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It is not for the first time when artists representing jazz of the friendly Baltic area performed on our concert and festival stages: we should mention the solo sax recital of Petras  Vysniauskas and the performance of the Lithuanian thumper Vladimir Tarasov accompanied by the Bulgarian sax player Anatoly Vapirov, within the frame of the 2005 edition of the International Jazz Festival “Richard Oschanitzky” that took place in Iasi…

On the occasion of the National Day of Lithuania, the Embassy of this country in Bucharest organized at the hall “Amfiteatru” of the National Theatre from the capital in the evening of February 19th “a concert aimed exclusively for invited persons” the guest-band being performing in front of the Romanian fans of the music of this style the next evening ( February 20th) in Art Jazz Club situated next to “Orizont” Art Galleries.

Lithuanian Jazz Trio gets together important performers, the piano and sax player Vytautas Labutis, the bass player and composer Leonid Shinkarenko and thumper and singer Arvydas Jofe, being indubitable extraordinary players on the instruments they handle with confidence. Even unusual, the striking originality of their performance impresses due to its colour, energy and coherence, having from time to time some notes of humour and self persiflage. The creativity of the three musicians  wants itself as a result of some  complex sound constructions, very well articulated, being a result of some laborious researches, and efforts of putting them on the interpretative page. The result offered to our hearing appears to be  more inclusive then the one of an usual trio, the band successfully using   electro-acoustic auxiliaries the effects box additional to the bass guitar, the laptop and the piano handled by the sax player, the electronic percussion being in completion to the arsenal of the instrument of the battery. The program included parts composed especially by the bass player Leonid Shinkarenko, “Pinoccio”, “Don’t care”, “Remebrance”, “Open A Door”, group compositions as for example the one entitled “Sand, Sand, Sand, Around…” and only in a small degree new forms of some well known standard themes as “Caravan” or “When the Saints Go Marchini In”.

The message of their music, valued through an appreciable instrumental technique, avoids very consciously the already beaten ways, making the connection with various stylistic kinds of this form of expression, appeal to blues, Latin rhythms and sounds, the lyrism of ballads or a certain contemporary expressionism, containing mockery accents. Each part of the program wanted and succeeded to be an expressive entity itself, in which the premeditated sections, attentively polished, were combined successfully with spontaneously improvised parts. The variety of the musical language conquered both due to performance moments during which ones, for example, Vytautas Labutis played in the same time the alto sax and the electronic piano or two saxes in the same time, Leonid Shinkarenko used in a detached manner the technique of double and triple bows, while Arvydas Jofe made rhythmical the incisive  vocal interventions with alert and whirling percussive formulas, impressing through  the independence of the hands and feet. By this way each and every second the interest of the audience was provoked by a permanently surprising fan of the sound polychromy. The talent, experience and the overflowing inventiveness proved by the Lithuanian musicians were the arguments of a performance that fully legitimated the applauses of the audience!