The first days in August mark Kaliningrad’s big summer event: The Don Chento Jazz Festival.

Hmmmm. Remind me. Don Chento? Didn’t he play bass with Count Basie? Or, just a minute, wasn’t he in Duke Ellington’s horn section?

Er, no. Don Chento is the adopted name of Kaliningrad pizzeria magnate, Vladimir Katzman. There’s usually a Don Chento [...]]]>

The first days in August mark Kaliningrad’s big summer event: The Don Chento Jazz Festival.

Hmmmm. Remind me. Don Chento? Didn’t he play bass with Count Basie? Or, just a minute, wasn’t he in Duke Ellington’s horn section?

Er, no. Don Chento is the adopted name of Kaliningrad pizzeria magnate, Vladimir Katzman. There’s usually a Don Chento pizza place next to one of Kaliningrad’s Viktoria supermarkets.

To digress a little, Don Chento pizzas are truly awful. Any babushka in Kaliningrad can knock you up a better Italian in half the time for half the money. But then you’d have to eat it in her post-Soviet kitchen with all the wrong wallpaper, and good decor matters more than good food to aspiring Russians these days. So Don ‘Vladimir’ Chento had his pizzeria interiors designered as a jazz club and set up the annual Jazz Festival in Kaliningrad as a promo.

How’s it working out? Kaliningrad blogger Kokoc isn’t impressed. He complains:

It is pleasant when a city lives a full cultural life, even though I am not a passionate jazz fan.

But what interests me is that there is also in the neighbouring city of Klaipeda (Lithuania) an annual international jazz festival. Big artists come from around the world, tourists flood in and the festival spreads itself all over the old city.

In fact, the highlight of this event is the territory of the festival – the city of Klaipeda itself. Nobody erects barriers or cashier’s offices. The power of sound is the jazz music that can be heard by all.

But, in our case, the festival is fenced off and access costs money. Even though Jazz knows no boundaries and territories.

For some reason, our people need to create an additional entourage around any event. Maybe they think consumers ‘demand’ that the elite should be separated from ordinary mortals, as if it’s a mere commercial event.

Clearly there’s a conflict here between a civic and a commercial event. Kaliningraders would like see their show rival Klaipeda’s – oh and Gdansk has a festival too. It’s Jazz Wars in the Baltic. But sponsor Don Chento is pitching his pizza parlours as a place for gilded youth, not daytrippers.

In any case, you can’t daytrip into Kaliningrad. Unless the authorities introduced a Moscow Football Match system, where a ticket was equal to a visa, you’d spend the whole festival at the border.

And to be fair, someone has to pay for big name artists. Europe’s biggest and longest running event, the North Sea Jazz Festival in Holland, always charged admission and even a small premium for top billing.

Klaipeda, which features acts like Joe Sample and Randy Crawford, is putting up a huge local funding, maybe even some EU culture money, and there Kaliningrad can’t compete.

Unlike the locals, I think Kaliningrad is probably doing the best job it can. Which is more than you can say for the pizzas.

Above, the sailing ship ‘Lovis’. Below, the former Soviet sub B-413. Location, the Port of Kaliningrad. The connection is an environmental happening called Moving Baltic Sea, a kind of travelling circus seashow.

Propped by films, fun and festivities, Moving Baltic Sea promotes creative strategies for cultural and environmental co-operation between countries that share the same ecological [...]]]>

Above, the sailing ship ‘Lovis’. Below, the former Soviet sub B-413. Location, the Port of Kaliningrad. The connection is an environmental happening called Moving Baltic Sea, a kind of travelling circus seashow.

Propped by films, fun and festivities, Moving Baltic Sea promotes creative strategies for cultural and environmental co-operation between countries that share the same ecological space.

That the Baltic needs care is not disputed. It’s almost as closed as the Caspian and its waters take 25 – 30 years to refresh. Pollution is all around, whether it is fertilizer landwash from Denmark or sewage from amber mining in Kaliningrad. So the focus of these creative workshops is the need for transnational solutions.

The troupe’s activities are aimed squarely at youth but its message shouldn’t be lost on elders who still can’t find any transnational solution to the problem of Kaliningrad’s borders.

While building understanding, MBS also explodes a few myths. Apolitical NGOs are alive and well in Russia. The project’s Russian events were supported by Ecodefense, The German Russian Exchange and Guide as well as Kaliningrad’s Museum of World Oceans, which provided a lively venue.

As a parcel in the exchange of ideas, Moving Baltic Sea discovered that Kaliningrad isn’t exactly the dark side of the moon. (For good measure, they painted it a few other colours too.) But there remains Kaliningrad’s dark land border in the shadow of the Schengen curtain, which took some project members all night to cross.

By contrast, the team’s ship sailed into Kaliningrad in four hours. Yet pre-Schengen – just three years ago – we could go shopping from Kaliningrad to Gdansk or Klaipeda all in the space of a Saturday afternoon.

In shedding some ’son et lumiere’ on all sorts of issues, in a very nice way, projects like this do a great job.