ABOUT: Jazz.Ru took off
in 1997 as a mere jazz Web site in Russian and, by 1999, turned into Russian Jazz Web central. With its
40.000 unique user sessions a month and more
than fifteen years of intense online experience, www.jazz.ru is the definitive source of jazz information for millions of Russian-speaking audience worldwide. In 2007, Jazz.Ru
started to publish a
full-color, 72-pages-thick printed magazine, published seven times a year and titled
simply Jazz.Ru (so far, 3.000 copies a month, sold in major Russian cities - Moscow, St.Petersburg, Ufa, Nizhny Novgorod,
Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Yaroslavl, Krasnoyarsk, Vladivostok, and many others.) Contact: editor@jazz.ru
(editor Cyril Moshkow) /
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The
answer is "YES". The first jazz concert in Russia took
place in Moscow on October 1, 1922. The band was local, called
no less than The First Jazz Band of the Republic, led by not a
musician, but a dancer, one Valentin Parnakh
(1891-1951), who also was a gifted poet, poetry translator, and
literature historian, and spend seven years (from 1915 to 1922)
in Western Europe. That band was later employed by the great theatre
director, Vsevolod Meyerhold, in one of his plays where the
sounds of live jazz should represent the "Western reality." The
band included piano, saxophone, clarinet, trombone and a trap
set. One of the musicians known to be a part of this band was
pianist Yevgeny Gabrilovich (1899-1993), later a successful
playwright and movie screenplay writer. (On the picture: portrait of Valentin Parnakh, by Pablo
Picasso, 1919)
The first American jazz bands to perform in Russia were
drummer Benny Payton's Jazz Kings in 1926, with the great
Sidney Bechet (then clarinet, not yet soprano sax) on
board. The hot New Orleans-style band spent several months
performing in theatres and ballrooms in Moscow, Kharkov, Odessa
and Kiev; Bechet reportedly had to extend his Soviet visa for a
while, because he needed a few weeks in a hospital to recuperate
after too close acquaintance with Russian vodka.
That same year, London-based
Sam Wooding Orchestra toured
Russia (Moscow and Leningrad)as part of
European musical revue Chocolate Kiddies. The band also
consisted of African-American musicians, but, according to
historical sources, sounded less hot than the Jazz Kings. The first Russian jazz band to be recorded was pianist
Alexander Tsfasman's Moscow-based AMA Jazz, in 1928 (the
band could be heard in one of Russian Jazz Podcast
series.)
The most interesting recordings of early Russian jazz were made
in the late 1930, the most notably by Tsfasman, Alexander
Varlamov, and the fresh émigré from Poland,
which was captured by Nazi Germany, trumpet virtuoso Eddie
Rozner.
(On the picture: Alexander Tsfasman, 1938)
During the World War Two, jazz music was regarded as the music
of the allies (U.S. and Soviet Union were allies against Hitler)
and thus widely spread. When the Cold War began, Soviet
authorities' attitude towards jazz changed. After that, the
first significant recordings of Russian jazz were made only in
late 1950s... more on the subject: True story of new jazz in Moscow:
The answer is blowing in the wind, string and percussion
instruments,
by Andrei Solovyov "Golden Years of
Soviet Jazz. A brief history of new improvised music in
Russia", by Alex Kan. My Escape to America, by Leonid Pereverzev (announcing the
forthcoming 2011 book, "Leonid Pereverzev. An Offering to Duke Ellington,
and Other Jazz Texts") Grigory Shabrov: In Memoriam,
by Oleg Stepurko (dedicated
to the memory of one of the pioneers of the Soviet jazz rock
fusion)
FUNNY FACTS: Benny
Goodman Big Band performed in Moscow in 1962 at the
Soviet Army Sport Palace. At the height of U.S.A.-U.S.S.R. spy
scandal (American U2 spy plane was just shot off the Russian
sky) the KGB was suspicious of "capitalist provocations," so
only a handful of tickets went into Moscow's jazz fans' hands;
several thousand tickets were distributed among "ideologically
tested" blue collars through the Party committees at Moscow's
industrial facilities. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was
present at the concert, but soon got bored by the alien music
that he hated, and left during the intermission.
The concert was recorded, and released by RCA in 1962 (never
reissued on CD, though.)
