INTRODUCTION BY YORDAN RUPCHEV
There were times here when jazz woke up with spring but the result came as early as the autumn. For years the summer was meant for a holiday until The Varna Summer admitted jazz to the Festival. Now, in August, we do have a real Jazz-festival, which has gone two steps higher up and is on its way to reach the third. There, on higher ground it has been able to see farther and it has also been seen by far more people.
There were fears that it was too "free". Even so, what's wrong with that? It is the only one of its kind around here, unlike the rest of Europe for example.
As John Surmon said a year ago: "The American Jazz is surviving in Europe". And where shall the European survive? We are always talking about Montreux (France) and the "North Sea" (Holland), and we keep forgetting that tradition is not an easy thing to create. Patience is the key, patience and farsightedness.
Thank God for Anatoly Vapirov, he is the persistent kind. - when he sets his mind on something, nothing is able to stop him. He would talk, persuade, insist and there we are - he's made it! It also needs mentioning that he has the support of the oldest musical festival team in Bulgaria. That is how the third Absolutely Different Jazz Festival in Bulgaria has been made to see the light of day. A festival, looking for European music men, playing mainly free, made-on-stir-of-the-moment music, a festival where the free spirit of the East and the West, the North and South meet on the Black Sea shore. It is worth providing a support for such an idea. The audience still cherish the memories of Mikhail Alperin and Arkadiy Shilkloper's musical insights, as well as those of Karin Krog and John Surman, Andrew Scofield and Acoustic Version, Anatoly Vapirov and Yildiz Ibrahimova, Rossen Zakhariev and Roumen Toskov, Theodosy Spassov and Vasko Parmakov. The list will grow vivid; the hope that the best is yet to come is more and more palpable. And then at the end, when everything is over and we rub our eyes, may we sense that odd feeling of having got a closer look into the inexplicable world of the Music on the threshold of the new millennium.