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New Music from Russia
published in the New York Times, Jan. 6, 1991
The plight of an independent record producer is never easy. Since the mid-1970s, a new kind of music has been spreading throughout the Soviet Union, with roots partly in the contemporary free jazz tradition. Apolitical, independent of the state and frequently clandestine, it became the most adventurous form of creative expression to emerge during the stagnant Brezhnev era, renewing the Russian avant garde challenges of the 1920s.
Leo Feigin, a Soviet émigré working for the BBC in London, took it as his mission to reveal this music to the West. In 1980, he created Leo Records with his first release by the Ganelin Trio, Live in East Germany. Their performance dazzles with energy, ideas, irreverence, and sweeping structures. They were the only group in the catalogue ever officially sanctioned, with two records on the state-owned Melodiya label. Eventually, Leo produced a dozen albums by the trio, plus individual projects, from tapes that had to be smuggled out of the Soviet Union.
In ten years the company has brought out nearly a hundred records, half of them by artists in the Soviet Union, with the rest comprising music from East and West Europe and the United States. Among the Americans, there are major works by Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, and others. Consistent in risks taken and discoveries made, the catalogue includes some of the most fearless improvisers.
But the relentless financial debt kept accumulating for Leo. Now, in what may be a grand farewell release, a project more than five years in the making, Feigin has issued a box set of eight CDs, Document: New Music from Russia---The '80s. It represents the most substantial recorded evidence to date of a burgeoning movement of musical activity. With an elegant and extensive booklet, the package presents a full-range view of current activity with groups spanning the entire country.
Improvisation is the key element in this new music. In the booklet's introduction, Alexander Kahn, a Soviet critic and producer, points out that "improvised music was just about the only form of art by definition not subject to censorship." The pieces are elaborately constructed, usually in long, polystylistic suites. Often they make use of folklore elements as thematic material, reflecting the diverse regions the musicians come from. There is also a marked theatricality in the music: with the surprising contrasts, the uses of voice and text, the emphasis on performance.
More than in the West, many artists involved are renegades from classical and popular music. Yet some developed productive careers in these realms, like the Ganelin Trio who for 15 years were the premier exponents of the new music, until its leader emigrated to Israel in 1987. Pianist Vyacheslav Ganelin, composer of many chamber works, operas, and film scores, was the musical director for the Russian Dramatic Theater in Vilnius, Lithuania. Saxophonist Vladimir Chekasin teaches music at the conservatory there, using his own methods. And self-taught drummer Vladimir Tarasov works as first percussionist with the Lithuanian Philharmonic. None are native to the region.
If there has been a center to this far-flung network of activity, it is the Contemporary Music Club in Leningrad, which has sponsored many concerts in culture halls and delicately dances at the bounds of tolerance by the authorities. Perhaps the most provocative musician connected to the club is the pianist Sergey Kuryokhin, the inexhaustible wunderkind who at 36 is famous for his large groups as for his startling solo performances. In his Crazy Music Orchestra and especially the band Popular Mechanics, he mixes the rhapsodic with the avant-garde, electrically laced with the drive of rock and roll. Other ingredients may include operetta, gypsy music, and circus themes. Kuryokhin was also the keyboardist for the popular underground rock band Aquarium, featuring the guitarist Boris Grebenshchikov. Leo has issued a couple of very abstract duets by the two, in addition to six other albums by the pianist.
On Document,Kuryokhin is heard in three different settings, including the stunning "Thracian Duos" with the eminent Leningrad saxophonist Anatoly Vapirov. The Ganelin Trio closes the package with three solos and a group piece. But the nearly ten hours of music in the box set begin with a haunting suite of folks songs and improvisations, "Dearly Departed," by an unknown Leningrad group assembled only for the recording. The piece establishes the tone for music of a strange beauty on these dates, indigenous to its landscape and fully conscious of developments elsewhere.
Eastern influences abound throughout, as in the trumpet-bass duo of Vyacheslav Guyvoronsky, who also works as a doctor, and Vladimir Volkov. For ten years they have played together almost exclusively and here they offer two ragas, plus five short pieces inspired by Japanese miniatures. Spiritually directed in a comparable vein is the extended solo work by Valentina Goncharova, "Ocean." From her kitchen studio in Tallinn, Estonia, she has overdubbed electric violins, cello, and voice, to create a dense, meditative sound journey. Gypsy vocalist Valentina Ponomareva, renowned for her astonishing technical range in a career spanning big bands, Russian romances, and free jazz, on this occasion leaps effortlessly from whispered growlings to ecstatic scatting and monkish recitations.
