic of K. Potias' presentation is "This is our music." Free Jazz and Black Politics in the 7th Century in the XNUMXs".
Master of documentary photography Ph. In his lecture at Tokyo Jazz Joints, Arneillas will present a little-known phenomenon of Japanese jazz culture to Lithuanians - cafes dedicated to listening to records, called "jazz kissa". The lecturer is one of the creators of the project exploring this phenomenon of Japanese subculture, which was launched in 2015, and captured about one and a half hundred such points in Tokyo.
Jazz kissa culture emerged in Japan after World War II, when listening JAV and new music records released in Europe were a luxury, so people did it in coffee shops. Now they end their lives together with their owners.
Ph.D. Arneillo's lecture will crown the presentation of Japanese jazz at the festival. This year, three October 18 projects will be dedicated to him in the Vilnius Old Theater. "Vilnius Jazz" is famous in Europe as one of the most important Japanese jazz scenes. So far, we have presented more than half a dozen Japanese soloists and groups. This year we even managed to invite the entire orchestra from Japan, so we wanted to give it a wider context - that's how the Japanese jazz evening appeared in the program", said Antanas Gustys, the long-time organizer of the festival.
In addition to the "Special Big Band" assembled by world avant-garde and "noise" scene legend Otomo Yoshihide, the multi-instrumentalist Kondo Tatsuo's band "K3" will perform at the Japanese jazz evening, where three virtuosos of O. Yoshihide's big band play. Another trio will start the evening dedicated to Japanese jazz on the "Vilnius Jazz" stage, which will be joined by Lithuanian pianist Gintė Preisaitė among the Japanese.
This improviser, composer and producer studying in Denmark and her partners from Japan share a wide musical horizon, a love of experimentation and common musical acquaintances. Gintė has just toured in Japan, where she played with fellow members of this trio. On the Vilnius stage, her partners will be Sachiko M, a star of experimental electronic music playing samplers, and percussionist Aikawa Hitomi.
The concerts of the 37th international festival "Vilnius Jazz" will take place on October 16-20. in the old theater of Vilnius. The project is financed by the Lithuanian Council of Culture and Vilnius city municipality.
