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Morton Marcus: This Is KUSP, community sponsored radio for the Monterey Bay, Salinas and the Santa Cruz area at 88.9 FM on your dial. And I'm Mort Marcus and this is a very special Sunday night special, which I am doing tonight between

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9 and 11. And if you are thinking about moving your dial, do not do it because this is a very special program indeed. You're hearing some Red Norvo in the background and this is the inspiration for tonight's show. It is not tonight's show.

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Tonight we are going to the Soviet Union with a very good friend of mine, Bill Minor, the poet, jazz columnist and jazz pianist, and we are going to hear some music from the Soviet Union and the latest in jazz. And Bill Minor, welcome to KUSP.

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The last time you were on here, you were totally a poet, and why don't you tell us what has happened since last time. Bill Minor: The other is- excuse me, I was not on. I've had a number of disparate interests, one of which was poetry, which I

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read here before when my friend Paul aired. The other has been music, which I played since I was about 16 years of age. I also teach a course in Soviet Russian literature, and I've been looking for a way to put all these things together. And

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about two years ago, I felt as if I had found that some splendid music started coming out of Soviet Union, first East Wind Records and Leo, and then Mobile Fidelity up in Petaluma has issued a number of records. And I heard- I liked very much

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what I heard and we began to plan a trip, on our own, independently. And I thought I'd like to go to about nine cities and sample as many different areas as I could, as many different backgrounds as possible. So we mapped that out,

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we weren't quite sure whether it was going to be possible or not. And we had a great deal of trouble being- making connections with people try to find out when the Moscow Jazz Festival was because I'd heard about Moscow, some records, or

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some pieces from the Moscow Jazz Festival. And nobody could tell me about that, and finally made a number of breakthroughs, the nicest of which was through a fellow named Steve Boulais(?), who runs an agency in Salt Lake City, and brought a number of

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Soviet musicians to the United States. And he said, "Why don't you give me some of your articles that were in magazines, and I'll take them to Moscow, and we'll see what comes out of all this." And I waited around for a long period of time and,

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and nothing did. And I'd forgotten about the offer somewhat, and finally, one day in my mail there was an invitation from the Composers Union to be their guests at the First International Moscow Jazz Festival, which was great. So we

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we took it from there. Bill Minor: It started on the 31st of May and lasted for a full week to June 5. Yeah. Morton Marcus: Now, there were also some American jazz people

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Bill Minor: A lot of them. Freddie Hubbard, Branford over there. Marsalis, Chico Freeman, who stole the show as far as I'm concerned. A lot, a number- Buster Williams Quartet were

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there, was there, and pretty much a balance between American groups and Soviet jazz groups, many of whom I had heard on record, knew about, so I was anxious to see them live. Morton Marcus: Okay, so you went to the Moscow International Jazz

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Festival and as a guest to the Composer's Union, and then what happened after- what was going on and then afterwards, obviously, Bill Minor: Well, we hit the road after the Moscow Jazz

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Morton Marcus: Well, what I would like to do in this program Festival, and we went north to Petrozavodsk, which is in Karelia, because I had heard about a musician named Andrei is sort of take it in the way you've arranged it, and then

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Kondakov. I heard him on record and I thought it would be good to sample the different republic's and the different natives, their styles that are coming out of republics and what listen to the different jazz and have your comments on it

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that contributed to jazz And we went from there to Riga to Tallinn, down to Kiev, down to Odessa and to Tbilisi, and then I met- We wanted to go to Baku, but were not permitted to do that. And we had hotel reservations in Vilnius, and at

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the last moment, I looked at my visa and they had simply taken white off, and Vilnius had vanished from- from the universe. So we didn't do that. And a person I very much wanted to get in contact with, Aziza Mustafa Zadeh is a pianist from

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Baku, and I did meet her and at Moscow at the Jazz Festival. So I saw just about everybody I'd hoped to see. Yeah. probably beforehand, so that people know what they're listening to and explain some of the experiments and, you know,

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insights that you have into the situation. Bill Minor: Sure. Shall we start with the first person I ever heard? Morton Marcus: Okay.

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Bill Minor: Someone impressed me very much. This is the father of Aziza Mustafa Zadeh. His name is Vagif Mustafa Zadeh. And the bass player I did meet in Tbilisi on this piece, his name is Tamaz Kurashvili, and he's Georgian. And this is the first

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piece I heard. I still think that Vagif Mustafa Zadeh is one of the most original voices that ever came out of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, he died in an automobile accident when he was in his 40s and his career career was was quite short, but

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he's a good person to start out with. Morton Marcus: Okay, so once more if you will pronounce his name for us. Bill Minor: Vagif Mustafa Zadeh.

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Morton Marcus: Okay, and from the Republic of- Bill Minor: Azerbaijan. One of the things that I wanted to do was to track down people who could explain what was going into this music. I'm not a

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musicologist. And I'm certainly not an ethnomusicologist. But I had read about him. And usually American jazz critic can simply say that his playing was based on American- or excuse me, on Azerbaijani folk, folk melodies. And I knew there had to be

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something a little bit more to it than that. So I talked to his daughter and arranged- we arranged to see her in Moscow. And when I asked her explain some of these configurations which were a part of the national or local music, she

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said she couldn't do it verbally, and fortunately there happened to be a nice grand piano in the room in which we're talking. So I said, "Will you make use of this?" And I have a little sequence here from the tape interview with her. I think

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at the very beginning, we're just trying to persuade her to play. There was an English girl who was helping me translate. And she began to talk about these figures called mugham. I had a pretty extensive talk with her and it seems they're not

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really scales. They're not really just melodic configurations or melismatic patterns, which are like a raga in that they have set names. And apparently there are many of them. There are hundreds of them. And she uses them not

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singly, but in combinations as her father did. And I thought it'd be very interesting if I could, you know, get her to play them separately, and then that you could see how they fit into the jazz patterns because there's an awful lot going in to

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that music that he was just playing, you know, much of it is straight jazz, and a lot of it is typically from the Republic of Azerbaijan. And she did that for me and her mother was there and at the very end of this, her mother begins to give some of

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the names of these- of these patterns, these mugham patterns. Morton Marcus: Well, looking at them here and I, we were sharing your outline for the thing with mugham and especially [unidentified]. Very, very similar to the scales that are

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used in Greek music and Turkish music. Bill Minor: Yeah, yeah, I think especially the Turkish influence is very strong, very Middle Eastern. Yeah. Morton Marcus: Very interesting. Shall- shall we go into what

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she's doing? Or- Bill Minor: Yeah, let's let's listen to her first. And then what happened is I found the bass player, Tamaz Kurashvili, in Tbilisi weeks later, and I asked him about the rhythmic

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patterns which are being used in that same piece that that Vagif played. And he- were in a hotel room and he just tapped them out on a tabletop for me, which was wonderful. Actually, we could play those back to back I think, okay, they come out together.

