Tallinn 67 Jazz Festival: Myths and Memories explores the legendary 1967 jazz gathering that centered Tallinn, Estonia as the jazz capital of the USSR and marked both the pinnacle of a Soviet jazz awakening as well as the end of a long series of evolutionary jazz festivals in Estonia. This study offers new insights into what was the largest Soviet jazz festival of its time through an abundance of collected materials including thousands of pages of archival documents, more than a hundred hours of interviews and countless media reviews and photographs while grappling with the constellation of myths integral to jazz discourse in an attempt to illuminate how it really was. Accounts from musicians, jazz fans, organisers and listeners bring renewed life to this transcultural event from more than half a century ago, framed by scholarly discussions contextualizing the festival within the closed conditions of the Cold War. Tallinn 67 Jazz Festival details the lasting international importance of this confluence of Estonian, Soviet and American jazz and the ripple effects it spread throughout the world.
Tallinn 67 Jazz Festival: Myths and Memories explores the legendary 1967 jazz gathering that centered Tallinn, Estonia as the jazz capital of the USSR and marked both the pinnacle of a Soviet jazz awakening as well as the end of a long series of evolutionary jazz festivals in Estonia.
Introduction /
Chapter
1. Setting the scene: Estonian jazz popularisers
Uno Naissoo and Valter Ojakäär and official organising procedures of Tallinn
67 /
Chapter
2. Individual memories /
Chapter
3. Americans at the festival /
Chapter
4. Post-festival reviews: Media and official reports / Conclusions.
Tallinn '67 as an affective event
Heli Reimann is a postdoctoral researcher at the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki.