On December 11-14 the international jazz festival Jazz Bez will take place in Ternopil. The festival was established by the popular art union Dzyga and the Kyiv-based Polish Institute eight years ago and is held simultaneously in Ukraine and Poland. Within this period it has become a remarkable event in Ukraine’s festival life and has made it possible to restore old or create new jazz traditions in Lviv, Ternopil, Lutsk and Rivne.
This year Jazz Bez will take place in Lublin, Przemysl, Jaroslaw, Sanok (Poland) and in the Ukrainian cities of Lviv, Ternopil, Lutsk, Kyiv and Sevastopol. Each city has its own, fairly independent program, so in mid-December Ukraine will see an “explosion” of jazz music, which will be strengthened by the support from our western neighbor.
For the third time Jazz Bez is coming to Ternopil, which is promoted as a city of festivals. Several local jazz formations have already emerged there attracting a large intellectual audience. “All the concerts on December 11-14 will take place in the Shevchenko Academic Drama Theater, which has wonderful acoustics,” explained Oleh Makohin, the Jazz Bez coordinator in Ternopil. “Jam sessions-an informal communication between touring and local musicians-will be held in one of the fashionable local art clubs.
Various jazz trends will be presented here-from avant-garde to Dixieland-performed by Shockolad+PL (Lviv-Krakow), FBI-Jazz Project (London-Lviv-Krakow), Jacek Kochan & Co (Warsaw-Brooklyn-Paris-Sanok), 4 Jazz (Dnipropetrovsk), Dzhazova Fira (Ternopil), and others.”
In a sense, this event, whether it is held in Lviv, Rivne, Ternopil, or Lutsk, facilitates the development of contemporary urban music culture.
P.S. The recent two-day festival Zaporizhia Jam-2008 involved musicians from Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Sevastopol, and Yalta and offered top-quality Ukrainian jazz for the enjoyment of the audience.
