Vyacheslav Ganelin

Vyacheslav (Slava) Ganelin was born on December 17, 1944, in Kraskovo, near Moscow, Russia.

In 1948 his family moved to Lithuania. There he studied piano at the school of music, then at the Lithuanian Conservatory in Vilnius. Ganelin grew up in the times when jazz was officially denounced in the Soviet Union as the anti-soviet art form. He found freedom in improvisational jazz.

In 1960's Vilnius, Lithuania was more westernized culturally than most of the Russian cities. Baltic States in general practiced more tolerance and encouraged the freedom of artistic expression, thus providing the environment conducive to Ganelin's creativity and experiments, both on stage and in his music scores. Bold innovations in music were made by Ganelin in the times when every note and every word was under the rigid control of the Soviet censorship. By the mid 60's Ganelin fronted his own band and played gigs with various jazz musicians of the former Soviet Union. Tallinn Jazz Festivals in Estonia were the most popular among the jazz musicians for their special atmosphere of freedom and comfort, with visiting foreign stars like Keith Jarrett and Oscar Peterson.

Ganelin first formed a duo with the symphonic percussionist turned jazz drummer Vladimir Tarasov, who left his home in the Russian city of Arkhangelsk and moved to Vilnius, Lithuania, in the late 1960's. They have been working in a duo setting for quite a while, until at a concert in the Russian city of Sverdlovsk the two met a local reed-man, the rebellious and wildly ecstatic saxophonist Vladimir Chekasin, who joined them and moved to Vilnius, Lithuania.

Ganelin debuted as a concert jazz pianist in 1961, when he was just a 17-year-old student. The cultural "Thaw" under Nikita Khrushchev provided the window of opportunity for jazz artists and Ganelin became the one, who went on exploring the free-jazz.

There Ganelin made his famous appearances in 1966 and 1967, showing his own compositions in a bold and developed free-jazz style. Spontaneous improvisations by Vyacheslav Ganelin became a sensation, and made a strong impression on both the local public and the critics from Moscow and Leningrad. Vyacheslav Ganelin developed such an advanced and unusual individual style, that it became hard for him to find matching musical partners on his level. His compositional freedom and technical fluency came with the intellect of a chess-player and the imagination of a free artist.

He found his audience at the modern jazz concerts at the Lithuanian National Conservatory, where he studied piano and composition, and graduated in 1968.

The lucky developments happened in 1970-71, and with that trio Ganelin became famous beyond the jazz circles in the Soviet Union, and abroad. They had such followers as Sergei Kuryokhin, Anatoliy Vapirov and Vladimir Rezitsky, with whom Ganelin also collaborated.

The Ganelin-Tarasov-Chekasin trio performed at many festivals and recorded their music until 1987.