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There's a slight pause between the two. Morton Marcus: So this is- Bill Minor: The first is just a conversation with Aziza and her mother, Elsa, and then she plays the mugham figures and if you

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listen carefully to the first one she plays, it's the first five notes of "Around Midnight" and she's not playing "Around Midnight." She's just playing one of these traditional patterns. I thought that was amazing. It's basically- It's

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five notes that make up "Around Midnight." Morton Marcus: If you just tuned in out there with talking to Bill Minor who has just come back from the Soviet Union, talking to and recording Soviet jazz artists, so here we go with

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what he was just talking about right now. [Conversation in Azerbaijani] Either one or the other. Bill Minor: Maybe it is, so I can understand just to break it down.

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Unknown: [Conversation in Azerbaijani] [Piano music] [Conversation in Azerbaijani] Chargah. Chargah. Chargah.

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[Tapping sound] Bill Minor: But is there a name for that specific- Unknown: [unidentified] Bill Minor: Are there's some others? Could you give me like a

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two or three different examples of different [unidentified] So 455 Unknown: [Tapping sound] Bill Minor: He was- he was a real find. I-

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By the time we got to Tbilisi, I think I had about 1000 hours of taped interviews with people, musicians and I felt I talked about to everybody that was going to be able to and I contacted a man there, just a friend of a friend from the

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States. And he said, when I phoned him, he said, "I'm sorry, I can't see you because my parents are very ill. They're in the hospita." l and he said, "I have arranged for you to meet one of our local musicians." And that turned out to be Tomas

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Kurashvili, who I think is probably one of the finest bass players in the Soviet Union. That was totally by accident. We spent the entire day and until about four o'clock in the morning with him and two photographers who also gave me a

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great stash of photographs. Morton Marcus: Well, it's just haunting stuff. I mean, you can hear the coming over the steps the different waves of Turks, who will come into the Balkan region and will leave the same

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musics, if I can say that. But just beautifully lyrical stuff. Jazz totally incorporated into another tradition. Bill Minor: Yeah. There's a quite a bit of debate as to whether national musics really fit in a jazz format. And of

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course, people were very proud of their own music and Aziza and her mother felt when I talked to them, that Azerbaijani music lent itself better to, to the jazz format than, than most music of the other nationalities and I had a number of other

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people who confirmed that and so there was just something compatible about it. In fact they said, we feel our music is closer in rhythm and in spirit to the black music of America than- than any other jazz played in the Soviet Union.

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Morton Marcus: If people out there are trying to locate where Azerbaijan is, its way in the south in that soft belly, which moves between Iran and the Soviet Union. And it's just- gosh, it's gorgeous stuff. Go on!

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Bill Minor: We'll- We'll take another jump. I'll introduce you to an absolutely delightful person. And if I may, I have something that I wrote, which, which introduces this person, I think I'll do that. His name is Yuri Kuznetsov. And I met him in

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Riga, where he was performing at the Jazz Festival there and we had arranged to meet again when we arrived in Odessa, some time later. I do have literary interests also. And Odessa is a fascinating town writers like Isaac Babel and another Yuri,

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excuse me, Yury Olesha. I think Kuznetsov is the musician, I may have confused that. So the first job of business I wanted to do was go around and find some of these places that I had read about to see if they still existed. And I got very lucky on

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that. Olesha writes about a trip, just a jaunt around town he took with his best friend in the early days of the war when they were evacuating the city. And apparently he was staying at a place called the London- The Hotel London. And he was the

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only person remaining there and he had his backpack over in the corner and he said, "I'm going to be the last person to leave Odessa."He loved the city furiously. And they took one last stroll around the town, and I read about coming up over a

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hill, small hill, and there was the Odessa opera house with an acacia tree outside. And my wife and I took that trek, and lo and behold there it was. Outside of the Krasny Hotel, there was a man, looked like he's probably in his maybe 60s or 70s, just a-

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who's an official standing out there, I mean someone who worked for the hotel. And I thought if anybody knows where the Hotel London might be, this- this looks like the guy who could do it, you know? So I went up and in Russian asked him if this

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place that I had read about depicted being 55 years ago still existed, and he gave me the exact street directions and down we went. Morton Marcus: The- Odessa wasn't bombed and destroyed

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during the Second World War. Bill Minor: No, no, no, it's it's it's very much the way- the way it was. It's a magic, magic place. I'll try to give you some of the feeling of that.

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Morton Marcus: Okay, wonderful. Bill Minor: This is my meeting with Yuri. Morton Marcus: Is this going to appear anywhere? I know that several of your articles are going to appear in different

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magazines. Bill Minor: I'm not quite sure about this one yet. Yuri and I met not there- this is the Hotel London- but in the lobby of the Chernoye More. Convivial, he was ready for a

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full day and probably night for he seemed disappointed when I told him my wife and I had tickets for the opera that evening. We were introduced to his friend Vasha, an architect and whisked away in Vasha's car down French Boulevard, past once

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stately, brightly colored homes of the bourgeoisie, past what they jokingly refer to as the "Hotel Hollywood," one of the many large video palaces springing up, past Communist Party headquarters, mock machine gunfire issued from the car,

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laughter and a declaration that in Odessa, people didn't really care much for politics, that they had more important things on their minds."Such as?" I asked. "Life. Bureaucrats hate jazz," Yuri added. [Unidentified] I asked. Still?

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Well, it's better now, but. We stopped at- excuse me- sea south of the city. Yuri gulped giant quantities of fresh air just as exuberantly as the day, hot, sultry. Smacking his lips with considerable relish he quaffed two pints of pyvo, or beer, at

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the next beach we stopped at, surrounded by what? By what my wife described as chunky little teenagers in bikinis. Vasha who originally hails from the more temperate Baltics kept saying, "Exotica, exotica, new freedoms, perestroika." Isaac Babel once

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wrote of singers, not pianists, from the south, from Odessa, saying they had, "Joy artistically expressed joy in their being, high spirits, lightness of touch, and a charming sad and touching feeling for a life which is both

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good and bad, but extraordinarily interesting." Again for the second time, I sense that a writer might have been talking about Yuri Kuznetsov. At Vasha's home before sitting down to a sumptuous Ukrainian meal,

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delicious deep red borscht, wine, cognac, strawberries, varenyky dumplings with potato stuffing, and later the same filled with cherries for dessert. Yuri and I went upstairs where his friend had a sunlit studio

