Jazz comes to life in Russia

Press, 8 February 1985, Page 23

Jazz comes to life in Russia

NZPA-Reuter Moscow “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy ...” George Gershwin’s soulful blues classic from "Porgy and Bess” sounds bizarre in Moscow with thick snow outside and a temperature of minus 24deg. In the Artists’ Club on Kuznetsky Bridge Street, almost halfway between the Kremlin and the headquarters of the K.G.B. security police, a group of young Soviet musicians is playing

Dixieland, Cole Porter and Gershwin to a select audience.

Seryozha Dreznin, aged 29, tousle-haired and moustachioed with sparkling eyes, throws his jacket over the back of his chair and plays, his fingers dancing over the keyboard of a baby grand. Centre-stage with long dark hair tied back in a pony-tail, Lena Karetnikova closes her eyes for the high notes and breaks into skat,

sliding up and down the octaves with agility. Only a block away, red stars atop the Kremlin towers shine down on the capital of communism as Lena sings words written half a world away: “Your daddy’s rich and your mama’s good-looking, so hush little baby, don’t you cry.”

The audience loves it, clapping along in a fashion rarely seen among sedate Soviet concert-goers above the age of 17.

Like most aspects of Western culture, jazz was taboo in the Soviet Union in the 19305, but during the detente of the war years it acquired a certain respectability. A popular film last year recalled the "Sovietsky Dzhaz” of those early years.

Moscow Radio broadcasts a weekly jazz-blues programme which gives the impression that the city is a hive of cellar clubs throbbing with hot sounds. The “Palaces of Culture” recreation centres where Soviet jazz is mostly played are not quite that. Concerts in the Soviet

Union of anything other than strictly conventional classical music are usually preceded by an introductory chat on the genre’s history and moral attributes. Jazz and blues are praised as a product of oppressed black culture in the United States. This makes them politically acceptable and explains away the singing in English. In New York, Chicago, London or Hamburg, Seryozha and his friends could be earning large sums entertaining jazz fans in smoky, crowded bars with waitresses pushing between tables. -

In Moscow, the fans sit in a brightly lit bare room and no alcoholic drinks are available.

No-one playing at the Artists’ Club on this particular night is a jazz professional. There is no entrance fee and the audience consists solely of club members and their guests. Seryozha is a classical pianist and student of composition at the Moscow Conservatory. Lena is a : piano accompanist at a cultural

institute. Her skat singing is just for fun. In the middle of the set, the ensemble displays the variety of its talents with two numbers from "Ophelia,” words by William Shakespeare from “Hamlet” and music by Seryozha Dreznin, who describes it as “an opera in jazz-rock style.”

Seryozha hopes his composition will get a wider airing during next summer’s Moscow Youth Festival. He has little interest in financial gain. That is only for members of the Union of Composers and first there are examinations to pass. He is writing a new jazz opera in Russian, based on a play by the nineteenth-cen-tury poet, Alexander Pushkin.

Back on stage, Arkady Kirichenko, Polonius in “Ophelia,” screws up his eyes and grabs the microphone to produce a Louis Armstrong voice, uncanny from a short, bearded Russian:

“Way down upon the Swanee River, far, farjaway