Jazz Bez

Jazz Bez is an international jazz festival held in the Ukrainian city of Lviv every year. It is one of two major jazz festivals that take place in the city, the other one being Leopolis Jazz; Leopolis Jazz is a summertime event, whereas Jazz Bezz takes place in winter.

Jazz Bez was created by Dzyga (“Spinning Top”), an artistic association founded in 1993 by a group of student activists and local artists. Four years later, they opened the Dzyga Art Center in a former Dominican monastery; the center is part art gallery and part concert venue with the primary goal of showcasing young artists.

The team at Dzyga came up with the idea to organize a music festival to strengthen Ukrainian-Polish cultural relations in 2000. But why jazz? According to the festival’s organizers, jazz is a popular and at the same time sophisticated music genre that was quite well-developed in Poland but underdeveloped in Ukraine at the time of the festival’s inception, so they thought that popularization of jazz in Ukraine would bring musicians from two countries closer together.

The inaugural Jazz Bez festival was held from December 7 to 12, 2001 in Lviv (Ukraine) and Przemyśl (Poland). Each city hosted ten concerts featuring Ukrainian and Polish jazz musicians and vocalists. In 2005, the festival expanded beyond Lviv and Przemyśl for the first time. Since then, Jazz Bez concerts have taken place in many Ukrainian (Berdychiv, Cherkasy, Chernihiv, Drohobych, Druzhkivka, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kharkiv, Kramatorsk, Kropyvnytskyi, Kyiv, Lutsk, Mariupol, Mostyska, Novytsia, Odesa, Rivne, Sevastopol, Slovyansk, Sumy, Ternopil, Uzhhorod) and Polish (Białystok, Gliwice, Jarosław, Krosno, Lublin, Przemyśl, Rzeszów, Sanok, Sękowa, Warsaw, Wroclaw) cities and towns, but Lviv has always remained the heart of the festival and its main operating base.

Today, Jazz Bez is a truly international event featuring musicians not only from Ukraine and Poland, but also from other European countries and even the Americas. In addition to jazz concerts, its program includes workshops, lectures, open rehearsals, jam sessions, JazzBezKids (a special program for children), and other events and activities held at various venues across Lviv. The main festival venues include the Dzyga Art Center, America House Lviv, and the Mykola Lysenko Lviv National Music Academy.

Jazz Bez is very much a collective effort. It is co-organized by Dzyga, the Cultural Strategy Institute (a municipal institution responsible for implementing the Lviv City Culture Development Strategy), the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Lviv, the Polish Institute in Kyiv, the Koza Artistic Association, 32 Jazz Club / Old Fashioned Radio (Kyiv), and other organizations and institutions.

One of the most amazing things about Jazz Bez is that, as of 2023, it has been held every year since its inception, even during the Orange Revolution of 2004, the Euromaidan protests of 2014, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. No matter what happens in the world, jazz brings people together in Lviv.