VILNIUS - Lithuania has stubbornly managed to hold on to its reputation as a buzzing center for jazz and improvised music, and has kept its ecstatic audiences despite the proliferation of so many other entertainments and attractions. Helping to keep jazz traditions alive is multitalented vocalist Neda Malunaviciute.
The highly touted singer and flutist, who will dazzle listeners with her amazing vocal range and improvised flute playing at Tamsta Club on May 10, stands at the apex of a flourishing and innovative modern jazz music tradition in Lithuania that goes back to the sixties.
Mama Jazz, one of the jazz scene's most flamboyant personalities and one of the organizers of the annual Vilnius Jazz Festival, is especially enthusiastic about Neda.
"Someone of Neda's talents appears once every hundred years," she says. "She has such a wonderful vocal, full of rhythmic feeling, with an astonishing range of notes. In addition, she is the queen of improvisation. She can feel the warmth of the music through her heart."
Neda's albums have won critical acclaim, including "Laikas Pripazinti" (1997), an accessible collection of catchy pop songs. She has just released a "best of" collection called "Geriausios dainos."
She released CDs such as "Jazzy Lithuania," "Note Lithuania" and "Free Spirits" over the last three years as introductions to the country's intense and prolific jazz figures. Neda herself, now 36, has been working together with the celebrated Vilnius Jazz Quartet for the last 12 years.
However, it is on stage that Neda visibly dissolves into the music, her colorful vocals drawing the music gradually to a rapturous climax.
Jazz is an inextricable part of many people's lives in Lithuania. You can even study it, at the department of jazz in Klaipeda University's art faculty. Most of the country's jazz musicians have studied there at one time or another, though each has been encouraged to develop a distinctive style.
The point that really marked the birth of a modern jazz scene in Lithuania was a legendary performance in 1961 by the pianist Vyacheslav Ganelin, then just 17.
The concert, which followed an unprecedented conference on jazz theory and history organized by the National Conservatory, known today as the Lithuanian Academy of Music, inspired an ecstatic audience with playing that many had never heard before.
Musicians like Ganelin quickly became more self-assured in how to improvise and were by the mid-sixties fronting bands and starting to take them to jazz festivals outside Lithuania.
It was not until the birth of the Ganelin Trio in 1970 that things really started to take off. Percussionist Vladimir Tarasov left Arkhangelsk in Northern Russia in the late sixties to move to Vilnius. It did not take long before he met Ganelin and the two began working and touring as a duo.
They met saxophonist Vladimir Chekasin when performing in a city in Siberia and persuaded him to join them in Vilnius. Developing their own unique means of musical expression without any western influences, the trio continued to break new ground and astound audiences and critics. It ended only when Ganelin immigrated to Israel in 1987.
Chekasin turned his attention to instructing the country's new musical talents. Over the years, he has developed an entire school of music that almost all of today's jazz musicians have been trained under.
Despite the popularity of jazz in Lithuania, venues in the capital that exist specifically for jazz have a troubling habit of dying out.
The Neringa restaurant on Gedimino Avenue was a favorite hangout for the city's bohemian jazz contingent during the 1980s, and the tiny, smoky Langas Club in the Old Town served as a regular venue in the 1990s. The Neringa still hosts occasional performances, but the Langas closed in 2000.
The most recent victim was El Dorado, a respectable restaurant at the Holiday Inn Vilnius where, every Friday night, the waiters shed their uniforms for T-shirts and jeans and took orders from a cut-price menu. The lights dimmed, the music began, and the ambiance unfurled. El Dorado ended its life as a jazz venue when the hotel fell under new management. For now, the blues and rock venue Tamsta will have to suit as a part-time replacement.
Neda plays Tamsta Club, Subaciaus Street 11, tel. +370 5212 4498, 8pm.
