Tallinn '67 Jazz Festival

Myths and Memories

Heli Reimann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000440553
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique de jazz

Tallinn '67 Jazz Festival: Myths and Memories explores the legendary 1967 jazz gathering that centered Tallinn, Estonia as the jazz capital of the USSR and marked both the pinnacle of a Soviet jazz awakening as well as the end of a long series of evolutionary jazz festivals in Estonia. This study offers new insights into what was the largest Soviet jazz festival of its time through an abundance of collected materials – including thousands of pages of archival documents, more than a hundred hours of interviews and countless media reviews and photographs – while grappling with the constellation of myths integral to jazz discourse in an attempt to illuminate 'how it really was'. Accounts from musicians, jazz fans, organisers and listeners bring renewed life to this transcultural event from more than half a century ago, framed by scholarly discussions contextualizing the festival within the closed conditions of the Cold War. Tallinn '67 Jazz Festival details the lasting international importance of this confluence of Estonian, Soviet and American jazz and the ripple effects it spread throughout the world.

1 Setting the Scene

Estonian Jazz Popularisers Uno Naissoo and Valter Ojakäär and Official Organising Procedures of Tallinn ’67

DOI: 10.4324/9780367815295-2

Most of the jazz scene in post–WWII Estonia was based on the dedicated and enthusiastic activities of Uno Naissoo and Valter Ojakäär. The relationship between the two is much like that which exists between a chronicler and his sources – Ojakäär recorded what Naissoo achieved. That the trajectory of the entire cultural form can be articulated through the work of two individuals testifies to the size of the Estonian cultural space. In a population of little over one million, there is unlikely to be a high participation rate in a minority cultural form like jazz. Even Ojakäär and Naissoo, as we shall see, were not full-time jazz ‘workers’, but had a range of other professional commitments.

During the Soviet era, Estonia was not only territorially but also culturally connected to the Soviet Union, which, contrary to expectations, was not necessarily a disadvantage in their jazz activities. In the Soviet context, Estonian jazz culture managed to take on a pioneering role: Naissoo was an initiator of a jazz festival tradition and a recognised jazz composer; Ojakäär prepared the first jazz broadcasts (after WWII) and penned the first full-length volume on jazz in the Soviet Union. They were both trained as classical composers, belonged to the Composers’ Union, represented Estonia in the Union’s congresses and were often jury members for musical competitions all over the Soviet Union. As such, they were frequent guests in the corridors of Moscow’s highest cultural institutions and well known in professional Soviet music circles.

This chapter aims to set the scene for further discussion of the Tallinn ’67 festival. The first two sections introduce the eminent figures in Estonian jazz, Uno Naissoo and Valter Ojakäär – their role in Estonian jazz culture and contribution to Tallinn ’67, and some details of their lives. The historical overview of Estonian jazz festivals is presented in the first section. The following two subchapters are respectively on formal organising procedures of the festival and the individuals forming the legislative body – the orgkomitee. Finally, the festival schedule is presented based on the surviving document, the Pamyatka utchasnika festivalya (Festival Memorandum for Participants).

Uno Naissoo: The Initiator of the Jazz Festival Tradition

‘What is the oldest American jazz festival?’ asked my [George Avakian’s] new-found Soviet friend in the bar of the Hotel Tallinn.

‘Newport, I guess.’

‘And how old is it?’ he asked, pouring us a couple of stiff belts of Caucasian cognac.

‘Well, we recorded the second year and that was 1956. That makes thirteen years this summer, but it’s really the twelfth because they skipped a year.’

‘Twelfth,’ he smiled. ‘Tonight, my fellow citizens of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and I welcome you to the opening concert of the fourteenth annual Tallinn Jazz Festival.’