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overlooking a garden full of peonies and roses. We sat down to some serious talk about his music. He preaches what he practices his cardinal tenet being a belief in "extrant" or creation on the spot, an open field of improvisation, calling

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on a host of musical sources but not consciously using any single one. This rules out the deliberate use of folk or national material employed by other musicians I talked to in the Soviet Union. Kuznetsov feels the goal is to infuse folk

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music, all of which he sees as one, with one's own soul, producing what he calls global jazz. He feels he does this by speaking directly and sincerely to the audience. Instruments are not important. They play themselves, nor is technique,

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which always with him exists only to assist in opening his soul. Most musicians in the USSR complained to me about the difficulty of finding partners, other musicians who can play on their level, who speak the same musical language. "And

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Manoukian," and this is a performer we saw him with in Riga. "We meet every day," Yuri said, "we watch football matches together, we talk, we joke, mutual timing, understanding, trust, one heart one life, "drug druga" for each other. Yuri

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Kuznetsov seems to have found a solution to this problem. What he hungers for, as do so many Soviet artists I talked to, is the chance to play with those jazz giants, he has "only heard on record, but not as living context." Kuznetsov's isolation

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is heightened by domiciled registration, one of those peculiar Soviet institutions which does not allow people to move freely from city to city and town to town. His one request is probably the most basic an artist of any sort can

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make. He wants to bring his talent to the larger world while he's still alive. After our talk and dinner, accompanied by a host of toasts to friendship, mutual happiness, the universal language of jazz, Yuri grew more and more expansive. The cognac

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lucrative, our evening operas left waiting in the wings. We did make it, following up resembled a suicide ride back across Odessa, quickly parked and skipped up Lenin street toward the fine opera house with scenes from Shakespeare painted

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on the ceiling. Yuri pointed out the apartment in which he was born and where his mother still lives. He and I breaking out spontaneously into a scat on “Muskrat Ramble,” drawing a look of concern from Vasha as if we suddenly lost our minds, which

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delightfully and for the moment we may have. When author Yury Olesha's friend Postovsky?) and their war time walk had suggested that Odessa had changed, lost his traditional liveliness, Olesha's responded "Baloney, Odessans don't

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surrender, and they don't die. Their wit is crossed with fearlessness. Even now, during the war, Odessans are just as brave as cheerful and funny as ever." And even now, no matter what extreme and severe changes the Soviet Union may be going

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through, the city's spirit seems to live on in someone like pianist Yuri Kuznetsov. We stopped on the opera house steps. "Now we must be serious," I said. Yuri drew himself up to full short, but solid stature, grinning impishly. "Yes, he

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said, we are at La Scala." I tried to explain that I had deep rich feelings, but too few words in Russian with which to express them. He said he felt the same. That was very bad. A phrase he pronounced well in English. We understood each other perfectly

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and parted. Morton Marcus: Beautiful stuff. That's gonna make a wonderful series of articles. I can see that already here. Not only is Bill a poet, but he is a very, very fine fiction writer as

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well. And certainly that whole ambience of the city and sense of a place now really comes out. Shall we hear some of Mr. Kuznetsov Bill Minor: Probably going from the sublime to the ridiculous in

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terms of Vadif Mustafa Zadeh. Yuri is a marvelous piano player. He condescended to let me play a boogie woogie duet with him. So we're sitting after this full Ukrainian meal at a piano in Odessa, playing "Going to Chicago. I'm sorry, I can't

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take you." Morton Marcus: Shall we listen to it now. Bill Minor: Sure. Morton Marcus: Okay.

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Unknown: [Music] Morton Marcus: A program of jazz in the Soviet Union and you people who have recording machines, cassette recordings that kind of record all of what radio I really would suggest, if

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it hasn't occurred to you already to really record this program. If that's alright with you, Bill, because you- these are cuts that you will hear nowhere and it is really a great chance now. What do you say to that?

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Bill Minor: Not- not all of them are. Some of them are, some of the ones for sure. But- but very hard to find. Actually the last one you'll never hear anywhere! Actually that was me. Morton Marcus: Which one was a minor?

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Bill Minor: It was- Yeah, I was the one singing and I was at the bottom of the piano and Yuri was at the top and all over the place. Morton Marcus: I knew it!

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Bill Minor: The only the only English he knows is, "Oh, yeah!" But it- but it was fun and permissible. Morton Marcus: It was- It was great. And we are here again with Bill Minor who made this trip into

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the Soviet Union from May 27 to June 6, and- Bill Minor: That was just for the Jazz Festival. Actually, we were there- Altogether we left in the middle of May and I stopped in Boston to talk to an immigrated saxophone player

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named Igor Butman. And then in London, and then we were at the Jazz Festival and then we traveled to eight other cities. So we didn't return until almost the middle of July. Yeah. Morton Marcus: Well, that's- that's some- I was wondering how

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quickly that went. I'm looking at my own write-up here and I said, "well, more bad journalism by Marcus." Okay, Bill, where are we going from Odessa?

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Bill Minor: Let's go- Well, this isn't me. But we'll go to Leningrad and listen to a very interesting group. Since we've been talking about some national qualities that ended up in the music. There was a man named Roman Dubunikov(?). And as a

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group, I don't think this translates quite correctly, but the group is called Dearly Departed. And I talked to a man named Alex Kahn, who is an excellent critic in Leningrad, and he said that this group, he'd heard these recordings and

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didn't know who these people were, at a very hard time during the 80s when the music was really underground. And apparently, the bass player [unidentified] Arbuzov died at the age of 26. And there's some tragic circumstances connected

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to this group. The singer is a woman named Irina Bogdanova, who apparently also has had- is alive but still had some rather bad circumstance. And it's a very haunting folk song. And what Roman did was to take old Russian folk songs and to give

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them a contemporary setting, but this is her singing. And the piece is called, "Isn't it a green oak that is catching fire." And I can give you- before we play it, I can give you just a little bit of the sense of- there's a refrain,

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which in Russian is, "moya sud'ba, moya neschastnaya sud'ba," which means my fate, my unhappy fate and it's returning- repeated almost every other line and it's almost like a little fairy tale of going up to a hill and finding a letter, which

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discloses the unhappy fate of a very important frieqnd. "I unsealed it and did burst into tears as my friend died" and then refrain comes back in. And the person keeps going back up to that hill and finding another letter. "I unsealed it and burst

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into tears" and her voice is- is- Well, you'll hear it. It's on here. Unknown: [Singing] Morton Marcus: Wow

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Whoa Bill Minor: We will stay in Leningrad for a little bit I- Having taught Soviet literature for some time I didn't have any deceptions about the Soviet Union being one [unidentified]