Louis Armstrong never performed in the U.S.S.R, though
producer George Avakian tried hard to arrange his Soviet
Union tour. Ekaterina Furtseva, Soviet Union's culture
minister, refused because she felt that "he was going to be too
popular." In 1958, Louis Armstrong addressed to his Russian fans
a few words in Russian through the Radio Liberty
airwaves, and played his trumpet along with the recording of
U.S.S.R's 1957 #1 hit, "Five Minutes" (from the
Carnival Night movie), which was, coincidentally, the first
Soviet recording that involved overdubbing technique (singer
Lyudmila Gurchenko sang in an empty studio, listening in
earphones to previously recorded Eddie Rosner Big Band.) The
recording of this "double overdub" exists, and is released by
Russian label SoLyd Records in 2006 (as a bonus track on "The
Liberty of Jazz" CD, SLR 0363).
by Cyril Moshkow
FURTHER LISTENING:
October 4, 2009: Cyril Moshkow, the publisher and editor of
Jazz.Ru, Russia's only Jazz magazine, appeared on
WPFW
in Washington, DC as a guest of Larry Appelbaum's Sunday
radio show, Sound of Surprise, for a two-hour dialog
about the state of jazz in Russia. Many Russian jazz recordings
can be heard during the conversation. LISTEN: part 1 (wma,
25.7 Mb, 1:13:47);
part 2 (wma,
14.2 Mb, 0:40:47)
September 30, 2009: The Open World Leadership Center and the
Library of Congress Music Division cosponsored the
Russian-American Jazz Summit. Conversations on the
American influence in Russian Jazz were led by two
world-renowned jazz experts, Russian Cyril Moshkow and
American Larry Appelbaum, at the Library of Congress in
Washington, D.C.
WATCH ON YOUTUBE (62 min.)
The first printed jazz magazine in
post-Soviet Moscow, proudly titled Jazz.Ru Magazine, published since 2007
#1, 2015 (#60)
ON THE COVER - The Professor! Alexander Oseichuk, Russia's chief jazz educator, the Jazz Ensemble teacher at the Russian Gnessins Academy of Music in Moscow, tells it like it is - what does that mean to be a real jazz teacher, and why on the day his own band turned 25, he quit performing in favor of being an educator exclusively. Unbending. 15th Triumph of Jazz Festival in Moscow and St.Petersburg in the days of economy crisis. Triumph participant, saxophonist Bob Mintzer, interviewed.
The Discreet Charm of Vynil. The history of jazz vinyl covers. Story nine: Impulse! Records.
Russian Jazz Chronicles. Rostov Jazz Festival: fit to survive
The Capital of Jazz. New York Is Now, by Andrey Henkin
Pianist Alexey Podymkin interviewed: musician on the verge of a new step
Sergei Manukian, Russia's most popular jazz vocalist, interviewed on the occasion of his 60th birthday.
Jazz and Grammies, 2015: Dancing Chick to Chick
Producer / composer/ bassist Alex Rostotsky turns 60: "I Haven't Changed"
In Memoriam: trumpeter Lew Soloff, producer Orrin Keepnews, trumpeter Clark Terry, record label executive Bruce Lundvall Jazz Research Center continues Russian jazz history studies: Three Faces in Black and White - the history behind a b/w photo of Joseph Weinstein Big Band from Leningrad arriving in the city of Voronezh in the middle of harsh Russian winter of 1970.
Jazz Province Festival: the festivities continue, on the 19th year of the trans-Russian moving jazz festival
Estonian guitarist Oleg Pissarenko tells the story of the final volume of his 2009-2015 audio trilogy
All We Have: 15th Jazz Over Volga River festival in Yaroslavl shows strong line-up and commitment to keep the 35-years-old tradition alive
Russian Real Book: a theme by NYC-based Russian bassist, Dmitry Kolesnik
FAQ: ARE THERE ENGLISH BOOKS ABOUT JAZZ IN RUSSIA?
The answer is "YES"
and "NO".
Yes, because three such books do exist.
No, because they are out of print, and the newest is 14 years
old.
