Vyacheslav Ganelin

Vyacheslav Ganelin is one of the founding fathers of Lithuanian jazz (which was then Soviet jazz). Born in Moscow in 1944, Ganelin's parents moved to Lithuania in 1948. He studied piano and composition at the State Conservatory. Although jazz was officially denounced by the Soviet Union due to its pedigree as a specifically American art form, Lithuania had a reputation as the jazziest of the Soviet Republics, and Ganelin studied jazz on his own, outside of the academic world. The birth of modern jazz in Lithuania came about in 1961, when the National Conservatory organized a c...