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as we've been instructed for so many years. But one of the things that really impressed me about the music was the incredible diversity of it. Let me take a group that's- has played in the United States, I believe. In fact, just about the

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time we left to go the Soviet Union, they were making a tour beginning in Vancouver and coming in Seattle and Portland, I believe, I don't know if they made it as far down to Cal- as California. And then when we returned, they were back in

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Leningrad, and I just missed them again because they were going off to the festival in Murmansk and I would love to have talked to them. This is a trumpet player named Viechslav- Viacheslav, excuse me, Gaivoronsky, and the bass player

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is Vladimir Volkov. And one of the things which is unusual about Soviet music, I think, as compared to American jazz, just about every musician I talked to complained about the incredible distances which separate the top players. And that they could not

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find the depth. For example, if I'm a horn player traveling United States and I come into Santa Cruz, I can always pick up some excellent musicians just as fine as anybody else anywhere the United States on bass, drums and piano. Same thing probably

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true with Monterey, where I'm from. But they said, this is not possible in the Soviet Union. So the great mother of invention, necessity, what they do is they pair up in duos. And you'll find some very interesting duos like a French horn and drums, or in

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this case, a trumpet and bass and that's all you've got. And you're up there and they're naked to the world and they're genuine, not hyped virtuosos because they're- they just play exquisitely and everything that's coming out is coming out

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just out of the two of them. And I found a number of duos, and I'll play some, some others later on that fall in that category. Gaivoronsky and Volkov are very highly thought of by every musician I talked to. And the interesting thing here is

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this piece is called "Five Netsuke" and it was inspired by a show of Japanese miniature sculptures at the Hermitage. And there are five very, very short pieces. The first is called "Fighters," the second is called [unidentified] the second is

00:41:06.300 - 00:41:19.470

"Actors." The next is "Fujin, God of Wind" and the last is called "Poet" and, and I think they're very small stories about describing each one of these, each one of these Japanese figures, very nice piece, this is Gaivoronsky and Volkov.

00:41:21.400 - 00:41:31.050

Ups. Morton Marcus: She's still singing. Bill Minor: She's still singin. Morton Marcus: Well, let her sing. I mean, if she wants to

00:41:31.050 - 00:47:46.400

that bad. Bill Minor: It goes right into it. Morton Marcus: This is our petulant technique out there. Bill Minor: Okay, I can just do another Leningrad figure named

00:47:46.550 - 00:48:00.320

Anatolij Vapirov. I was the- one of the first persons that I heard on records when Leo Records came out of the United States that there would be a statement of the fact that the the artists themselves were not responsible for what's produced

00:48:00.320 - 00:48:13.670

on the records and it was a rather dangerous time for some of them. Jazz has a very curious history in the Soviet Union, as a matter of fact goes all the way back to the very beginnings of recorded music, even in the United States and, and in

00:48:13.670 - 00:48:28.010

London, the original Dixieland band, as a matter of fact, Tsar Nicholas the Second, his Volhynian Life Guard Regiment had a hit record of Georgia- "At a Georgia Camp Meeting." And there is that, legendary or true I'm not quite sure, that when

00:48:28.370 - 00:48:41.330

Prince Yusupov drowned, what shot, poisoned and drowned, eventually, Rasputin, in the background on his gramophone "Yankee Doodle" was playing, being played by a Dixieland orchestra. So the music has been around for a long time, but

00:48:41.330 - 00:48:55.400

it's- it's surfaced or gone under in terms of the political climate. And I had a very interesting conversation in Leningrad at a nightclub called the Dixie Swing Club, where the [unidentified] jazz player, an excellent trombonist named

00:48:55.400 - 00:49:07.160

Kanunnikov and he told me about the days in which you could just- you could not say the word jazz. That meant you'd immediately be sent to the camps and he talked about the fact that he had changed the name of his jazz band to "variety

00:49:07.190 - 00:49:21.230

orchestra" at that particular time. So he was having a heyday now. But when Vapirov started out, the situation was a little bit different. And he teamed up with a Sergey Kuryokhin, who was a fine, younger pianist to appear here at Kuumbwa Jazz

00:49:21.230 - 00:49:34.790

Center in Santa Cruz. In fact, he was the first Soviet performer I ever heard live. I'm gonna get to- I had a great talk with Vapirov and then we'll listen to a little something he's done. He was from Leningrad, and now he's living

00:49:34.790 - 00:49:50.360

in Bulgaria. His ancestors are Bulgarian. And he's very much interested in dramatizations, although he's got some interesting ideas about that, is that is to how to turn legends and myths into music. Also, I thought he had some very good

00:49:50.360 - 00:50:02.720

things to say about free jazz as opposed to traditional jazz or to mainstream jazz. Soviets don't seem to have as much of a hang of this as maybe as we do about that. Matter of fact, at [unidentified] festival here, you're likely to hear one or

00:50:02.720 - 00:50:14.360

another. It's a Dixieland festival or a free jazz festival. And it's a shame in a way that we don't mix them up more because they're where the audiences are less sophisticated, perhaps not quite as discriminating. And because

00:50:14.360 - 00:50:28.070

they don't have that knowledge of the jazz history of jazz past anything goes. And I thought it was good to see that, say at the Moscow Jazz Festival, where a very avant-garde group like [unidentified] would play next to a very traditional group like

00:50:28.070 - 00:50:41.060

[unidentified] which I'll later on- we'll listen to them and what they do. And it was very, it was refreshing for me, and the people like Larry Oakes, of the Rova Saxophone Quartet or Butch Morris, who are not as well known in the United States

00:50:41.300 - 00:50:55.440

on their own turf as they should be, are positive heroes in the Soviet Union, free jazz players and new music players. So it's nice to see again that- the range and the diversity. Here's some of the things. I talked to Vapirov about that in

00:50:55.440 - 00:51:07.530

terms of people playing so much free jazz in the Soviet Union. He said, "Some people pick up a saxophone, blow any note they think that sounds good and they think that's new jazz or new music. Kuryokhin did that, he picked up a saxophone, was

00:51:07.530 - 00:51:20.070

playing with sounds, but that's a small intellect it's not really connected with music. It's an idea he said like children playing, he says Dada-like, yet the public likes this. Vapirov's own preference free jazz or mainstream depends

00:51:20.070 - 00:51:32.040

on who I am playing with, whatever they like playing best I like playing. You mentioned Benny Golson, the much respected mainstream tenor saxophonist and composer who would be performing that evening and he said he wouldn't feel right playing with

00:51:32.040 - 00:51:47.970

him, it wouldn't be natural. So his favorite form is free jazz. He loves playing mainstream and feels, "he doesn't do it quite right." If he's got his own style of free jazz, that will be similar to, or run parallel to, someone else's mainstream. I

