Virgil Mihaiu has been a JJA member for some 30 years, supporting and reporting on music and other subjects (he is a highly respected scholar of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s works, among many other credits.
His letter below demonstrates how a breadth of interests employing values of jazz and improvisation tie together a life rich with ideas and activities, reinforcing a world-wide network of people like him — that’s us — Ed.
Sorry I haven’t been able to write to you since this summer. In October, my new collection of essays entitled Jazz Contextele mele (“My Jazz Contexts”)
appeared at the JUNIMEA Publishing House in Iași, with a presentation by the erudite Sorin Antohi on its back cover. It comprises 420 pages, containing chapters about how I lived the last 50 years of the history of Romanian jazz, how I perceive the global character of current jazz, my long-standing collaboration with Down Beat (mainly as a member of DB’s Jazz Critics Poll) and Jazz Forum, my perceptions on jazz developments in Romania, but also in Brazil, Cuba, Georgia, Montenegro, Croatia, Azerbaijan, Ethiopia, Turkmenistan, the interesting collaboration between Wynton Marsalis and today’s Romanian musique savante, etc.
The book was launched in Iasi, in the Caudella Hall of the Conservatory where in 1847 Franz Liszt gave a historic concert (Eduard Caudella was the first music professor of our great composer George Enescu – in his turn, violin teacher of Yehudi Menuhin during the latter’s childhood). Since October I had public presentations of my book in Bucharest, in my hometown of Cluj, as well as in other cities in the Romanian province of Transylvania.
Jazz Aesthetics Course/Cluj National Music Academy, Nov. 24 2022
This autumn marked a quarter of a century since I initiated the Jazz Aesthetics Course at the National Academy of Music in Cluj (founded in 1919). At one of the Course’s recent open sessions, I invited as special guest Lucian Ban, the pianist born in Cluj in 1969, who pursues a great career in New York. For several weeks he had toured Europe – including the Berlin Festival – in the company of John Surman/reeds and Mat Maneri/viola. I had the pleasure of attending their concert in Brașov, followed by an interesting colloquy with them and the organizer Adrian Lacatus.
Later on, Lucian gave two concerts in Cluj — one presented by my friend Thomas Mendel, the other by me.
Foreground (from left to right) the TRIGON band: Gari Tverdohleb, Vali Boghean, Dan Brumă, Anatol Ștefăneț (band leader), emcee Virgil Mihaiu (red shirt).
“On the right, next to his charming girlfriend, is my trustworthy friend Thomas Mendel.”
Despite the sinister war on our eastern border, I managed to emcee the renowned Ethno Jazz Festival in Chisinau (the capital of Eastern Moldova). That event’s culminating point was the 30-year jubilee of the Trigon band, led by viola master Anatol Stefanet. This group continues in its own way the transfigurations of Romanian folklore initiated by composers such as Bela Bartok, Enescu, Theodor Rogalski, Richard Oschanitzky, Sabin Pautza, etc. Soon after, on October 30, Trigon had a smashing success with the concert given at the Music Academy in Cluj, which I had the honor to emcee.
In the culture magazine STEAUA (founded 1949), edited by the Romanian Writers’ Union, I go on publishing the pages entitled JAZZ CONTEXT every month. In issue no. 11-12/2022 I also managed to publish a separate selection of essays dedicated to Richard Oschanitzky (1939-1979), the father of Romanian jazz expression, signed by jazzologists Florian Lungu, Alex Vasiliu, Sabin Pautza as well as myself.
The list of events I attended this fall is far from complete, but I’m trying to avoid getting boring. At the same time, I try to argue why it would be impossible for me to condense in just a few lines the activities of the last three to four months. I hope that the JJA members will accept my apologies! I wish you all a prosperous new year.
More from Virgil’s travels:
“After a medical check-up in Craiova, I took the opportunity, with Liana, to cross the Danube in Serbia. The Romanian bank of the Danube photos were taken from the opposite bank in Serbia, i.e. outside the European Union. In this second picture [below]
you can notice a rock onto which the head of the Dacian king Decebalus was carved. He had led two defensive wars of the Dacians against the Roman armies led by Emperor Trajan, in the first century of our era. In the end Trajan managed to build an unbelievable stone bridge over the Danube (traces of it can be seen in the Romanian town Drobeta, and in the opposite Serbian town of Kladovo). Thus, the Roman empire’s troops moved into Dacia and began the process of Romanization of the natives, which led to the emergence of the nation of which I am a part (the only neo-Latin people in Central-Eastern Europe).”
