Guili Chokheli and Nani Bregvadze’s appearance in the all-Georgian line-up of Tbilisi’s Open Air Festival 2025 closed the gap between generations of Georgian musicians.
This year’s Tbilisi Open Air Festival (24–25 May) exclusively featured Georgian artists, and boasted several rather unusual collaborations. One such collaboration, on the final day of the festival, was a performance by pop/funk/jazz duo Green Room and the Soviet Georgian jazz legend Guili Chokheli.
Green Room, or Mtsvane Otakhi, is a two-man musical project that dates back to 1999, consisting of Beka Japaridze and Achiko Guledani. The latter, Guledani, is one of Open Air’s chief organisers.
Green Room has a strong sense of humour, and their sound is varied and funky. The duo’s eponymous 2001 album is available on Spotify, along with their 2003 Shut Down. ‘Headless’, a song off the latter album, has a bizarre and funny music video you can watch here. Most of it takes place in a mental asylum, but the first part gives a nice sense of 2000s Tbilisi.
In 2019, Green Room returned from a 15-year-long hiatus to join up with singer Uma J (Gvantsa Japaridze) and four other musicians. They have three or four songs up on YouTube with this new configuration.
Guili Chokheli dates from an altogether different Tbilisi. She was born in 1935, making her 90 years old at the time of this performance. She studied at the Tbilisi State Conservatoire, and went on to have an illustrious career, recognised in 1967 as a Meritorious Artist of the Georgian SSR. Chokheli is credited with popularising jazz in the Soviet Union. She sang jazz — with a certain Georgian flair — at a time when it was still frowned upon by the authorities, who viewed it as an unhealthy cultural influence from America. In fact, Chokheli lived and performed in America alongside a jazz ensemble for some years.
In her defiance of the jazz ban, in many ways Chokheli represents a kind of freedom for Georgia. She disappeared from the limelight for a while, returning four or five years ago to perform and to speak out publicly against the ruling Georgian Dream party and its founder, Bidzina Ivanishvili.
The diminutive Chokheli appeared on stage in a high-necked pink-and-black cape and black elbow-length gloves. Understandably she voiced the songs, as far as I could tell, making the elegant gesticulations of a seasoned performer. The crowd loved her. When she finished she was handed flowers, and proceeded to give a fiery speech: ‘We will win — just so you know. What a day! [Georgian Independence Day!] Who will win against these young people? Fear us!’ she shouted, raising her arms above her head to an applauding audience.
Open Air clearly represented, to Chokheli, an opportunity to align herself publicly once more with the ongoing anti-government demonstrations in the country. Her support has been very well received; an audience member I spoke with afterwards said they were touched to hear such words coming from a woman, a rebel since the beginning, who has seen Georgia through so many of its political upheavals. The protests have been characterised as emerging largely from the capital’s youth population, so it is meaningful that this venerable and high-profile artist continues to speak out as she does.
Following Green Room and Chokheli as the evening’s penultimate performance, was an another collaboration, this time a trio of Georgian performers: Indie Rock band Mechanical Rainbow, composer/producer/musician Kordz, and former People’s Artist of the USSR Nani Bregvadze.
Mechanical Rainbow are from Tbilisi, and were formed in 2018. The band’s two principal members are Dadu Donadze on vocals, and Tsotne Baghdavadze on bass and backing vocals. They also have a keys player, two more guitarists, and a drummer. Their songs are upbeat, danceable — ‘Just trying to change the world with our fun lil’ tunes!’ — and their aesthetic is a kind of cross between suburban 90s America and a 70s flower child thing.
Kordz, Alexandre Kordzaia’s stage name, is a multifaceted musician who has collaborated with the Georgian Philharmonic Orchestra, Giorgi Tsagareli, DRO, international ensembles like the Asko Schönberg Ensemble, and last year, with Mechanical Rainbow, in a song called ‘SDEQ’. Kordz grew up between Georgia and Switzerland, and names inspirations as varied as Igor Stravinsky and Prince.
Just before this year’s Open Air, Kordz dropped a track with 88-year-old Nani Bregvadze, ‘Mtvareo’. The song was originally composed by Gogi Tsabadze and performed by Nani Bregvadze in 1973 for the musical Veris Ubnis Melodiebi, and Bregvadze re-recorded it. It’s got a rather beautiful music video too, emphasising a cross-generational continuity by featuring Bregvadze alongside a group of teenagers.
Mechanical Rainbow and Kordz perform a couple of bouncy tunes including the previously mentioned SDEQ to an enthusiastic crowd. They’ve got a wholesome vibe; it would make good music for a child’s birthday party. Then Mechanical Rainbow exit the stage and Nani Bregvadze appears.
Bregvadze herself is a veteran of the stage, a former People’s Artist of the USSR, a crooner, sometime-actress, and all-round soviet national treasure. She looked relaxed on stage in a glittering white coat, performing ‘Mtvareo’, swaying with her mic beside a bobbing Kordz on the synths. Midway through her performance, her daughter Eka Mamaladze, also a famous musician, comes on stage. Kordz is jumping up and down in his excitement at this point, clearly thrilled to be performing with the two of them. Bregvadze is also handed a bouquet of roses, and before leaving the stage she thanks the audience for the love they have shown her.
Bregvadze’s illustrious career during the USSR saw her performing regularly in Soviet Russia, in Russian. She’s never been particularly politically outspoken, and she has a reputation in Georgia as being somewhat of a diva. Before this performance at Open Air and her collaboration with Kordz, she meant little to the younger generations of Georgians, so it was somewhat surreal to hear them chanting ‘Nani!’ as she sang.
Along with Chokheli, Bregvadze had previously shown some tentative support for Georgia’s queer community, in agreeing to perform at the Tbilisi Drag Ball. She pulled out at the last minute however, and Chokheli represented their generation alone. This Open Air performance was perhaps the beginning of greater political outspokenness from Bregvadze, even if it was more symbolic than voiced.
These two collaborative performances at Open Air represented a sweetly sentimental synthesis of old and new, a kind of closing of the gap between generations of Georgian musicians. Their performances crystallised a powerful feeling of national pride that ran through the festival, and Bregvadze and Chokheli’s appearances represented implicit (or in Chokheli’s case, not so implicit) support of Open Air’s values of freedom, equality, and diversity, which in today’s climate are necessarily political. This was emphasised all the more by the imminent Georgian Independence Day on the 26th, the day after the festival ended. The main-stage performances were rounded off by the Sukhishvili Georgian National Ballet, which felt fitting.
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