Virgil MIHAIU
born 1951, Cluj/Romania
Writer, jazzologist, diplomat
2006–2012 – co-founder and first director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in Lisbon and minister-counselor at Romania’s Embassy in Portugal.
Romanian editor for Jazz Forum in Warsaw, the International Jazz Federation’s magazine;
professor on Jazz Aesthetics at the National Music Academy in Cluj; member of the international board of Down Beat and editor of Steaua cultural magazine; member of USA’s Jazz Journalists’ Association and of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society; since 2015 director of the Casa do Brasil cultural centre, under the aegis of Cluj’s main University UBB.
Author of 20 books of poetry and essays, among which Romania’s groundbreaking studies about relationships between jazz and contemporary arts: The Resonance Box (1985);
Jazzorelief (1993)
Between the Jazz Age and Postmodernism (2003)
My Jazz Contexts (2022).
Author of
Jazz Connections in Portugal (2001)
Jazz Connections in Romania (2007)
Co-author of
Russian Jazz: New Identity (1985)
Jazz in Europa (1994)
Jazz in Word (2018)
The History of European Jazz (2018)
Mihaiu in:
Dokumentationsstelle für ost- und mitteleuropäische Literatur
Contact: vmihaiu@gmail.com
May 22, 2026, 13:45–14:15
Performing Poetry with Free-Jazz Improvisers
If my participation in the Jazz in Word conference, Vienna/ 2014, consisted of an essay with an assumed academic, rather objective character, the topic of the spring 2026 meeting, Jazz – Word – Play, inspires a more subjective approach.
I propose an assessment of my performative experiences, which consisted in directly relating my own poetry to open artistic expressions, combining elements of avant-garde jazz, improvisational/ aleatoric music/ postmodern experiments, instrumental theatre, etc., under the sign of creative-ludic freedom. I shall highlight the influences exerted on me by the innovative tendencies in Central-Eastern European music, as well as the contributions of Romania-born personalities to the initiation and consolidation of avant-garde directions in 20th-century culture (such as Tristan Tzara, co-founder of Dadaism, Constantin Brancusi, exponential reformer of universal sculpture, Eugen Ionesco, initiator of the theatre of the absurd, Marcel Iancu/Janco, remarkable architect in interwar Romania who later became a leader of cutting-edge artistic trends in Israel, etc.).
Particular premises: my literary activity, which started in 1970, has continued until nowadays being doubled by intense jazzological concerns. Before 1989, I promoted the Constanța-based Creativ group, whose core Harry Tavitian and Corneliu Stroe epitomized innovative jazz attitudes in the context of official cultural closure. In 1993 happened my providential meeting with Alan Tomlinson – member of the London Jazz Composers’ Orchestra and inventor of a sui generis artistic language expressed through the trombone. I aim to reveal – from the inside – how our poetic-musical collaboration developed, to which the Tavitian-Stroe duo was integrated, thus resulting in a loose outfit called Jazzographics. Since audio/video recordings are quasi-non-existent, I shall only exemplify with a filmed summary of Jazzographics’ performance on the stage of the Cluj National Opera in 1997.
I will also present short examples of my texts that were the basis of the aesthetic experiments staged with Jazzographics, but also in other formulas, e.g. with Dima Belinski, Mario Florescu and Marius Gagiu at the 1998 Universal Exhibition in Lisbon, with Tavitian and Alexander Balanescu at Porgy & Bess Vienna 2004, with Joao Paulo Esteves da Silva at the Romanian Cultural Institute in Portugal 2008.