GANELIN TRIO PRIORITY

Vyacheslav Ganelin - piano, synth., perc.

Petras Vysniauskas - soprano saxophone

Klaus Kugel - drums, percussion

Music, no matter what genre, becomes most vivid when it tells a story about ourselves. But the narrative freedom to produce fields of association that go beyond existing images must be fought for over and over again. In the 70´s, the pianist Vyacheslav Ganelin was considered exceptional. In soviet Lithuania he took part in a form of music that was called - without any questioning - free jazz. In European jazz, the boldness of the Ganelin Trio´s inventiveness was without comparison. The trio possessed an inexhaustible richness of sounds, ornaments, spontaneous moving forces, open structures, dramaturgies, and switching functions within the band.

Every performance became genesis. Being able to play without set pieces Ganelin and his companions, saxophonist Vladimir Chekassin and drummer Vladimir Tarasov, found a new definition for improvisation. The friction between inner freedom and outer constraint triggered eruptions whose forms ranged from romantic elegy to raging fury - these eruptions were kept under control by their creators at all times.

Since the postulate of unlimited free expression without a defined goal could have caused revolutions, the Ganelin Trio was heard mainly in the western world. 

Overnight it became quiet around Vyacheslav Ganelin. Just before politics in Europe changed irreversably the trio dissolved and the pianst disappeared in Israel. Times became fast-moving and the laws of the ubiquitous free enterprise left little space for dreams. After the era of great visions no one needed the sweeping formats of a Vyatcheslav Ganelin any more. 

In life, just like in any of his improvisations, the pianist was sensitive enough to know exactly when to end an artistic statement.

With saxophonist Petras Vysniauskas, the second central figure in Lithuanian jazz, and German drummer Klaus Kugel there now exists a new Ganelin Trio. Is nostalgia part of the game here? Why not? It would be a criminal misjudgement of the Baltic soul not to be willing to perceive the sediments of nostalgia in all of its statements. But now, as then, the timeless nature of Ganelin´s music is characterized by being able to transform an insatiable longing into productive power. Ganelin, Vysniauskas and Kugel are more than just plain avant-gardists that break up all connections behind them just to pay tribute to some future aesthetic. They make use of the method of American jazz in order to listen deeply into the European musical tradition. That way, they shed light on great gestures of baroque music, they internalize the painful individualism of Romanticism and recapitulate the careless lightness of traditional folk music. It is no less than trans-European, inter-traditional and multi-sensual improvised music. 

What was said above about their rich musical supply is also true without exception for the pianists new formation. With Vysniauskas and Kugel, Ganelin may be less missionary and pugnacious as in the 70´s. But in an age of euphemisms where all fronts have been veiled or dissolved, precisely translatable statements make sense only for the most ardent of idealists. Today´s Ganelin Trio draws from the variety of life an even greater amount of options and perspectives. By not submitting to the worn out primacy of the moment but instead implicating the freedom of the whole process in every moment of their play the new Ganelin Trio is without comparison in European music.

by Wolf Kampmann, Berlin, 2006