The Jazz Mashroutka

Tonight I attended O Seară de Jazz at the Sala cu orgă in Chișinău. It was fantastic.

Mashroutkas are the microbuses that scurry all over the city carrying many, many passengers to their destinations. In Chișinău public transportation relies on mashroutkas and trolleibuses, all of which are always quite crowded. Mashroutkas are constantly stopping to pick up more passengers, while the driver tells everyone to move back until they are as full as possible. And then he stops to pick up more. It is no wonder that we all, including me, have the same cold and flu this week - fever, congestion, coughing, and general miserableness.

Tonight the Sala cu orgă was transformed into a jazz mashroutka. When I arrived for O seară de jazz at 6.30 people were already streaming into the hall. It was a free event, and obviously very popular. They continued to stream in until the hall was extremely full with at least half of the people standing in the aisles, and they kept streaming in until it was like being on a mashroutka bound for jazz heaven. The crowd was extremely varied, speaking Romanian and Russian as well as Gagauz and maybe some English.

The main performers were from former East Bloc countries now in the EU and NATO. They came together to celebrate twenty years past the end of Soviet domination and the cultural ties that they enjoy. The main ensemble consisted of tenor sax (Slovakia), piano (Slovakia), bass (Czech Republic), drums (Poland), and vocals (Hungary). They were fabulous, playing fantastic jazz and solos with beautiful riffs that were well-conceived and performed.They announced that none of them had ever been in Moldova before tonight.

Well, Moldova is not in the EU or NATO and will not be getting in anytime soon. Ongoing problems with the breakaway Transdniester region, political deadlock in the parliament, and a very poor economy make Moldova appear to be caught in an ongoing post-socialist dilemma.

The true wild card was Moldovan performer Anatol Ștefăneț, a violinist and violist from a Lautar and Roma family in the north of Moldova. He was just what the ensemble needed for some extra spice and life in their performance.

When he entered the stage I immediately knew the others were afraid of him. While they all wore very well tailored sports coats and slacks, he was in a wild shirt with wild hair. When he walked on stage he presented the tenor player with a clay jug of homemade wine, which the tenor player did not know what to do with, and immediately put under the piano. Ștefăneț finally made them all take a drink from it during the wild applause at the end.

Ștefăneț played two tunes with the band. The crowd loved him and so did I. He used an odd sounding distortion effect for both tunes, and the Moldovan scales he has used all his life. He played on the Ellington tune Caravan and then took charge of a theme and variations that he directed masterfully. The bass player looked intensely at him (and at the strings on the bass) as he listened and searched for the right rhythms and sounds to accompany him. The drummer was obviously thrilled, the piano player seemed happy to be looking the other direction, and the tenor player left the stage as the tune began. It was a wandering theme with constant changes in modality and sound typical of Moldovan village tunes. The band and Ștefăneț thrilled us all.

So the Jazz Mashroutka at the sometimes stately but always interesting Sala cu orgă was a great evening that I will never forget. While people coughed and sneezed all around me I was happy to be packed into that beautiful hall with Moldovans, enjoying the sounds of EU jazz and the wild card Moldovan, Anatol Ștefăneț.