Last year, a new jazz club opened in Armenia’s third-largest city, Gyumri, the founders of which then implemented the Gyumri and Jazz project. Launching the newspaper Jazz Info was the founders’ logical next step. 

During the Soviet years and especially in the 60s, jazz was hugely popular in Gyumri. After the 1988 earthquake, jazz singers, unable to create their art individually, performed as a brass band. 

Over the years, attempts were made to preserve interest for this genre of music. “We couldn’t restrict ourselves only by creating the club or the Gyumri and Jazz project,” said Jazz Club founder Mkrtich Manukyan. “We felt that another option for promoting jazz was necessary and that was definitely going to be the newspaper.”

And so it was that the  Jazz Info launch took place at Jazz Club. The 200-print-run monthly will be distributed free of charge. The content of the first issue is mainly about the Gyumri and Jazz project. 

“Subsequent issues will be published with headline news. In the future, we’ll also cover worldwide classical jazz greats. We will allocate a lot of space to Armenian jazz; we especially will attempt to introduce our readers to Gyumri’s jazz musicians,” said editor Lilit Makaryan. 

The monthly newspaper published in Gyumri’s Kaxaki Gratun (“city publisher”) printing house is currently only printed in black and white. Adding other colors and especially emphasizing the newspaper’s name in the future is not ruled out.

“We’re thinking to make the title in color in the future. Color adds emphasis, draws attention, and at the end of the day, makes the newspaper more noticeable, though we haven’t made sales an issue, and through layout, we don’t have a problem of being more noticeable among the other newspapers,” opined Makaryan. 

The first issue is available to those who want it at the Jazz Club. “We will provide the monthly also to bookstores — it will be available in bank foyers and coffee shops, as well. Two hundred copies is not a lot, but I’m sure that the paper will undoubtedly find its reader,” said founder Mkrtich Manukyan, expressing hope.

Yeranuhi Soghoyan, Gyumri