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XI International Festival “Jazz in the Hermitage Garden”
The first metropolitan open-air jazz festivals took place in strict accordance with the three classicist unities - place, time (closer to the end of August) and mode of action. Now, when the summer season opens with a comprehensive jazz picnic “The Estate. Jazz" in Arkhangelskoe near Moscow, "Hermitage" even more deliberately emphasizes its downright academic rigor and purity of style: almost no one dances on the proscenium anymore (as sometimes happened in the recent past). The weather is favorable, and everyone, as in the neighboring New Opera, sits philharmonically in garden chairs, in open (which does not mean inexpensive) cafes overlooking the stage and listens - absolutely the same thing that they listen to during the entire concert season in jazz clubs or concert halls. Everything is subordinated to the main unity - action: two thirds of the program play hard bop, aka modern mainstream in a straight ahead spirit. In the sense: they played the theme, took turns showing what they were capable of, and returned to where they started. Basic lineup: acoustic quartet with saxophone plus trumpet player and/or vocalist.But there is one significant change: like it or not, there is a generational change. Consciously or not, this year not a single one of those “honored people” from the first and second jazz generations (not to be considered Utesov’s verses as jazz) was brought onto the stage this year, from those who illegally practiced jazz in the mid-50s and became to be legalized by the end of Khrushchev’s “thaw”. Or those who made their debut at the first Komsomol festivals of the 60s. All of them are now in their seventies (or sixties). It is noteworthy that the only exception that confirms the rule is not even a performing musician, but one of the two presenters of the festival - St. Petersburg historian Vladimir Feyertag. (The second presenter, Moscow writer Kirill Moshkov, is suitable for the ageless Feyertag, if not as a grandson, then certainly as a son.)
But generations are new, and prejudices are old!
The complexes earned by our jazz during the Soviet years are in their place. First of all, the heightened - in the hypocritically puritanical times of communal apartments - love for jazz vocalists, whose voices were attributed with almost Freudian symbolism of freedom of morals, like the half-naked “Freedom on the Barricades” from Delacroix’s painting. In the homeland of jazz, singers are called “canaries,” and (coincidence or not?) in one of the Hermitage cafes, someone put on a table a cage with a lively canary, which was clearly not disturbed even by the sounds of jazz.
Second: unlike all of Europe, our jazz is American jazz. During the “Iron Curtain” we did not take any part in European jazz life, contacts were difficult even with colleagues from the “fraternal countries of socialism”, and several generations grew up exclusively on the jazz programs of the Voice of America (in an extremely simplified, but still English). Accordingly, Eurojazz in Russia is an exception.
Therefore, our jazzmen (especially in educational institutions) willingly picked up the American fashion of the end of the last century for jazz neoconservatism, and the flourishing of the capital’s club life gave rise to the feeling among young jazzmen that there is no need to take risks, experiment, look for one’s own - since clubs pay exactly for what what everyone does. This is also supported by the American educational program “Open World”, which gives our musicians the opportunity to train in America, and young Americans to show what they are capable of here. For example, it was possible to distinguish, for example, the Russian ensemble led by teacher and saxophonist Mike Tracy from the Russian-American project “Following the Shadow” by pianist Ivan Farmakovsky only through the participation in the latter of the omnipresent Igor Butman.
We have already heard and seen almost all of the guest performers in Russia more than once. In fact, these are members of our well-known repertoire group (with two of our New Yorkers) “Mingus Dynasty”, who performed at the Hermitage with their own projects. Alas, not all orchestra members are capable of being leaders.
If keyboardist George Cooligan, not even with his permanent ensemble, but with two Moscow accompanists - Igor Zolotukhin on guitar and Evgeniy Ryaby on drums - was able to make the erotic and killer hit of the Beatles "Come Together" into a cool jazz composition, then all the originality of the performance of saxophonist Craig Handy, it seems to me, was contained not in himself, but precisely in the “Mosgortrio” of the hereditary jazz pianist Yakov Okun, which accompanied him.
Actually, at the XI festival, the majority followed the call “do as we do, do as I do,” especially since most of the groups included musicians from the post-Soviet diaspora.
For example, the ensemble of the rather famous pianist Larry Willis conquered the Hermitage not so much with the authority of the leader, but with the energy of the former Kiev resident, now Israeli, Robert Anchipolovsky. Singer Greta Matassa from Seattle (very good, but somehow nervously trying to outshout herself) was accompanied by her current neighbor Alexey Nikolaev. A true virtuoso, he was perhaps the only saxophonist who was not afraid to express his own “I” within the standard mainstream.
The program of Trialogue, a French-Russian trio from Cannes, sounded unexpectedly fresh, unlike everything else, although salon-styled. Despite the fact that “Trialogue” (formerly famous guitarist Alexei Bodnarchuk in Moscow) was reinforced by a Moscow drummer, he still could not avoid the feeling of some kind of toy.
Polish pianist Adam Makovich, whose concerts and records were known to jazz lovers by heart in Soviet times, played, it seems, almost the same program in retro style as in the Warsaw cinema in 1977 before emigrating overseas, but either he or either we ourselves, or times have changed. Or maybe everything is much more prosaic - they were afraid to sound the luxurious Bösendorfer piano in sufficient volume?
In fact, the only European jazz ensemble was the trio of Austrian saxophonist Karl Heinz Micklin with his son, Karl Heinz Jr., on drums and bassist Ewald Oberleitner. Muscovites who heard the trio last season probably shuddered - isn't it too esoteric for a Sunday evening under the still scorching sun? And those who had not heard, seeing all his saxophones, including electrified ones, and an alto flute, immediately remembered the same trio of the classic Ornette Coleman (also with his son on drums). In some ways, professor and chairman of the Society of Jazz Educational Institutions, Micklin really resembles both Coleman and another leader of Eurojazz - the famous Jan Garbarek. But he logically combines the democratic presentation of his almost avant-garde material with the professorial intellectualism of Dev Liebman. However, the public still seemed to appreciate the originality of Austrian “world jazz”.
Just as I couldn’t help but appreciate Igor Butman, who performed the role of all the national and honored people combined. Almost simultaneously left without the luxurious “Le Club” and a TV show (let me remind you, there was such a thing as “Jazophrenia”), he now concentrates his efforts on producing and acts as a “playing coach”. At the Hermitage he presented as many as three groups - all in the spirit of the mainstream, but for each variety of “modern classics” he always finds some kind of zest in his solos that “catches” the audience’s ears. If only our entire new generation could look up to Maestro Butman! And not only on his ability to show the jazz product face to face - mostly in some television role. Then our jazz as a whole would probably be bolder, more original, and festival guests wouldn’t only post what we already know well!