International music festival Kaliningrad City Jazz.

Age of the project: 15 years, age of the festival president: 60

The international music festival Kaliningrad City Jazz is a large-scale cultural forum held annually in Kaliningrad since 2006. It is a project with a broad genre and style coverage.

In the year of its foundation the organizers, the festival president Vladimir Katsman in particular, did not anticipate that by the 15th anniversary of Kaliningrad City Jazz they would unite within the project musicians of most diverse music styles of the modern scene, such as soul, rock, blues, new age, and others. Remaining a forum of jazz creativity for the festival admirers, as it was at the beginning of its beautiful story, Kaliningrad City Jazz has changed considerably in its structure and content.

About 200 musicians, who have taken part in the festival over the years, represent the whole range of original trends in contemporary music. For Kaliningrad residents and those who specially came to the jazz festival from other cities, performed: Incognito (Great Britain), Candy Dulfer (Netherlands), Zucchero (Italy), Zap Mama (Belgium), Inner Circle (Jamaica), UB40 feat. Ali Campbell, Astro and Mickey Virtue (UK), ZAZ (France), and so on. The list is impressive.

At the apparent independence of these directions and performers from each other, in the space of Kaliningrad City Jazz, they get into a new context: their coexistence and participation in collective action, lasting for three days, is transformed in the minds of listeners and spectators in the image of «multiverse» scene.

The practice of organizing the international music festival Kaliningrad City Jazz reflects the most important trends of contemporary culture. The program and structure of the festival discover the diversity of intercultural communication: globalization tendencies, enlargement of creative contacts in the field of music environment, move towards «multilingualism» of artistic language, and a dialogue with art in the open information field. That is why we can claim Kaliningrad City Jazz is one of the most important tools in the establishment of the cultural and creative code of the region.

Photo: Viktor Guseinov