One Hundred Years of Jazz Adventures in Russia: Survived the Gulag and the Age of Saxophone Extension

Where, when and thanks to whom Russian jazz was born is known for certain. It happened on October 1 exactly one hundred years ago in the very center of Moscow, in Maly Kislovsky Lane. Today this date is celebrated by the entire jazz world in our country. How the music of American African Americans took root on Russian soil, what five main stages it went through and other interesting facts from the life of the “newborn” we are talking with the director of research at the Jazz Research Center, editor-in-chief of the Jazz.ru magazine Kirill Moshkov.

– The history of jazz in Russia was not started by a musician – Valentin Parnakh (1890–1951). He was a poet of the “Silver Age of Russian Poetry” and, moreover, a great enthusiast of eccentric dance. Born in Taganrog, studied at St. Petersburg University, at the beginning of World War I ended up in Paris and lived there for seven years. In the summer of 1921, he first heard the African-American jazz ensemble “Louis Mitchell Jazz Kings” in one of the Parisian institutions and was captivated by its exciting rhythms. Here is the music for the newest, unseen dances, which must be opened to the Russian audience! Parnakh invented the Cyrillic spelling of the word “jazz”, was the first to publish educational articles about jazz in Russian, and the following summer he brought to Moscow a set of instruments for a jazz ensemble, records and notes of fashionable melodies. It must be said that the Valentin Parnakh Jazz Band was recruited from enthusiasts – for example, young Yevgeny Gabrilovich, a well-known screenwriter in the future, played the piano. Newspapers vied with each other to advertise the first performance of the “First Eccentric Orchestra in the RSFSR”, so that at one o’clock on October 1, 1922, the Great Hall of GITIS (now the 26th auditorium of the historic GITIS building in Maly Kislovsky Lane) was packed and warmly applauded exotic rhythms and the unprecedented dance of Parnakh ” Giraffe idol.” By the way, on the same evening, the Jazz Band appeared on the stage of the Theater. Meyerhold, where a number with a foxtrot was introduced into the play “The Magnanimous Cuckold” especially for the “eccentric orchestra”: now the characters danced not to the piano, but to a whole live “jazz band” of seven musicians. From this date we count the history of jazz in Russia.

– Do you know when the first domestic jazz record was recorded and released?

– The first domestic jazz record with two fashionable American melodies was recorded in Moscow in 1928 by the AMA Jazz ensemble, which worked at the AMA music publishing house. This ensemble was led by 24-year-old pianist Alexander Tsfasman. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory and showed great promise as an academic musician, but abandoned his classical career by immersing himself entirely in jazz. In the 1930s, he led a popular jazz orchestra with a large composition, his records (“Unsuccessful Date”, “The Sound of Jazz”), and in 1939-46. Tsfasman worked as the head of the Jazz Orchestra of the All-Union Radio Committee.

– Jazz was banned in the USSR – is it a myth or a reality? “Today you play jazz, and tomorrow you will sell your homeland” – this is the reality of the middle of the 20th century.

– Yes, there is such a myth that jazz was banned in the USSR, but it’s not true. In 1936, after the so-called “discussion about jazz” in party newspapers, Soviet jazz even received state support: within a couple of years, the State Jazz Orchestras of the Union Republics were created (the State Jazz of the RSFSR was headed by the popular singer and actor Leonid Utyosov) and even the State Jazz USSR, which was led by conductor and vocalist Alexander Varlamov before the war. Some of the USSR State Jazz musicians died in the fall of 1941 in the encirclement near Vyazma, but other orchestras continued to perform in front of the active troops – including the State Jazz of Belarus conducted by trumpeter Eddie Rosner, who fled from Poland to the USSR from the advancing Nazi troops. Jazz during the Great Patriotic War was considered the music of the allies in the anti-Hitler coalition and enjoyed wide support. But when signs of the onset of the Cold War appeared in 1946, the official ideology lost interest in jazz. Rosner was arrested for trying to return to Poland without official permission and spent eight years in the camps – where, however, jazz also played: the Gulag had its own system of “cultural work”.

The sad years of 1947-55, when all the “state jazz” were disbanded, Leonid Utyosov later ironically called “the era of unbending saxophones.” True, the Utyosovsky orchestra was not dispersed – it was only renamed the State Variety Orchestra of the RSFSR and covered up a group of saxophones, which were too reminiscent of jazz, planted in the first row by an extensive violin group. Nevertheless, a complete ban on jazz at the state level did not happen: the development of this music simply stopped for eight years.

– Did the thaw play its historical role in this?

– Yes, the history of Soviet jazz actually began anew with the “thaw”. In the second half of the 50s, the so-called “generation of engineers” came to jazz – students of technical and scientific specialties who mastered modern music in amateur performances at the institute. Saxophonist Georgy Garanyan was a mechanical engineer, his colleague Alexei Zubov was a theoretical physicist, trombonist Konstantin Bakholdin was a communications engineer, and the future creator of Soviet jazz-rock saxophonist Alexei Kozlov graduated from an architectural institute. But this generation’s love for jazz was so ardent that the “generation of engineers” managed to overcome the gap between domestic jazz and the world stage, caused by the “extension of saxophones.”

In the mid-60s, the first jazz festivals swept across the country, which showed that the USSR had its own modern jazz scene, and it fits into the mainstream of the development of world jazz art. And in the mid-1970s, jazz specialties finally appeared in the state system of musical education, and in the same years the state touring and concert system began to recruit jazz soloists and entire ensembles: so jazz in the USSR finally became no longer an entertaining stage, but a recognized part of musical art.

– How did the closeness of the USSR from the outside world affect the development of domestic jazz and musicians?

– The closed nature of the country made many musicians want to leave it and play jazz together with those who created and developed this art on the other side of the globe. Some were even lucky: for example, Moscow trumpeter Valery Ponomarev joined the legendary New York Jazz Messengers ensemble of drummer Art Blakey in 1977 and worked with him for four years, traveling all over the world. But not everyone was so lucky. Most of the Soviet jazz emigrants never became big stars in the West.

– Here we come to the post-Soviet period of our jazz. As far as I know from my jazz friends, life at the beginning of Perestroika was on the brink.

– The end of the USSR also meant the end of the former system of state support for art. Jazz in modern Russia had to learn how to survive in new market conditions. And, you know, he survived. Firstly, it was supported and fed by the system of jazz education – from the “variety departments” of children’s music schools and music colleges to several jazz departments in higher educational institutions, primarily the Russian Academy of Music. Gnesins and the Rostov Conservatory. Rachmaninov. Secondly, part of the Soviet jazz emigrants returned: these musicians successfully applied the experience gained in the West on the Russian stage, creating a new jazz art infrastructure in Russia almost from scratch.

The most striking example here is saxophonist Igor Butman, who studied in Boston at the famous Berklee Jazz College and successfully worked on the New York stage, and in the second half of the 90s returned to Russia, where he opened jazz clubs, organized festivals, collected his own big band (now it is the Moscow Jazz Orchestra conducted by Igor Butman) and created his own fund for the support and development of musical art. He organizes many important events in Russian jazz – including a nationwide 100th anniversary celebration program, which now hosts dozens of festivals and concerts – the first one will be held today at the Bolshoi Theater. As part of this program, a collection of notes by Russian jazz composers is being released, as well as a book and a full-length documentary film about the history of jazz in Russia – the film “Jazz 100”.