Here they are, in alphabetical order: Feigin, Leo. Russian jazz : new identity. London ;
New York : Quartet Books, 1985. ISBN: 0704325063 Minor, William. Unzipped souls: a jazz journey through
the Soviet Union. Philadelphia : Temple University Press,
1995. ISBN: 1566393248 Starr, S. Frederick. Red and hot: the fate of jazz in
the Soviet Union, 1917-1980. New York : Oxford University
Press, 1983. ISBN: 0195031636
Andrey Kondakov (piano, percussion,) Vladimir Volkov (bass) and
Vyacheslav Guyvoronsky (trumpet) perform their composition based
on the Russian classical romance song, Alexander Dargomyzhsky's
"I Still Love Him" (1851,) during the Moscow premiere
performance of their "Dargomyzhsky, Dargomyzhsky" suite
at DOM Culture Center, Moscow, Russia, on January 14, 2011 Published with artists' permission
IVAN FARMAKOVSKY QUARTET
Pianist Ivan Farmakovsky and his band (saxophonist Dmitry Mospan,
bassist Anton Revniouk, and drummer Donald Edwards) perform
Ivan's original "Soul Inside Out" at the Moscow House of Music
on November 10, 2010
with artist's permission
HERMAN LUKIANOV AND KADANS
Herman Lukianov and his KADANS perform Lukianov's "Constant Value"
during the June 26, 2010 Jazz.Ru: New Sound series concert at the
Union of Composers jazz club, Moscow, Russia (Herman Lukianov - tenor
horn, Alexey Kruglov - as, Anton Zaletayev - ts, Alexey Becker - p,
Makar Novikov - b, Alex Zinger - dr)
from the series' producer, with artist's permission
RUSSIAN JAZZ PODCAST:
October 4, 2009: Jazz.Ru editor
Cyril
Moshkow appeared on Washington, DCWPFW as a
guest of Larry Appelbaum's in his Sunday radio show,
Sound of Surprise, for a two-hour dialog about the state of
jazz in Russia! LISTEN...>>>>
EARLIER IN RUSSIAN JAZZ PODCAST: Jazz.Ru
editor Cyril Moshkow tells the story of unique Muscovite jazz
accordion player Vladimir Danilin, who celebrates his 60th birthday on
December 2, 2006. Danilin started his career playing at the dances in
his native town of Lyubertsy, near Moscow, in late 1950s, and by the
early 1960s he was already playing jazz clubs in Moscow. Jazz in its
pure mainstream form was (and still is) all what he was interested in.
This was also true when Vladimir Danilin switched to the piano, and
spent many years in the country's most popular jazz big band of the
late 1970s - early 80s, Oleg Lundstrem Orchestra. And this stayed true,
when Danilin returned to his primary instrument, the accordion, in
early 1990s and continues on this instrument ever since...>>>>
FEATURED
ARTIST SITES:
IVAN
FARMAKOVSKY (PIANO)
Ivan, now in his 30s, "paid his dues" when playing in Igor Butman
Quartet and Big Band in late 1990s; in 2008, after a few years in a
country's most popular rock band (the one which better must not be
named,) he resumed his high-profile jazz career by recording an album in
New York City with Igr Butman on sax, Gene Jackson on drums, Ugonna
Okegwo on bass and Ryan Kisor on trumpet. The very same band, except
that now it's the great Eddie Henderson on the trumpet, presented the
freshly released "Next To The Shadow" album at the Moscow House of Music
on April 21, 2009; "The Way Home" (on Butman Music), recorded by
Farmakovsky's working band, followed in October, 2010.
IGOR
BUTMAN (SAXOPHONE) Igor has a rare gift: he is not only a brilliant performer, he
is also an able promoter of his own work and of the genre in
general. He easily makes friends with musicians, politicians,
businessmen, and media people, and thus pushes jazz as a genre
further than it has ever been in Russia. He is the first Russian
jazz musician to release albums on Universal label, and a
successful jazz event producer: his Triumph of Jazz festival,
held each February since the year 2000, is a must-see on Moscow
jazz scene. Igor Butman also runs jazz clubs: Moscow's premier
jazz club, called Le Club, the only jazz club in Russia ever mentioned
in Down Beat's Top 100 jazz clubs in the world, worked under his
artistic direction from 1999 to 2007; currently, the new Igor Butman
Club presents world-class live jazz played by both Russian masters and
visited Americans.