He raised his glass. As we clinked, I thought: maybe they did invent baseball.¹

This dialogue was reportedly conducted between George Avakian, the manager of Charles Lloyd’s visit to the Soviet Union in 1967, and an Estonian proud of Tallinn’s jazz festival tradition longer than Newport. It raises a provocative question: can we really consider the event in May 1949 to have been the first of those festivals? Naissoo, indeed, dated the festivals initiated through his enthusiasm from this gathering, called at that time a loominguline kohtumine (creative meeting). To apply the status of a full-size festival to an event involving two groups on a stage in a darkened room performing in front of a few people is questionable; but it assumed a symbolic meaning in the foundation of a tradition that ultimately spread across the whole of the Soviet Union in the 1960s. That meeting in 1949 is certainly seminal in relation to later festivals.

Further insight into ‘creative meeting’ is provided by one of the sections in the Almanac of the Swing Club.² It opens with the declaration that this event would not simply be a venue for amateur dance bands playing ‘sentimentally sweet schlagers’, but for ‘real music makers’, top level musicians; and the audience would not merely be interested in dancing, but true jazz lovers. Swing Club, Mickey’s and Rütmikud were the three ‘combinations’ (the term used for bands) supposed to take part first, but ‘the haltuura ³-spirit’ of the latter obstructed the plan.

Heldur Karmo, the author of that chapter of the Almanac, explicitly critiques the bands on artistic grounds. Mickey’s, an imitation of a big swing band, although demonstrating a satisfactory standard of performance, was declared to be lacking originality and just tediously copying American swing classics. Swing Club, the group led by Naissoo, lacked experience in improvisation, although they at least presented original repertoire. ‘After the concert everybody quickly grabbed their cases, instruments and other treasured objects and just hurried to catch the last bus, or train or tram,’ was Karmo’s embarrassingly anticlimactic conclusion. Following the event, a questionnaire circulated among the musicians, set out the aesthetic platform of Estonian jazz musicians, of which the most important principle seemed to be simply an angry objection to bebop, on the grounds that ‘one cannot make honey from dung.’ One of the 18 questions asked for a definition of the term ‘Soviet jazz’, to which nobody could really give any reasonable answer. Harry Kõlar, for instance, stated that ‘one cannot imagine what Soviet jazz should be, because if it is jazz, then it is not Soviet and vice versa.’

The overview of the history of jazz festivals in Tallinn based on personal notes of Naissoo indicates that a similar kind of ‘creative meeting’ with the same participants took place in December of the same year.⁴ The first two modest gatherings were followed by one in 1952 and from 1956 onwards the events appeared annually until 1967, with the exception of 1962. The number of participating ensembles in 1952 was three, five in 1956 and 1957, then an abrupt increase occurred in 1958, when 12 local ensembles took to the stage at the Club of the Tallinn Plywood and Furniture Factory. This three-day gathering is the first event that unambiguously qualifies as a festival. The festivals in Tallinn gradually attracted participants from farther afield, with two groups arriving from Leningrad in 1959 and the first group from Moscow in 1961.⁵ While the events in 1963 and 1964 took a step back in terms of duration and participant numbers compared to 1961, the expansion then accelerated from 1965 when, for example, the number of groups from the Soviet Union alone reached eight, representing five cities. Tallinn ’66 saw the inclusion of the first ensembles from Finland and Sweden. And finally, the biggest jazz festival ever to have taken place (at that time) in Soviet territory, Tallinn ’67, with 26 groups, involving 122 musicians from 17 cities (Ojakäär & Ojakäär 2011: 143–159).

