VOTD 1/17/2024

 VA: Tallin 67 (Melodya)

Purchased used at Jerry's Records, I think

What is this? I guess it must be a festival recording, an audience can sometimes be heard. I don't know any of the artists. Some of the notes in discogs.com don't translate from the Cyrillic, so I can't read them.

Should I approach listening to more records like this? Not knowing anything? I'm not a big fan of streaming services to listen to albums, but it could be one reason to bring things up on my phone. I think I've mentioned before I don't engage with Spotify. I like the library-based Hoopla app, I even brought up the latest Rolling Stones album on it. (Didn't like it much but it gets better towards the end; the mix seemed weird and antithetical to the Stones, but maybe I should judge a non-mp3-based rendering.)

So what is this? A jazz festival from behind the Iron Curtain? If so, the musicians seem to have ingested at least 1950s jazz, even touching the 60s. Alto saxophonist Zbigniew Namysłowsi sounds a bit on the boppish side of Eric Dolphy while blow on "Summertime", one of the familiar tunes here. The band kicks into a funky backbeat on part of it, something I'm certain I could have done without. There's a Qunicy Jones tune (don't ask me the title) and a quirky version of "Oleo" by the V. Zakarhov Quintet, their only credit I can find on discogs. 

Is this a Soviet-era festival? Does that say something about jazz, in that era as well as now? Is it an international music, or was it already by that time designated as something polite and inoffensive? 

I sometimes think about the legendary first Stravinsky/Nijinsky performance of Le Sacre du Printemps, where reportedly people were tearing the chairs out of the floor. Now the piece, at least in concert form, is a staple of college-level orchestras. What could we do now to rile anybody that much without being blatantly and outrageously offensive? 

Am I even asking the right questions? Given the door-smashing and chair-throwing of Jan. 6 2021, perhaps there are other questions to be asked, other directions to take. Not that I'm equating that with Stravinsky. I seem to be posing more questions than answers.

The record's not bad, by the way.