ARKADY
SHILKLOPER (HORNS) The horn virtuoso, who started his career in the Bolshoi Theatre
orchestra and the Moscow Philharmonic Symphony, switched to jazz and
improvised music in the 1980s, and since then recorded for ECM, Jaro,
and Quinton, worked with Three O, the Vienna Arto Orchestra, the Moscow
Art Trio, the Pago Libre band, and in many settings under his own
name. Master of French horn, alphorn, and flugelhorn, this virtuoso
innovator works now in Germany, though his Russian fans still see him
many times a year...>>>>
Since early 2010, the Russian jazz magazine on the Web
changed its paradigm. In 1998-2009, we used to publish the
weekly or bi-weekly "issues," or "editions," formed much like
traditional paper magazines, only without paper. Wait a minute,
we said to ourselves in late 2009, it's been three years since
we already did have a paper magazine as well! So, instead of
running two magazines (one on the paper 7 times a year, another
on the Web some 30 times a year,) we switched to a new blog-like,
read-while-we-write layout - Russian Jazz Magazine
2.0.
It's still in Russian, understandably, as it's targeted on
Russian jazz community, and Russians don't care much about
reading in foreign languages. They like their jazz discussed in
their mother tongue, in very many well-arranged words, just like
Tolstoyevsky did (or was it Dostoy?) That's what the
Russian Jazz Magazine
2.0. is all about. You can even read it - using, for
example, the Google
Translate tool. Read
it, comment it, and even
subscribe to it!
Still, we keep the English digests of many our pre-2010 "issues"
in our archives.
..With a borrowed
jacket and tie on, the saxophonist came to the dean's office and
promised to play at the reporting concert a paraphrase on the
Russian folk song "A Birch-Tree in the Field.” With a heavy
heart, the administrators gave him the green light. Lukin was
playing for twenty minutes. Alone. Solo. He roared double tides,
first on his knees, then lying on his back and, finally,
standing on his head. "I just impersonated a birch-tree,” he
explained, twisting his moustache and grinning. The members of
the art direction had a hard time at the district party
organization, and Lukin was expelled. This is how the Russian
free jazz was born...
It was Shabrov's song that provoked a scandalous riot during an
audition at MOMA (organization that unionized and
‘ideologically controlled’ all club and restaurant music performers —
Moscow Association of Music Ensembles). Kleynot decided to play "The
Song of Joy," by Grigory Shabrov... [...] ...when the sound of the last note vanished,
something extraordinary happened — the audience arose in a standing
ovation, and the cheering, whistling, applauding lasted unbelievably
long — 40 minutes!
There were three other bands scheduled for audition after Kleynot's
band, and the committee asked the audience to calm down
so that they could move on, but there was no question of that! The
crowd (which largely consisted of Muscovite musicians) was chanting
violently — "Bravo!" The committee members lost their temper
calling them to order. Finally they decided to postpone the audition
till the next day and left, but it stopped no one — everyone was
screaming with frenzy. [...] It's reasonable to suggest that the
musicians not only welcomed the music but strove to show rejection of
totalitarian system this way — the system that oppressed jazz as a
mean of free self-expression...
English pages of Russian jazz musicians and journalists:
Academic Band - trad jazz band
from the city of Ulyanovsk
Gregory Fine - a brilliant
straight-ahead jazz pianist
from the Mid-Russian city of Samara
Alexander Fisher
- Vienna-based Russian trumpet player, past member of Oleg Lundstrem Orchestra and "Allegro" ensemble, teaching at the Vienna
Konservatorium now
If you have any questions on Russian jazz, Russian jazz artists,
festivals, clubs, organizations, labels etc., don't hesitate to ask
this portal's editor, Muscovite jazz journalist
Cyril Moshkow.
Contact: Jazz.Ru editor Our editorial phone is +7(495)945-8910
Our mailing address is: Cyril Moshkow, P.O.Box 10, Moscow 125284
Russia
ALBUM REVIEW QUERIES POLICY
Jazz.Ru Magazine does accept albums for review, but:
1. we focus on Russian jazz scene, and target on Russian
audience.
Therefore, the album must be available on Russian market,
otherwise the review is not relevant for our readers.