On the list of members of the orgkomitee for the 1967 festival, Naissoo was formally presented as the head of the Jazz Music Commission of the Ministry of Culture of the ESSR (Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic), the institution existing only formally for the purpose of legalising the jazz festival movement at the governmental level. A piece of handwritten sheet music titled ‘Festival fanfare’⁶ shows that Naissoo was the composer of the opening fanfare for the festival. The Norwegian jazz critic Randi Hultin was, however, surprised by such an opening, since the march-like fanfare sounded to her like the opening of a sports event rather than a music festival.⁷

Naissoo identified himself primarily as a composer. His diverse compositional output ranges from solo pieces to orchestral works and rock opera while the wider Estonian public knows him as a composer of numerous popular Estonian evergreen songs. Primarily because of his unique jazz suites, Naissoo has been recognised as the founder of the folk jazz tradition in Estonian jazz history. The distinctive feature of the suites is non-traditional ensemble formats where Jazz Suite No. 6 for instance is composed for male voice, female voice and instrumental ensemble including guitar, piano, harmonica, drums, bass, violin, melodica, three trumpets, trombone and two beeping toys.⁸

‘If your vocation is composing then you have to subordinate all your other activities to that’,⁹ was Naissoo’s perspective, asserting that the numerous vocal and instrumental groups under his leadership were workshops for his musical experiments. He began assembling groups in the late 1940s with the formation of Swing Club, the experimental group which in fact almost never appeared in public with its musical innovations: ‘We played very little … meaning we tried to play but there were no results. Nobody could really play anything. But we theorised a lot and talked frequently about musical styles.’¹⁰ The greatest heritage of the group is the Almanac – the ‘doctoral dissertations’, as musicians called their written record of the debates in which they searched for their personal paths during a period of aesthetic and stylistic upheaval in jazz at the global level, and the changing status of jazz in the Soviet musical scene. Naissoo’s next group Stuudio 8, under his leadership for two years (1962–1964), was an octet of five professional horn players with a preference for the transparent and airy sounds of west coast jazz. The greatest recognition given to any group under Naissoo’s artistic leadership was the silver medal for a triumphant performance of the ensemble Metronoom at the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow in 1957. In addition to his skills as an arranger, Naissoo was a multi-instrumentalist, always on stage with his groups, although he remained modest regarding his skills: ‘I am not an instrumentalist, not at all. I learnt piano as a secondary instrument – this was the only instrument I ever got average marks for. And then double bass as a side instrument – it was very poor … I only received a grading of 3 for that. So, it was all real amateurship. … I also played French horn but then I got a hump in my back and changed instrument for something less bent.’¹¹

Although Naissoo considered himself primarily as a composer, his role as an educator is no less important: he spent 28 years teaching music theory at Tallinn Music School, published four books on harmony, devoted 26 years of educational work at the Youth Section of the Composers’ Union, and finally, established the formal education of popular music in Estonia by opening the Levimuusika ¹² Department at Tallinn Music School in 1977. Apart from earning his living, he explained his long and active engagement with music education half-humorously, saying: ‘I am very lazy person. If I want to learn something new then I include the subject into the teaching program … then I have an obligation to learn it.’¹³

Besides his musical achievement, Naissoo became famous because of his idiosyncratic personal traits, including an always-in-a-hurry temperament and a humorous, figurative manner of speech. His way of talking, full of self-deprecating irony and amusing punch lines, earned him legendary status, surrounding him with the ‘aura’ of mythology. The point is exemplified in an episode in which Naissoo described his busy life-style:

I’ve had a car for a while now but even with the car I can’t scoot to all the places I need and to get everywhere on time. I practise compiling a to-do list, so that I write down all the things I need to do the next day. I put those things in order according to the driving route so that there are as few left turns as possible, as few traffic obstructions as possible, so I can get to the place I need faster. On average I have 3–4 things per hour to do on a daily basis in different corners of Tallinn. […] I am not used to having a holiday. If I haven’t done anything else but eating and sleeping for some days I feel sick.¹⁴

The following comments on his sense of urgency and sporting skills are part of the library of anecdotes that have gathered around him (Figure 1.1):

Figure 1.1 Uno Naissoo (personal collection of Heli Reimann). Uno Naissoo’s caricature by Hugo Hiibus (personal collection of Ksenia Naissoo).

Yes I have done some sports. People say when seeing me running in the city tha...