Cornel Chiriac

Chiriac was born on May 8, 1941,[1] in Uspenca [ro], a village in Bessarabia, Soviet Union (previously in Cetatea Albă County, Kingdom of Romania, now in Odesa Oblast, Ukraine).

"[2] Some of the notebooks ended up in the possessions of important Romanian musicians, such as Radu Maltopol [ro], Cristian Colan, and Johnny Răducanu, being the only possible source for ready information about jazz at the time.

In 1965, he published a study of jazz in the magazine Secolul XX; a year later, he wrote the preface for the Romanian edition of Louis Armstrong's My Life in New Orleans.

According to the minutes, he described the difficult conditions of Romanian jazz musicians at the time and accepted the idea of a federation under UNESCO protection.

He said the federation should focus on creating a jazz academy, a bureau for international concerts and a centre where audio and TV recordings could be exchanged.

Coincidentally, Cliff Richard, who eight years earlier had played in The Young Ones, a film that inspired many Romanian rock bands, was scheduled to sing there.

The hotel employees and firemen broke down the door to stop the blaze, while Chiriac disappeared during the commotion, taking with him just the tapes with Phoenix.

A few days later, he managed to leave Romania and arrived in Austria with the help of a falsified invitation (received during the Brașov festival and having as its initial destination Poland).

He spent some time at the Traiskirchen refugee camp, where he was discovered by Radio Free Europe director Noël Bernard.

Ioana Măgură Bernard [ro] later recalled: "Often, after doing something without thinking, Cornel had such problems with the German authorities and with the American heads of RFE that he was almost kicked out of Germany and off radio".