The use of vocals on Document shows a great variety of approaches. There is the majestic "Concerto for Voice," featuring the Armenian jazz diva Datevik Hovhannessian with Chekasin's madcap but well-harnessed big band. The group Orkestrion, from Volgograd, blends poetry and improvised music in contexts of constant renewal, while the impassioned young saxophonist Alexander Sakurov, from Ivanovo, inspired by Russian orthodoxy, presents a large-scale composition with the poet Yuri Dronov. The three horn players of the Moscow group Tri-O are joined by the singer Sainkho Namchylak, from Tuva near the Mongolian border, whose protean technique encompasses Buddhist throat singing and ululating birdlike cries, as well as more melodic phrasings.
From the most distant points, two other long-established groups are represented. Jazz Group Arkhangelsk, from the city of the same name near the Arctic Circle, recorded "Above the Sun, Below the Moon" especially for the box set. Led by saxophonist Vladimir Rezitsky, the group has thoroughly digested many folk, jazz, and popular sources to forge a music that is new at every turn. More openly geared to spontaneous composition is the duo Homo Liber, from Novosibirsk in Siberia. Pianist Yuri Yukechev, composer of more than a hundred published works, points out that for them "traditional music had exhausted itself. Paper had stopped reflecting the composer's ideas."
Among the younger improvisers showcased on Document, the saxophonist Petras Vysniauskas of Vilnius seems the fastest rising star, with his remarkable mastery of instruments and stylistic vocabularies. Two versions of the Moscow Improvising Trio are also heard, whose style arises not so much from external influences as from the inner esthetic tensions of the elements at hand. Similarly turned in on their own material is the trio of cellist Vladislav Makarov from Smolensk, whose improvised work approaches the sound of contemporary composers.
In his book Russian Jazz: New Identity (1985), Leo Feigin spoke of the serendipity of how and when the tapes arrived to him, making it difficult to know what records he would produce next. With the new box set, he is all caught up at last, or almost. Some of these musicians will be touring England later this year, and Channel Four television, along with Associates Film Productions and Feigin, will be producing a five-hour series on the Russian new music.
New Music from Russia
published in the New York Times, Jan. 6, 1991
The plight of an independent record producer is never easy. Since the mid-1970s, a new kind of music has been spreading throughout the Soviet Union, with roots partly in the contemporary free jazz tradition. Apolitical, independent of the state and frequently clandestine, it became the most adventurous form of creative expression to emerge during the stagnant Brezhnev era, renewing the Russian avant garde challenges of the 1920s.
Leo Feigin, a Soviet émigré working for the BBC in London, took it as his mission to reveal this music to the West. In 1980, he created Leo Records with his first release by the Ganelin Trio, Live in East Germany. Their performance dazzles with energy, ideas, irreverence, and sweeping structures. They were the only group in the catalogue ever officially sanctioned, with two records on the state-owned Melodiya label. Eventually, Leo produced a dozen albums by the trio, plus individual projects, from tapes that had to be smuggled out of the Soviet Union.
In ten years the company has brought out nearly a hundred records, half of them by artists in the Soviet Union, with the rest comprising music from East and West Europe and the United States. Among the Americans, there are major works by Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, and others. Consistent in risks taken and discoveries made, the catalogue includes some of the most fearless improvisers.
But the relentless financial debt kept accumulating for Leo. Now, in what may be a grand farewell release, a project more than five years in the making, Feigin has issued a box set of eight CDs, Document: New Music from Russia---The '80s. It represents the most substantial recorded evidence to date of a burgeoning movement of musical activity. With an elegant and extensive booklet, the package presents a full-range view of current activity with groups spanning the entire country.
Improvisation is the key element in this new music. In the booklet's introduction, Alexander Kahn, a Soviet critic and producer, points out that "improvised music was just about the only form of art by definition not subject to censorship." The pieces are elaborately constructed, usually in long, polystylistic suites. Often they make use of folklore elements as thematic material, reflecting the diverse regions the musicians come from. There is also a marked theatricality in the music: with the surprising contrasts, the uses of voice and text, the emphasis on performance.
