Return movement – Newspaper Kommersant No. 196 (7397) dated 10/21/2022

The premiere of the documentary film “Jazz 100” (director – Alexander Bryntsev), which was filmed as part of a large program to celebrate the centenary of Russian jazz, took place. The film uses over 600 archival photos, 95 audio tracks and many historical video documents. About the film “Jazz 100” and the book dedicated to the anniversary of Kirill Moshkov, which was created simultaneously with the filming, tells Boris Barabanov.

In October 1922, the “jazz band” of the dancer, poet and musician Valentin Parnakh gave the first jazz concert in our country (on the stage of the current GITIS). The centenary of this event was celebrated with a concert at the Bolshoi Theater, and the premiere of the documentary film Jazz 100 was held at the Khudozhestvenny cinema. This is the first attempt to cover the entire history of the development of the genre on the territory of the country by means of documentary films.

If American jazz is the music of immigrants, from the descendants of African slaves to Jews who fled Europe in the first third of the 20th century, then the history of Russian jazz, as the creators of the Jazz 100 film see it, is the history of re-emigrants, musicians who left and returned, those who was obsessed with the idea of ​​jazz enlightenment. The Russian jazzman, unlike his American colleague, constantly needs to be on the road. How can one not recall the quote about the “ambassador of rock and roll in a non-rhythmic country” from a song by Boris Grebenshchikov – who, by the way, is present in the film by Alexander Bryntsev as a participant in Kuryokhin’s Pop Mechanics.

Valentin Parnakh was a prominent figure in Parisian émigré circles until he decided in 1921 to ask Vsevolod Meyerhold for money for instruments to organize Russia’s first jazz concert. As it is said in the film, Parnakh brought to Russia not jazz itself, but the idea of ​​jazz, planted in the minds of the local public the idea of ​​the possibility of some kind of music other than academic and folklore.

The Polish Jew Eddie Rozner created his first orchestra in Belarus, and in 1940 he already played in Sochi a personal “reserve” for Joseph Stalin. In 1946, Rozner was repressed, but in the Khabarovsk Territory he did not cut down the forest, but led the camp jazz orchestra. After rehabilitation in 1954, Rosner worked actively in Moscow, and his orchestra starred in Eldar Ryazanov’s Carnival Night.

Oleg Lundstrem assembled his orchestra in Harbin from the children of the CER employees and for many years aspired to the USSR, where he eventually moved along with all the musicians of his team.

Jazz emigration was also in the fate of Igor Butman, and in the biography of his colleagues Valery Ponomarev, Alex Sipyagin and Nikolai Levinovsky. All of them received a serious education, for example, Igor Butman played in Lionel Hampton’s orchestra, and Valery Ponomarev played with Art Blakey. It is all the more entertaining, of course, to listen to the heroes of the film in 2022, when the “relocation” of a large number of representatives of various genres has become one of the trends in musical life.

The pillars of Russian jazz of different times sincerely believed that jazz could take root in Russia, even without having Russian roots. But the question is what should be considered Russian jazz. No matter how hard the author of these lines tried, neither in the film nor in the book of jazz critic Kirill Moshkov “Jazz 100: A Century of the Russian Jazz Scene, 1922-2022” he could not find an answer to the question of what distinguishes Russian jazz in world culture, except for the geotag.

“Russians have their own soul, their own feeling. And you can hear it in their playing,” Wynton Marsalis says in Jazz 100. And then: “Do I think, when I look at a Russian: “These people are completely different”? The deeper you look into a person, the more clearly you see that the spirit is one. And Dave Brubeck, thinking about Russian jazz, nevertheless comes to the conclusion that every musician is a separate jazz. Kirill Moshkov’s book quotes from Brubeck’s letter to the Second Approach group: “I am sure that every person, every ensemble is unique or should be unique.”

Despite the word “Russian” in the title of Moshkov’s book, both it and the film tell us that for at least 70 of these 100 years our jazz was still “Soviet” and not “Russian”. The point of his separation from the pop and restaurant feeders, the moment of “self-awareness” was the Tallinn Jazz Festival in 1967. Azerbaijani Vagif Mustafa-zade represented the entire USSR at the jazz composition competition in Monaco and won it (unfortunately, posthumously). Sverdlovsk saxophonist Vladimir Chekasin, at the invitation of Vladimir Tarasov and Vyacheslav Ganelin, moved to Vilnius to work, and as a result, an outstanding jazz trio GTCH was born. Such a life of jazz was indeed a unique phenomenon in the history of the style. After the collapse of the USSR, nothing of the same scale happened.

Kirill Moshkov’s book contains a serious overview of the contemporary jazz scene in Russia. This is what the film lacks, the entire final part of which boils down mainly to stating the achievements of the team of Igor Butman, its producer. Opens the tape “Polyushko-field” performed by his orchestra, the photo of the musician is the first in the film. According to the film, Russian jazz is Butman’s universe with his record label, orchestra and international forums. And such, for example, phenomena as the festival “Manor. Jazz”, which addressed the mass Russian audience in the language of jazz, does not exist in this universe.

If we consider Russian jazz to be an in-depth study of its roots by musicians, then in this sense it still has a long way to go. For the language of such diverse musicians as the pianist Evgeny Lebedev, the bands Zventa Sventana and the Settlers, the national background is largely decisive. Nearby is a wise mentor – a folklore researcher and a member of the jazz Moscow Art Trio Sergey Starostin. It’s too early to talk about new Russian jazz as a phenomenon, but changes are inevitable, and one of the reasons is the isolation that Russian musicians find themselves in in 2022. When Igor Butman and his colleagues speak from the screen about the international achievements of Russian jazz, you immediately remember that at the Moscow Jazz Festival (see Kommersant of June 16) the “unfriendly” countries in which jazz was invented and where wrote most of the jazz standards. Russian jazz has not stopped, it’s just that now it will need to move even more actively within the country.