00:51:47.970 - 00:52:00.150

asked him about his major extended compositions what one critic is called his epic approach, his use of myths, and he said that when depicting musically such types as [unidentified] an historical Siberian Khakasi(?) shaman, he

00:52:00.150 - 00:52:12.900

doesn't just go through the motions of telling the story or myth, but tries to let people actually hear that particular character. "How do you transform myths into something just musical," I asked? "Dear God, it just arrives," he said, as in my

00:52:12.900 - 00:52:25.290

Macbeth, the names are secondary, the story is secondary The music is first, I don't just adopt folklore, which be- it would be on the surface. When I look at folklore, I'm looking for something deeper, something I can identify with at

00:52:25.290 - 00:52:39.750

any given time, something inside of me which identifies with it. And when- when the spirit [unintelligible] da da da- when I use Bulgarian folklore, I use specific rhythms." And he began to sing some for me. "And melodies because melody is right

00:52:39.750 - 00:52:51.450

at the heart of Slavic culture, and that unites a number of different countries. Not technically, no, I have no special skills, nothing like muqam but I look for what links Bulgarian and Russian culture. The old Bulgarian state was

00:52:51.450 - 00:53:05.970

originally Russia on the Wolga. That was a long, long time ago, so I had to look very, very deep within myself, too deep." Just know that we'll play a piece now which is based on- on a Bulgarian theme, I'll toss him one of the things he said which

00:53:05.970 - 00:53:17.040

I thought was curious and I asked him about American music. As far as the comparison of current American and Soviet jazz goes, Vapirov says he has listened to a lot of the Marsalis brothers, Branford, who was performing at the festival

00:53:17.100 - 00:53:30.030

and Wynton. But he finds much of current American jazz, he mentioned Berklee College in this context, like a conveyor belt, he said it lacks the inner person. It all sounds the same to him. And he also feels this way about the products of the

00:53:30.030 - 00:53:42.450

[unidentified] Institute in the USSR itself. I talked to another man who taught there and was very enthusiastic about his- his teaching. Hundreds of them will make good jazz audiences someday, Vapirov said, but only one or two of them should

00:53:42.450 - 00:53:52.180

actually go out and play. Interesting Man, Morton Marcus: Before we get into the recording itself, I've got to take the station break, believe it or not, okay, doing

00:53:52.180 - 00:54:15.490

this for an hour. And this is KUSP community sponsored Radio 88.9 on your FM dial. We serve Monterey Bay, Salinas Valley, West Santa Clara Valley. And the Big Sur Coast KUSP is a national public radio MBR station. If you have just tuned in or your dial

00:54:15.490 - 00:54:33.850

is freely going from one side of the radio to the other, you are listening to the mid- the Sunday night special here on KUSP. And we are bringing you a two hour show. We are in the midst of it, on Soviet jazz today. The voice you're hearing most of these two

00:54:33.850 - 00:54:53.080

hours is Bill Minor, who is a jazz columnist, fiction writer and poet, as well as a jazz pianist and he was in the Soviet Union from May 27 all the way to mid July. And he went to such cities as Leningrad, Odessa, Talin, Riga, Kiev, Tbilisi and

00:54:53.110 - 00:55:11.050

Petrozavodsk. I've been destroyed those here, sitting here, shattered them my with my pronunciation and I'm a Russian, too. So there you go. And he just met these fascinating jazz artists. And he is reading us some from his articles, but more

00:55:11.140 - 00:55:23.920

he- Great timing. Mr. Minor would you again introduce this piece? Bill Minor: So this will be Anatolij Vapirov playing reeds and Sergey Kuryokhin on piano and synthesizer and [inaudible]

00:55:23.980 - 00:55:37.370

duels and actually the last 38 minutes and we're not going to play that. That's another characteristic of [inaudible] And some of these pieces will go on for 35,40,50 60 minutes or

00:55:37.440 - 00:55:53.560

so. I'm gonna play this about six- we'll play about six minutes or so. This thing then cut it because- It starts out with what must be a Bulgarian folk melody with a very, very pretty theme and then watch to see what it turns into free jazz

00:55:53.630 - 01:03:46.030

and watch what Vapirov does when he does some really amazing things. Bill Minor: left of that theme after 38 minutes. Morton Marcus: But it's hauntingly beautiful and you know, from the singing of Irina Bogdanova, and this piece there

01:03:46.030 - 01:04:03.490

is certainly a kinship between the blues and the rotten whale of despair and existential- I don't know what it is, but certainly all Russians know it. And it drives them to drink and other excesses.

01:04:04.380 - 01:04:18.060

Bill Minor: Actually very compatible forms. I think they've had their blues for a long time. I can hear that in classical music, even Mussorgsky. I see a continuous tradition. And then I can see why the jazz tradition was not

01:04:18.060 - 01:04:33.480

that hard to- See what's happening, it just seems there's a full merger there. There's any kind of fusion music. This would be it for me, rather than just saying jazz licks over a rock back which is what we call fusion, because everything is

01:04:33.480 - 01:04:48.510

here as the folk idiom and the [unidentified] of the Bulgarian tunes and, and those jazz rhythms again. Yeah, yeah. Morton Marcus: Well, merging the, the ethnic with jazz, which has certainly become what I love in the last 20 years or so.

01:04:48.540 - 01:05:01.800

Bill Minor: Yeah, people are [inaudible] very skeptical about that, mainly the more mainstream players they felt that they had had that time in the 70s and part of the 80s in which they had tried national [inaudible]. Each republic had tried to bring

01:05:01.800 - 01:05:14.400

its own folk music and it hadn't worked for someone and- but it certainly worked in the pieces I heard, you know, and it was wonderful [inaudible], who could break it down for me and show me exactly what those elements were contributing to the, to the jazz

01:05:14.400 - 01:05:26.970

pieces that were playing. Morton Marcus: For me, and I know this isn't a philosophical discussion between us, but for me, one of the things that really turned me away from jazz was that I really did not get

01:05:26.970 - 01:05:38.010

this, this reaching for the depths of tradition, which I'm hearing in this music. Now. Of course, this music does something special to me, because it's really hitting my roots. Yeah.

01:05:39.470 - 01:05:50.930

Bill Minor: I'm a mongrel. I'm Scottish, Irish, Dutch, you name it, you know, but it does something to me also, I think it's it's the universal feeling inside. The Russians have an expression "Dusha naraspashku" which means literally like an

01:05:50.990 - 01:06:06.420

unbuttoned or unzipped soul. So and that's compatible with the blues. Yeah. It's important. Lucia Morton Marcus: Or as in Cante jondo and the- the special duende of the, the Spanish gypsy.