More than in the West, many artists involved are renegades from classical and popular music. Yet some developed productive careers in these realms, like the Ganelin Trio who for 15 years were the premier exponents of the new music, until its leader emigrated to Israel in 1987. Pianist Vyacheslav Ganelin, composer of many chamber works, operas, and film scores, was the musical director for the Russian Dramatic Theater in Vilnius, Lithuania. Saxophonist Vladimir Chekasin teaches music at the conservatory there, using his own methods. And self-taught drummer Vladimir Tarasov works as first percussionist with the Lithuanian Philharmonic. None are native to the region.
If there has been a center to this far-flung network of activity, it is the Contemporary Music Club in Leningrad, which has sponsored many concerts in culture halls and delicately dances at the bounds of tolerance by the authorities. Perhaps the most provocative musician connected to the club is the pianist Sergey Kuryokhin, the inexhaustible wunderkind who at 36 is famous for his large groups as for his startling solo performances. In his Crazy Music Orchestra and especially the band Popular Mechanics, he mixes the rhapsodic with the avant-garde, electrically laced with the drive of rock and roll. Other ingredients may include operetta, gypsy music, and circus themes. Kuryokhin was also the keyboardist for the popular underground rock band Aquarium, featuring the guitarist Boris Grebenshchikov. Leo has issued a couple of very abstract duets by the two, in addition to six other albums by the pianist.
On Document,Kuryokhin is heard in three different settings, including the stunning "Thracian Duos" with the eminent Leningrad saxophonist Anatoly Vapirov. The Ganelin Trio closes the package with three solos and a group piece. But the nearly ten hours of music in the box set begin with a haunting suite of folks songs and improvisations, "Dearly Departed," by an unknown Leningrad group assembled only for the recording. The piece establishes the tone for music of a strange beauty on these dates, indigenous to its landscape and fully conscious of developments elsewhere.
Eastern influences abound throughout, as in the trumpet-bass duo of Vyacheslav Guyvoronsky, who also works as a doctor, and Vladimir Volkov. For ten years they have played together almost exclusively and here they offer two ragas, plus five short pieces inspired by Japanese miniatures. Spiritually directed in a comparable vein is the extended solo work by Valentina Goncharova, "Ocean." From her kitchen studio in Tallinn, Estonia, she has overdubbed electric violins, cello, and voice, to create a dense, meditative sound journey. Gypsy vocalist Valentina Ponomareva, renowned for her astonishing technical range in a career spanning big bands, Russian romances, and free jazz, on this occasion leaps effortlessly from whispered growlings to ecstatic scatting and monkish recitations.
The use of vocals on Document shows a great variety of approaches. There is the majestic "Concerto for Voice," featuring the Armenian jazz diva Datevik Hovhannessian with Chekasin's madcap but well-harnessed big band. The group Orkestrion, from Volgograd, blends poetry and improvised music in contexts of constant renewal, while the impassioned young saxophonist Alexander Sakurov, from Ivanovo, inspired by Russian orthodoxy, presents a large-scale composition with the poet Yuri Dronov. The three horn players of the Moscow group Tri-O are joined by the singer Sainkho Namchylak, from Tuva near the Mongolian border, whose protean technique encompasses Buddhist throat singing and ululating birdlike cries, as well as more melodic phrasings.
From the most distant points, two other long-established groups are represented. Jazz Group Arkhangelsk, from the city of the same name near the Arctic Circle, recorded "Above the Sun, Below the Moon" especially for the box set. Led by saxophonist Vladimir Rezitsky, the group has thoroughly digested many folk, jazz, and popular sources to forge a music that is new at every turn. More openly geared to spontaneous composition is the duo Homo Liber, from Novosibirsk in Siberia. Pianist Yuri Yukechev, composer of more than a hundred published works, points out that for them "traditional music had exhausted itself. Paper had stopped reflecting the composer's ideas."
Among the younger improvisers showcased on Document, the saxophonist Petras Vysniauskas of Vilnius seems the fastest rising star, with his remarkable mastery of instruments and stylistic vocabularies. Two versions of the Moscow Improvising Trio are also heard, whose style arises not so much from external influences as from the inner esthetic tensions of the elements at hand. Similarly turned in on their own material is the trio of cellist Vladislav Makarov from Smolensk, whose improvised work approaches the sound of contemporary composers.
In his book Russian Jazz: New Identity (1985), Leo Feigin spoke of the serendipity of how and when the tapes arrived to him, making it difficult to know what records he would produce next. With the new box set, he is all caught up at last, or almost. Some of these musicians will be touring England later this year, and Channel Four television, along with Associates Film Productions and Feigin, will be producing a five-hour series on the Russian new music.