All our life is jazz, full of harmony, day-to-day improvisations and interchanging rhythms, the heartbeat as we hear it – these words belong to Gaioz Kandelaki, the indisputable founder of Tbilisi Big Band, securely and cozily sheltered under the powerful wings of City Hall. Listening to our Big Band’s fantastic jam sessions, one sees 21 professional players on the stage, clad and poised right in the old nostalgic style of all those eminent Western jazz groups and personalities like Miles Davis Quintet, Duke Ellington’s Jazz Orchestra, Benny Goodman Swing Band, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie and many others of that caliber.
Yes, it is amazing that our Tbilisi Big Band is fairly comparable to those memorable musical giants of the American twenties, thirties and forties, saying nothing about contemporary jazz performers. The Band is now 25 years old, and is getting ready to celebrate the anniversary on April 30 next year, on the weathered stage of the Tbilisi State Concert Hall, in the formidable presence of the acclaimed American octogenarian jazz drummer Billy Cobham, who performed in Tbilisi exactly a quarter of a century ago. Hopefully, together with him, the numerous Georgian jazz fans will have a chance to listen to the beautifully female but strong and clear voice of the amazing Nik West and the mesmerizing tunes of her bass guitar. Incidentally, the world-renowned NikWestBass is Gaioz Kandelaki’s granddaughter-in-law, very much in love with Sakartvelo and its warm and loving people. The Big Band’s silver jubilee is going to look and sound even greater thanks to the presumable appearance on the stage of its absolutely insurmountable 85-year-young Givi Gachechiladze, the Georgian jazz wizard and the band’s unchanged musical director.
History has kept many incredible stories of the founding the Band. Kandelaki and his enthusiastic coterie started the group in the attic of the Marjanishvili Drama Theater in the torn-apart post-civil-war Tbilisi, when Gaioz was the Theater’s director. But, truth be told, nothing could have happened without the huge moral and material assistance provided by the Tbilisi City Hall and its leaders of those disturbed times. There is another, no-less-important, side to the history of Big Band, and that is the indigenous musical tradition. There was a time in this country when music lovers of Sakartvelo avidly listened to the jaw-dropping performance of jazz by unforgettable Constantine Pevzner and his outstanding variety ensemble Rero. Yes, the Georgian jazz roots are right there, in those old-timers’ talent and genuine professionalism.
On top of all that, jazz was so popular in this capital right after WWII that the young fans and listeners would sooner go hungry than be left without the expensive black-market records, sneaked into Soviet Georgia by myriad fits and starts and the obvious risks to be apprehended, because the Soviets had a sick, unbridled fear and aversion to jazz as a pernicious bourgeois art, dangerously saturating the tissue of pristine communist lifestyle. This was a considerable obstacle on the way of gingerly grafting the western culture on this side of the Iron Curtain, brought to life by relentless enthusiasts like Gaioz Kandelaki. By the way, recently, a big-format book-album came out, saying volumes about Kandelaki’s life in jazz and his prolific activity in general to the benefit of our culture. Not in vain. He carries the title of Tbilisi Honorable Citizen and Merited Art Personality of the country. Kandelaki is certainly not alone in the field. For instance, the celebrated dazzling Georgian jazz performer Maia Baratashvili joined the orchestra when she was literally a kid, and practically grew up on the stage in the lap of the Band. Together with her are the Band pianists Otar Magradze and Dini Virsaladze, drummer Valery Pailodze, tenor-sax Kakha Jagashvili, solo-guitar davit Koiava, and of course Maia’s fellow jazz singers Zaur Shavgulidze, Mariko Ebralidze, Temur Sajaia, Nestan Jibladze, Nino Gvelesiani and Giorgi Sukhitashvili. Big Band is lucky enough (and it deserves all it has achieved) to be housed in Tbilisi Rose Garden Park, in its pretty, comfortable premises called the Big Band Rehearsal Studio. They do about 200 concerts a year, including charity performances at various universities, as pure American tradition has it. The Band also does three to four concerts a month at its rehearsal studio, to which the interested public is always welcome, without charge. One of the most prominent venues for Big Band recitals is Tbilisi Sheraton Hotel, with 1000 seats, always packed full when the sounds of jazz are heard. Big Band has more than 350 music pieces on its repertoire, containing both real McCoy American jam session wonders and national melodies of the famous Georgian Voices, often performed ensemble. Georgian jazz, as we may call it, is a natural part of the UNESCO idea of Jazz World Day of 30 April, celebrated in the world simultaneously in 218 countries. To slightly alter the popular French saying – Ala West Come ala West!
Op-Ed by Nugzar B. Ruhadze