01:06:08.400 - 01:06:15.360

Let's go on. Bill Minor: Okay, I'll introduce you to some more people- Morton Marcus: Okay. Bill Minor: -that I met. I'm gonna do this. This is a small

01:06:15.360 - 01:06:29.880

ego trip, it'll introduce the next next phase I want to bring in. I met a man in London named Leo Feigin, who turned out to be extremely interesting and extremely helpful. And I was skeptical about meeting him at first. He had done a book called

01:06:29.910 - 01:06:43.590

Russian [inaudible] New Identity, "Russian Jazz: New Identity" and was very opinion- opinionated in a way. And I had written an article on Sergey Kuryokhin after I saw him here in Santa Cruz at the Kuumbwa jazz club and it was published

01:06:43.590 - 01:06:57.330

in Coda magazine. And when I arrived, I wanted to interview Leo. Leo's produced about 30 records of Soviet jazz and did Vapirov and Kuryokhin in their earliest productions that were introduced in the United States. But I was somewhat fearful of

01:06:57.330 - 01:07:07.350

meeting him because of his opinions. I wasn't quite sure what he thought about my article. And I met him at the BBC office, and he came roaring down the stairs. He's this giant man, who looks like one of the Volga boatman, he's got

01:07:07.350 - 01:07:21.210

shoulders like that and bald head and little white beard. And he [inaudible] and walked over and slapped a pass on my shoulder and my sport coat to get us by the guards and off we went into his office. And on the way up, he said, I want you said

01:07:21.240 - 01:07:29.250

something about your tape. And I didn't know what he was talking about. I said, What tape and he said, I have translated your article including [unidentified], he says, I think it's one of the finest things that's ever been written about

01:07:29.520 - 01:07:45.180

jazz in the Soviet Union. So what- then what happened was that it was broadcast for three nights into the Soviet Union, into the USSR. So when I got off the plane in Moscow at the Jazz Festival [inaudible] stroke of luck. I-So I'm gonna play just a

01:07:45.180 - 01:07:57.960

little bit of this in Russian and then I'll tell you what he's saying just briefly. And then I want to introduce you to some- a couple of wonderful people. I met a singer and her husband who- different side of things [inaudible] .

01:07:58.020 - 01:08:05.520

This is what jazz sounds like, the impact of jazz broadcasting to the Soviet Union. Morton Marcus: Okay, here we go. And this is Leo- what's his name?

01:08:05.550 - 01:09:46.450

Bill Minor: This is an announcer for this program a man named Alexi, I'm forgetting his name, you know, he gives you his name. Morton Marcus: Okay, gotcha. There we go. Unknown: [Recording in Russian]

01:09:52.600 - 01:10:05.320

Morton Marcus: Well, I understood every word of it! Bill Minor: Actually, I was thrilled. He did- he said that he thought there was a critic who really could place the music in the context of Russian cultural history, not only

01:10:05.770 - 01:10:16.720

contemporary Soviet Russian cultural history but- but in the past also. And that's something that I have been missing in the response of a lot of American critics to, to Soviet jazz. So many of them will say, well, so-and-so sounds just like Bill

01:10:16.720 - 01:10:27.670

Evans, or so-and-so sounds just like Oscar Peterson. I heard people saying that about Vagif Mustafa Zadeh. I said, wait a minute, I can hear a lot of that in here, but there's so much more going on. You know, and that's what got me interested in

01:10:27.670 - 01:10:39.770

the first place, is try to find out what that something more- something more was. Morton Marcus: That broadcast, for people who just tuned in, we're talking with Bill Minor, that was a BBC broadcast into

01:10:39.840 - 01:10:56.010

the Soviet Union. I guess you could call it Radio Free Jazz. Right. And that was announcing Bill Minors article on Kuryokhin, I guess. Yes. Yeah. And that's, that's what it would sound like. That's that's a classic little clip.

01:10:56.750 - 01:11:07.280

Bill Minor: It's certainly helped meeting people. Two of the people I met who are extremely interesting, who are not directly connected to the jazz world, but I do have an interest in poetry and especially the Russian poet,

01:11:07.280 - 01:11:20.570

Osip Mandelstam, who I've loved for years. And when I told the lady who was working with me at the Moscow jazz festival about that she said, You must read Irina Vorontsova and Igor Egikov. He is a Armenian composer, they live in Moscow,

01:11:20.900 - 01:11:41.150

and he has set Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam to provide a musical settings for the poems and then she sings the poems. And I'll play one example of that. Matter of fact it might help I read a translation. The poem [in Russian] "Where they

01:11:41.150 - 01:11:52.430

are taking me," and I think it's important to know that Mandelstam died in the camps in 1938, and he was a victim of the Purges. Horses stepping slow through this dark candled night, these

01:11:52.430 - 01:12:06.530

strange ones surely know where they are taking me. Confident they're concerned at the end, I'm thrown suddenly towards starlight. My feverish head sways, in the strange hands coolness is tender. The dark Luma fur trees is not yet

01:12:06.530 - 01:14:23.640

cleared. And this is Irina Vorontsova singing Igor's song, his setting Unknown: [Music] Bill Minor: Wonderful voice.

01:14:23.640 - 01:14:32.580

Morton Marcus: Beautiful voices. Bill Minor: Yeah. Morton Marcus: This is very much- the two female singers we've heard much like the first night I hear- I heard Maria

01:14:32.580 - 01:14:44.630

Farantouri sing in Greece. Blew my mind. Bill Minor: We spent an afternoon with them. They they spoke no English whatsoever and we went out to a monastery which is not even on the map- we couldn't even find on the map

01:14:44.630 - 01:14:57.740

and overlooking the Moscow river, 11th century grey stone church. And they went out and sat on the car and drank Georgian wine, stole a glass from one of those god-awful mineral water machines that everybody uses with [inaudible]

01:14:59.240 - 01:15:11.420

but that- They're, they're fine people. They gave me two albums. And he set a number a large number of fine Russian poets to music. Yeah. Morton Marcus: Doing the same service, the theater [inaudible]

01:15:11.420 - 01:15:20.090

in Greece. Bill Minor: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's not a discrepancy I did- the poetry is very important to them. And it fits nicely together. I like that element and a lot of the Soviet

01:15:20.140 - 01:15:32.780

jazz, I remember that. The next example is a representation of that too, an extra musical or story element, which a lot of American musicians I think shy away from saying, you know, that's not pure music or that's not pure, but I, I don't find

01:15:32.830 - 01:15:45.050

anything sacrificed by way of the music. It's your pleasure that- and then there's this added ingredient in terms of, you know, the Mandelstam poem, and it's a lovely poem. Of course, she's singing there. This is a man, interesting man

