Dniepopetrovsk: World Jazz at the Dnjepr 2002

Saturday evening, a Jam-Session in the restaurant Melrose took place after the concerts, a night-club for the happy few of Dniepopetrovsk with excellent dishes and a small stage for the musical program. The musicians and contributors of the festival were invited to drink, eat, play and they did all this up to nearly total exhaustment. We were not the only from Hamburg, also Lera Gechner, a fiery entertainer, lived in Hamburg for some time and played there quite often. Sunday evening brought four gigs, the ukrainian ensembles Grigori Nemnirowski Quintett and Dzyga Quintett. It was evident, that Dzyga played not as strong as the day before, maybe because of the intensive experience of the JamSession. And then the ukrainian-german Trio Gödecke - Shilin - Gorjunovich. That's why we came to this festival. Valery Shilin is the advocate of FreeJazz in Dniepopetrovsk, he is a member of the Trio AmaJazz from Ekaterinburg in Russia, far away in the Urals. Not easy to overcome these distances. We knew this Trio from concerts in Russia and they had played in Hamburg already and so Heinz-Erich Gödecke was sure about the musical quality. It was not too big an adventure to invite the pianist Sergej Gorjunovich to the trio, a musician he did not know before. Not enough time for rehearsal, some technical obstacles again, but it came out as a great concert and the audience, which is not very close to Avantgarde, understood, listened and reacted in a very positive, enthusiastic way, strong applause was the reward for this gig. We could not enjoy and celebrate the succes in depth, as directly afte the concert we had to take the train to Kiev, an 8 hour ride. A festival report at Jazz.ru, english online-Übersetzung plus: the Festival-Website from Dniepopetrovsk in ukrainian language Thank you! back