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.
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