01:15:45.100 - 01:15:57.480

and get German Lukyanov, who has a group called Kadans, which is the Moscow Chambers Jazz Ensemble. And this is a piece called "Ivanushka the Fool" and I've looked at the fairy tale and I- I had debates with people. I talked to one critic

01:15:57.530 - 01:16:09.600

who said, you know, there's no extra musical element. And that's not even important. You know, the drama is just extraneous. And if you hear it, fine, and you're a critic, you can pull it on with it. If you know these these literary

01:16:09.650 - 01:16:22.130

matters, he said, but that's not what's important in the music. And I asked him about this specific tune because it does tell such a story. And he said, No, no, it's just C major. That's all. There's nothing there. However, if you listen at

01:16:22.190 - 01:16:34.770

the beginning, there's a kind of packing sound and clacking song and they start- the Russian folktale begins with Ivanushka, who is one of three brothers and the other two are extremely clever and he's the fool and he always comes out on top.

01:16:34.820 - 01:16:47.100

[Inaudible] But he walks down, he feeds dumplings to his own shadow and does things like that. At the beginning of the story, he's walking down a road and he has a sack full of spoons and you never find out the significance of this, but

01:16:47.150 - 01:16:59.840

they're clacking together. But I think that we're looking at- I must have had this story very definitely in mind, even right down to the mischievious drumming later on and the kind of search and tumble polyphony that comes out in the piece. You

01:16:59.890 - 01:24:12.860

know. But it's fun. This is "Ivanushka the Fool" Morton Marcus: We are going to get back now to this wonderful program that is being brought to you mostly organized mostly by Bill Minor, who again, was in the Soviet Union this past

01:24:12.860 - 01:24:30.350

summer, guests of the Composer's Union and traveled to Leningrad, Odessa, Tallinn, Riga, Kiev, Tbilisi, and Petrozavodsk. And Bill, where are we now? Bill Minor: We're back in London- or in Leningrad again.

01:24:30.470 - 01:24:44.630

Well, actually Volgograd. To add on something, German Lukyanov, we did "Ivanushka the Fool". We spent an afternoon there at his house in Moscow and he turned out to be a poet, and a very good poet who was in several anthologies, one of which he

01:24:44.630 - 01:24:57.200

gave me and I did find that connection between literature and and the music, even if in a way if people denied it. One of the most interesting people I met was a man named Sergey Kusayev, who is a poet and a member of a group called

01:24:57.230 - 01:25:11.800

Arkestrian(?) and I believe that their picture is in the KUSP bulletin that came out with a picture of Sergei with a bullhorn. And they do performance. Try the recording. We've got the right- Yeah, we got it.

01:25:11.860 - 01:25:19.750

Morton Marcus: This is a continuation of the last one? Bill Minor: Not Kadans. I'm sorry. Maybe we should arrange that. That's right. Morton Marcus: So we're on the Dearly Departed, KDX.

01:25:19.750 - 01:25:31.730

Bill Minor: Yeah. It's probably the most avant garde group that I met. And I was very much interested in them because I am very fond of what happened musically, and in theater, and in literature

01:25:31.760 - 01:25:42.260

during the 1920s when there was a exceptional period of avant-garde in the Soviet Union, people like Eriomin and Kandinsky giving us absolute painting. The Russians were very much in the vanguard and way ahead of a lot of other people

01:25:42.260 - 01:25:53.540

at that time. And I was interested to find out if there was a connection between that period and what was happening now because there are many, many similarities, whether it was an acknowledged connection or whether they, the people in the

01:25:53.540 - 01:26:04.970

Soviet even knew about those groups up to a certain period of time. And I had a great talk with Kusayev, who said that he did not. There was a long period of time in which that era was just not accessible to him whatsoever. And he feels that

01:26:04.970 - 01:26:16.880

they simply did what they had to do at the time in the 80s, a group like Orchestrion(?) and then he began to learn and discover about people like Daniil Kharms, who, oddly enough, Lukyanov, who's a much more mainstream player, also was

01:26:16.880 - 01:26:29.570

very fond of and was one of the first writers of the absurd in the Soviet Union during the 20s, and even into the 30s. Morton Marcus: A great prose poet, one of the great prose poets of the 20th century who died virtually unknown in the

01:26:29.570 - 01:26:41.200

West and well- as well as Russia. Right, right. Bill Minor: Right. And then, of course, he's a hero. Absolutely. It was interesting because Kusayev is totally avant-garde and German is very much more formal and on the other side of

01:26:41.200 - 01:26:53.290

things, and yet they both love this man Kharms and, and German asked me, "So do you have his Collected Works," means all of his works, because they're not yet fully available to them. Orchestrion(?) uses anything they can get their hands on to

01:26:53.290 - 01:27:03.880

make music, sauce pans, machine parts, wood, glass, metal bucket, [unidentified] water, something called Dragon's voice, children's toys, and it's an anything goes situation. One of the statements he made for me was there's absolutely no

01:27:03.880 - 01:27:19.030

cultural life at all in Volgograd, and they juxtapose startling elements of the very mundane with the very sublime and the very earnest. This is a poem of Sergey's who was a writer also. And I'll just pull some lines out, I went through

01:27:19.030 - 01:27:30.640

the whole thing, but they're very surreal lines like "speaking on equal terms with the prodigal foliage. We are blind arrows headed toward transparent targets. We are capable of stretching out in any direction; we continually

01:27:30.640 - 01:27:44.080

imagine the pastor, a companion, a friend," and it's all pieced together. And then there's a lady an actress named Milena Tchaschina(?), who's up in a cage, very stunning blonde. And while Sergey is delivering this philosophical, tortured poem,

01:27:44.080 - 01:28:17.470

she is simply laughing and this is good experience, it last for about 10 minutes but I think we'll take a listen to Orchestrion. Okay, that's not right, let's-

01:28:18.310 - 01:28:27.870

That's my fault, let's give these guys a listen. They're wonderful. Morton Marcus: Okay. Let me just say this. Um, we are doing a great technical job here. We're going from tape to tape, and we

01:28:27.870 - 01:28:38.540

got wigwag signals and [inaudible] signals and everything else. So shall we continue? Who is this one? Bill Minor: Yeah, let me tell you this is my Mikhail Alperin from Moldavia, and Arkady Shilkloper on French horn. It's

01:28:38.540 - 01:28:44.900

another one of those duos, marvelous duos doing "Short Story" and then we'll go right into Orchestrion and maybe cut that a little short. Morton Marcus: Okay,

01:38:06.320 - 01:38:16.840

Bill Minor: on for a while until you really get the feeling of Volgograd, Stalingrad. Morton Marcus: Does he play an instrument actually? Bill Minor: He's playing the ones I mentioned, are listed in

01:38:16.840 - 01:38:25.210

the credits, medical- see metal bucket with water, dragons voice, wet glass? Morton Marcus: Pardon me for being stuffy? Does he play?

