Tallinn '67 Jazz Festival: Myths and Memories

By: Heli Reimann

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Synopsis: 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.