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My Escape to America, by Leonid Pereverzev
(announcing the forthcoming 2011 book, "Leonid Pereverzev. An
Offering to Duke Ellington, and Other Jazz Texts")
 Leonid
Pereverzev, the doyen of Russian jazz critique and jazz musicology,
passed away in Moscow, Russia, on March 18, 2006, of a stroke. He was
75.
Pereverzev was the earliest Russian music writer to analyze jazz as a
whole, in its both musical and social aspects, and to spread the word
through the Soviet Union, the word that jazz was not "The Music of Fat
People," as an early Soviet writer pejoratively described it back in the
1920s; jazz was a new branch of the global music culture, a branch that
deserved a close study, a wide popularization, and not a fear of being
infected by alien capitalist propaganda, but an appreciation of new and
fresh music culture. Pereverzev could not publish too many articles on
jazz in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when he started his jazz
advocate activities, but he was able to hold lectures and public
speeches on jazz. And he was really successful in that - so successful
that a Young Communist League-controlled monthly magazine, Smena (The
Shift,) even denounced him as the "ideology god of Moscow
jazzomaniacs," who "translated the delirium of [Voice of America
jazz host] Willis Conover."
Pereverzev's public lectures on jazz at the Moscow House of Scientists
and the Moscow House of Friendship With Peoples Abroad, accompanied by
slide projection and taped jazz playback, were the first steps into
lifelong appreciation of jazz for thousands of Muscovites. He continued
those lectures from 1958 and well into the 1960s. Later in the 1970s, he
continued his lectures, at that time via the Knowledge Society, a
strange reservation of evening education in the fields not totally
covered by the Communist Party-controlled educational system that
existed during the 1970s and 80s.
His jazz writing had started in 1962, when he wrote a story on Benny
Goodman and the famed bandleader's forthcoming visit to the Soviet Union
for Moscow-based Music Life magazine. It was Music Life that published
most of his early work, and when Pereverzev's first book about the
history of jazz was rejected by government-owned publishers in the
mid-1960s, it was only through Music Life he could see his book printed,
although only as a series of continuing articles in the magazine.
When the Soviet authorities allowed the first school to teach jazz in
Moscow in 1967(Moskvorechye Music Education Studio, now Moscow College
of Improvised Music,) it was Leonid Pereverzev who taught the first
several semesters of Jazz History course.
He was working in different fields; jazz (and music in general) never
was his sole passion, but the strongest. Pereverzev worked on the
theories of design at the Technical Aesthetics Research Institute and
then - on the theories of education at the New Technologies in Education
Research Institute in Moscow, where he served as the head of Design
Philosophy Research Laboratory until his very passing.
Pereverzev's music writing went on, regardless of how deep he dived into
other pools; he wrote a large annex, "From Jazz To Rock," for the 3rd
edition of the late musicologist Valentina Konen's 1961 book "The Ways
Of American Music" (Moscow, 1977,) and a popular book "The Way Into
Music," published by the Knowledge Society in 1981. His speeches at
several jazz musicology seminars in the 1970s and 1980s turned into
brilliant musicology and culture studies articles, which were not
published until Internet era. Since 1999, his massive works on Duke
Ellington ("The Offering To Duke",) jazz musicology ("Provocative
Jazzology" and "Jazz Is The Problem",) jazz in European literatures
("Mozart And Foxtrot") and on many other subjects can be found on
www.jazz.ru/books/pereverzev/.
It was his work as a liner notes author which gained the widest
recognition in the former Soviet Union. His knowledgeable and
brilliantly written liner notes for dozens of jazz LPs licensed from
American and European labels were the initial source of jazz education
for thousands across the nation, this reporter included. I still have
those licensed LPs with Duke Ellington's Sacred Concertos with Leonid
Pereverzev's liner notes at home. And I am proud that in his late years,
Mr. Pereverzev was both a frequent author and an active reader of the
Jazz Web zine that I run on www.jazz.ru.
Thank you, Teacher. And good-bye.
Cyril Moshkow,
Editor, Jazz.Ru Web magazine
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