01:38:28.120 - 01:38:39.040

Bill Minor: We watched one group called Archangels(?) which does play instruments but they didn't play them the night we saw them the Moscow Jazz Festival. My wife remembers them as the group that- that never picked up their instrument. Somebody in this

01:38:39.040 - 01:38:55.230

group is playing an instrument. Morton Marcus: They wouldn't be Milli Vanilli, would they? If you want to see what this gentleman looks like Sergey Kasareyev(?) of Orchestrion, look in the current KUSP Review,

01:38:55.440 - 01:39:09.540

the man with the megaphone, wearing Oshkosh- What do you call those things? That farmers wear? Bill Minor: Oh just jeans, I guess. Right. Morton Marcus: Right. See, the things that come up on

01:39:11.250 - 01:39:19.530

[inaudible]. See, were so deep in Russia, we can't even think of these common American terms. Anyway, shall we go, shall I let this fade behind us?

01:39:19.650 - 01:39:26.480

Bill Minor: Let's let's get- Let's, let's take a look. We'll have to do a little hopping around geographically. How's that? Morton Marcus: Okay, sure.

01:39:26.960 - 01:39:44.510

Bill Minor: Let's go to Alma Ata. And we'll need to change the tape. And this is a group which played at the festival called Boomerang, and a very fine trumpeter name Yuri Porvinov(?) and two brothers, the brothers Ibraminov(?)

01:39:45.200 - 01:39:59.450

[inidentified], one plays trap set and the other plays bass guitar and tabla and any percussion instrument you can name and they get some really Central Asian rhythms going here with the- with American stuff happening also. This is a piece

01:39:59.450 - 01:46:29.430

called [inidentified] Morton Marcus: "We never made it to [inidentified] where that last group Boomerang is from, but we'll close out with the group called [inidentified] playing now. This is Yuri

01:46:29.430 - 01:46:43.560

Yukovitch(?) on piano and Vladimir [inidentified] on reeds, another one of those extraordinary duos. And this is a piece about my favorite city, St. Petersburg. And I'll read a little bit of whatever I wrote about St. Petersburg, and stop

01:46:43.560 - 01:46:57.570

with that. And it's a statement by Alex Kahn, interesting critic at the [inidentified] Andrej [unidentified] in his novel [inidentified] said the streets of St. Petersburg possess one individual quality. They transform the figures of passers

01:46:57.570 - 01:47:12.180

by into shadows. To myself the ambience is such that people, real people don't seem that way converted to shades by the extraordinary flat spaciousness, no building taller by decree than the spire of Peter and Paul and buildings so intricately

01:47:12.180 - 01:47:26.130

artistic, even in their decay so as to supersede people. I thought of the paintings of de Chirico, those stony plazas inhabited by mannequins, brightly colored cubes and windblown curtains. The tip of a ship sail on the horizon, plazas

01:47:26.130 - 01:47:38.460

in which the laws of perspective don't apply. And statues peer around corners where a young girl shadow rolls a hoop down the street, and doors [unidentified] stand open with eternal patience, all things exuding mystery and melancholy.

01:47:39.300 - 01:47:51.750

And Leningrad color is not provided by people who dress pretty much the way city people do throughout the so called civilized world, but by the buildings which are painted lime green, rust, ochre, chalk, brown, salmon red, carrot,

01:47:51.750 - 01:48:06.420

crimson, cabbage, white sand, mauve, smokey sapphire, tawny red, anything to forestall the psychological effects of an inordinately long drab winter, I was told later. And once I, aside from color, was drawn to architectural details, intricate

01:48:06.420 - 01:48:20.370

latticework ornate balustrades, colonnades cuticles, semicircular triads windows topped with dancing arabesques, caryatids, enigmatic stone faces, urns on roofs, [unidentified] as busy as the music of Vivaldi or Bach. You

01:48:20.370 - 01:48:46.790

could wander Leningrad lost in some sort of architectural daze forever, I think, and we were just getting started." Bill Minor: This is later after I met Alex. I wrote, "as we sit on the terrace of the Leningrad Hotel sipping a second draft

01:48:46.790 - 01:49:00.440

Carlsberg now Pushkin, the Hermitage, the Winter Palace, Browns horsemen, even the aurora forever in view seem artifacts from some distant past, true shadows. Khan is talking about days, not all that long ago, when he first became exposed to

01:49:00.440 - 01:49:14.780

jazz, days in which members of 'the whole art underground scene' face the economy- common enemy, the system we lived in. Days when anything we did was a statement, a very serious political statement, such as in his case, bringing the American

01:49:14.780 - 01:49:27.860

Rova Saxophone Quartet to Leningrad in 1983. An act for which officials told members of the group Khan and his friends would be sent to jail. 'All these obstacles, we had to overcome, all these difficulties. I mean, this was

01:49:27.860 - 01:49:40.790

about nothing. A band of Americans had come here to play music. So what the fuck? Why make all this noise you know, it was funny, but the system of values we lived in at the time was not.' Khan spoke of being initiated through jazz into a

01:49:40.790 - 01:49:53.210

totally different world, into a bigger world, freer world, and a world where everything is possible. And this by way of the time, some mediocre Dixieland band of the 50s playing in a dance hall. It didn't really matter whether we were created,

01:49:53.210 - 01:50:05.930

they were creative or non creative, original or invented. It was a revelation. They were bringing the new life, he said. That new life, or at least a new reality has arrived now in Leningrad, but not a stitch of it so far seems reflected in the

01:50:05.930 - 01:50:17.810

architecture. That new life has been celebrated, questioned, denied in the Western press through simple words turned slogans, 'glasnost,' and 'perestroika;' none of which Alex and I employ. Although he does once mention the word

01:50:17.900 - 01:50:30.740

'Gorby mania.' The Neva rolls by; the spires of Peter and Paul, beneath which everyone from Pestel to Gorky has been incarcerated for their views stands tall. One might expect that Alex Kahn, knowing full well the consequences of the

01:50:30.740 - 01:50:44.480

statements he once made will welcome to change with open arms, but a thoughtful man, he is cautious, even skeptical. 'All this is in a way very painful to realize, to accept. This brings us to a completely new system of values, which most

01:50:44.480 - 01:50:58.050

of us are not ready to adopt, or at least do not have time to adapt to. This country has never been a democracy." And then one last word, wait- Okay, sorry.