2. we receive quite a lot of review requests. So we are quite picky
as to what is actually going to be reviewed. It is solely the review
editor's responsibility to decide what is going to be reviewed, and
what isn't. We do not guarantee that the album sent to us is
actually going to be reviewed in the magazine.
Please keep in mind that our album reviews are in Russian
language, as they are intended for Russian-speaking audiences,
and we do not translate them into other languages. If it still suits
you, feel free to submit your album.
A digital download code (file-share link) is preferred if
it's available. In this case, we also need a print-size PDF or JPG
file with the album cover artwork.
Please use e-mail to contact our
editorial staff... and thank you!
WRITERS' QUERIES POLICY
Thank you for your interest in Jazz.Ru Magazine, Russia’s premiere
jazz publication.
Currently, our staff writers and a regular stable of experienced and
proven freelance writers provide much of our content in house.
Jazz.Ru Magazine assumes no responsibility for unsolicited queries
or manuscripts.
We are interested in new authors and their ideas, but story queries
should be submitted in writing via e-mail first. Provide a short
focused outline of the proposed article (no more than 150 words).
The query should convey your tone and style. Include a brief bio and
attach copies of previously published work.
Please note than Jazz.Ru Magazine is published only in Russian
language. In cases with stories originally written in languages
other than Russian, the translation service can be provided by the
magazine staff (if the original language is English, German, French,
Polish, Ukrainian, or Bulgarian,) or performed by a third party (all
other languages,) but the translation expenses for unsolicited story
queries must be covered by the writer in any case.
Please note that Jazz.Ru magazine does not accept submissions for
fiction or poetry. contact
photos on this page by: Pavel Korbut, Constantine Krupenin, Cyril Moshkow
The
answer is "YES". The first jazz concert in Russia took
place in Moscow on October 1, 1922. The band was local, called
no less than The First Jazz Band of the Republic, led by not a
musician, but a dancer, one Valentin Parnakh
(1891-1951), who also was a gifted poet, poetry translator, and
literature historian, and spend seven years (from 1915 to 1922)
in Western Europe. That band was later employed by the great theatre
director, Vsevolod Meyerhold, in one of his plays where the
sounds of live jazz should represent the "Western reality." The
band included piano, saxophone, clarinet, trombone and a trap
set. One of the musicians known to be a part of this band was
pianist Yevgeny Gabrilovich (1899-1993), later a successful
playwright and movie screenplay writer.
The first Russian jazz band to be recorded was pianist
Alexander Tsfasman's Moscow-based AMA Jazz, in 1928 (the
band could be heard in one of Russian Jazz Podcast
Benny
Goodman Big Band performed in Moscow in 1962 at the
Soviet Army Sport Palace. At the height of U.S.A.-U.S.S.R. spy
scandal (American U2 spy plane was just shot off the Russian
sky) the KGB was suspicious of "capitalist provocations," so
only a handful of tickets went into Moscow's jazz fans' hands;
several thousand tickets were distributed among "ideologically
tested" blue collars through the Party committees at Moscow's
industrial facilities. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was
present at the concert, but soon got bored by the alien music
that he hated, and left during the intermission. 
ON THE COVER - The Professor! Alexander Oseichuk, Russia's chief jazz educator, the Jazz Ensemble teacher at the Russian Gnessins Academy of Music in Moscow, tells it like it is - what does that mean to be a real jazz teacher, and why on the day his own band turned 25, he quit performing in favor of being an educator exclusively.
Jazz.Ru
editor Cyril Moshkow tells the story of unique Muscovite jazz
accordion player Vladimir Danilin, who celebrates his 60th birthday on
December 2, 2006. Danilin started his career playing at the dances in
his native town of Lyubertsy, near Moscow, in late 1950s, and by the
early 1960s he was already playing jazz clubs in Moscow. Jazz in its
pure mainstream form was (and still is) all what he was interested in.
This was also true when Vladimir Danilin switched to the piano, and
spent many years in the country's most popular jazz big band of the
late 1970s - early 80s, Oleg Lundstrem Orchestra. And this stayed true,
when Danilin returned to his primary instrument, the accordion, in
early 1990s and continues on this instrument ever since...
