Jazz Bez, Day 10

Jazz Bez, the tenth day, the last one.  Off-Quartet and Mint Digital

The Off-Quartet   (guitar, trumpet, contrabass and percussion ) performed contemporary. The group was distinguished by its quite unique (at that Festival)  jazz guitar and just fantastic drum solos. The musicians created some informal  and  easy atmosphere.  Martha Biliska , the conferencier of the Festival, introducing the Quartet  informed the audience that it was just people from Denmark (among other countries) more frequently  responded  that they were happy.

Indeed,  an extremely “positivity”   that was distinguished the two Danes & two Poles within other Festival’s participants.  Their zest is the implementation of the guitar as a solo rather than harmonic instrument  carrying on an equal dialog with the trumpet 

 The guests from the Lithuanian the Mint Digital were the Fest- finishers & they  presented not only an experimental mixture of pop, jazz and electronics but their own Vj as well and the last one  accompanied the whole performance. To be honest, despite his professionalism & titular-cargo the video-performance hasn’t impressed me greatly.  Vj played down with  the computer aesthetics of the  early 90's,  sometimes he disharmonized with the music and the transitions between scenes were too  rough. On the other hand, it was the only Festival group trying to entertain the audience with a visual show.  

The Mint Digital  was so far from jazz in their experiments that only the vocals of Dive Starinskaite (pseudonym Deevah Dee) “saved” the situation. She was accompanied by electro though sometimes  its  rhythmic pulsation was disturbed by the bewildering saxophone and flute (Alvydas Maciulskas). Dive is successfully  exercising many styles (as evidenced –her  numerous awards),  her genre-list  includes even hip-hop. The vocalist is just that  an exception when a black diva is singing “inside” a white girl.  Some contradiction detween an appearance & vocal abilities creates the combination to be  rarely found in music world & to be amused by an audience.

As a result it should be admitted that  Jazz Bez -09 occurred to be more interesting than its predecessor due to the quantity of  presented all-around-jazz  experiments. Some mainstream projects sounded like a pleasant dissolvent of the intellectually rich Festival  but still they haven’t  defined  its general trend. By the way, Jazz Bez  seemed to be successful and  it has managed to educate L’viv audience to be quite persnickety & open  for novelties. The most of the objectively top-quality projects were appropriately perceived and valued. And only the  free-jazz performances  were “loosing”  its audience  while the concerts But! The number of non-apprehenders was  smaller in comparison with the previous year. 

Well, “Dzyga” has assumed its educational  liabilities & it complies with them worthily

Efendy + Roxolana Savchyn