“I believe, as Lenin said, that this revolutionary chaos may yet crystallize into new forms of life” – Michail Gorbachev
The hard fact was, instead, that “jazz was considered to be third-rate entertainment, [but this way] it was not an object to be criticized as literature and classical music were” (jazz critic Alexey Batashev). Misinterpreted as “a style of expression only to spread cheap illusions” (musician Alexey S. Kozlov), jazz musicians were this way paradoxically free to express themselves with no control from the authorities.
Even if the price to pay when you play an almost illegal music, coming from the Western civilization and the Capitalism – where Western Communists saw in this kind of music a way for the black culture to free itself and its oppressed from the chains of racism, see Carles and Comolli book Free Jazz Black Power (1971) – is to become almost irrelevant and condemned also to become almost a clandestine, the passion of so many, mostly unsung heroes as the ones you’ll find in this post, stand up and speak for itself.
The media carried anti-jazz campaigns, jazz musicians had to play underground and the listeners had to play their records secretly. Finally in 1962 during a period of relaxation from the Cold War, the Benny Goodman Orchestra and others could tour the country. In the same year, a jazz magazine was printed, the very first one, and a jazz festival was held in Moscow. The first seeds were planted.
In more recent times Leo Feigin, an expat from Russia with a great passion for jazz, founded Leo Records in 1979. His purpose was since the beginning to document free jazz coming from his own country, with the help of many friends who, on vacation in Russia, attended clandestine concerts then came back into the UK after having recorded them on tape. Obviously in order to create hype around his fellow Russian musicians, Feigin had to issue lots of good material from the most renowned contemporary improvisers from the U.S. and the Europe.
Let’s start with the Ganelin Trio. In his website, critic Piero Scaruffi describe their music as “a gross exercize in mis-interpreting Cecil Taylor, as if played by a circus ensemble affected by deep neurosis but with the skills of classical musicians”. More prosaically, the trio led by pianist Vyacheslav Ganelin show an exquisite mastery in their instruments and are able to create wild textures and more intimate moments of music.
Coming in the U.K. television in 1984, when Glasnost (“transparency”) still had to dominate the public debate, they created furious reactions, both positive and negative. The trio formed itself in 1971, and they featured also saxophonist Vladimir Chekasin and drummer Vladimir Tarasov. Their music is able to bursts into wild improvisation but is also keen on more reflexive moments.
Try to give a spin to records like Buddha’s Hand (Circle, 1971), where he’s accompanied by Mark Miller on bass and Sadiq Abdu Shahid on drums, and you’ll find the same tensions that animated the best music coming from the New York environment not only during the Seventies but also in the William Parker era. In fact, this music is coherently in line with the musician’s attendancies of the period.
A completely different character, but not less valid, even if his path to music led him near the land of the kitsch even if his music has solid basis, is Sergeij Kuryiokhin. After he played piano and keyboards in Leningrad, he became, thanks to many collaborations who help him deepen his musical vision, one of the pivotal figure in the music business of his time.
Now, it’s the time to introduce possibly the most famous band from Tuva, with a well known singer/vocal agitator, Sainkho Namtchylak: the Tri-O. Very much appreciated thanks to an US tour, that led the trio plus vocals to become very famous, the Tri-O mix free jazz with vocal experiments varying from Cathy Berberian to Diamanda Galàs, even if Namtchylak is an universe on its own and her raucous, sometimes scattered sometimes dense vocals need to be apreciated without any comparison.
Women in Russian free jazz are not an exception, and so here we have a couple more. The first is violinist Valentina Goncharova whose experiments with music are more keen on industrial and ambient music – somebody would also say ‘new age’ before it became a swear word – and for its difference with what you heard before – if you’re checking music while reading, something I would higly recommend – is one of the very first you’ll want to listen to, even if raucous saxophones are excluded from her music scores.
At that point she started to experiment with a modified electric violin built by her husband Igor Zubkov, an engineer. This way she started experiment with electroacoustic music, recording household objects with contact microphones. Her music is an example of what you can obtain when you like to play with things and consider life an occasion to experiment in the wider sense of the word.
In order to describe the music of Romani Valentina Ponomareva, instead, Italian critic Stefano Liuzzo bothered the names of Mercedes Sosa, Chavela Vargas and Oum Kulthum. Truth is, after a period passed with the interesting Trio Romen (Ponomareva, Igraf Ioshka and Georgi Kvif), she released a sensational album titled Fortune Teller where classic jazz, scat, and improvised music, blend together.
If you my reader are more interested in classic improvised music, another name I can mention is that of Anatoly Vapirov. Born in Ukraine in 1947, he studied at the conservatory clarinet and saxophone, subsequently, apart from his work as a teacher in Leningrad Conservatory, he toured extensively over the world.
During his last years he lived in Bulgaria, but he didn’t cut the relationship with Russia and became one of the leading figures in Russian Jazz. An interesting work from him is the 1983 album Invocations, where both Ponomareva on vocals and Sergey Kuryokhin on piano and percussions are present. The three Invocations (of Spirit, of Fire and of Water) are spatialised during the recording in a very peculiar way.
Many people nowadays would apply the same recording techniques in order not to let people comprehend how much inadequate they are as musicians – echoes and effects makes the ambient full of sound and meaning even if you’re not able to play, I say so because I experimented myself once, more than 20 years ago – but in this record it is as if Vapirov and friends musicians are trying to expand their consciousness.
Finally the duo Homo Liber, documented by Leo Records in an album from 1989 titled Document – New Music From Russia, features pianist and multi-instrumentalist Yuri Yukechev and saxophonist/flutist Vladimir Tolkachev. One of the most peculiar projects in this post, they mix something that seem to be minimalism or electronic experiments with analog equipment.
I hope this voyage in the realms of Russian free jazz will be interesting for you as it was for me, that’s the reason the post don’t end here but continues with videos of live performances by some of the musicians involved in my writing and with a couple of interesting articles I found out on the net:
The Free Jazz Scene in The Former USSR: Between Vilnius and Arkhangelsk
Red & Hot: The Fate of New Jazz in Russia
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