Bohemian utopia

IV festival "Bohemia-jazz" is nostalgia for music without electronics

Throughout the world of tour of pop musicians and jazz-festivals, they arrange mainly so that the recording companies are easier to enter the market with their products. The Russian company Bohemia, which seemed to be successfully starting as jazz in 1998, now lives only due to the fact that it gradually realizes the CDs with the archival records of the Soviet company Melody. Having released several dozens of brilliant records, mainly with the participation of our most famous Jazis, Arkady Shilkloper and Mikhail Alperin, Bohemia sharply slowed down: even directly to her IV annual festival, she could not offer anything other than the reprint of one two -year album - the Forte gypsy Valentina Ponomareva. The founder and general producer of Bohemia Andrei Feofanov is an enthusiast and romantic. He really wants his jazz to be recognized as a matter of national importance: for this, he arranges pompous discoveries with military orchestras, and lush techniques in strange Novuroussian institutions like the Bunker Stalin club in Izmailovo. In front of the television cameras, government officials and parliamentarians are on duty at the love of jazz, media recognition as an entertainer try to entertain the public with chatter, which has nothing to do with jazz. At the current festival, the recording company paradoxically invited the groups so famous and well paid that their independent “bohemias” disks are not only released, even to spread in Russia is unlikely to ever be able to ever.

The previous three festivals, although they were called Bohemia -Jazz, were actually just team concerts of all artists with whom Bohemia works - from the folk choir to classic virtuosos. However, this year, Feofanov set himself not a formulated, but a specific task: to show (or, more precisely, to prove!) That jazz lives and flourishes not only in his homeland in the United States. He managed to enlist the consent of the two groups, for a quarter of a century that determined the development of jazz on the European continent - the Vienna Art orchestra and the quartet of the Norwegian saxophonist Yana Garbark (magazine No. 19).

Bohemia-jazz this time went within five evenings, but Feofanov, in essence, was engaged only in celebrities, and gave the other concerts to the musicians themselves. Moreover, he admitted to journalists: “I trust my artists one hundred percent; What Valentina Ponomarev will do at his concert is the same secret for me as for you. ” Of course, the organizers are not to blame for the fact that due to the illness of the French trumpeter Alena Brune did not take place “Day of France” (however, Bruna had already performed last year). As a result, all evening I had to give the pianist Daniil Kramer and the whole brood of jazz class students of the 28th Children's Music School. Unfortunately, their teacher, an enthusiast of jazz education, Peter Petrukhin, except for the long -known team - pianist Evgeny Lebedev and saxophonists Konstantin Safyanov and Alexei Gordeev (already, by the way, grown out of the age of the child prodigy), - there is no one else to show more.

Daniil Kramer went on stage with the words: “If someone does not know me in the face, I am Daniil Kramer,” and generally said no less than he played. It must be admitted, however, that the public Kramer knows and loves: salonovirtoous pianism of the early twentieth century in Russia does not come out of fashion. Kramer, as always, played at maximum speed, but this time he was also unbearably voiced loudly. It is good that the other favorite of the public - Valtornist Arkady Shilkloper - enjoys the same authority among both jazz fans and among professionals. The best jazz valtor, the world, as the schillacoper of criticism is called, played for four years in the Vienna Art orchestra and was designed to “warm up” the audience at the opening. Due to various troubles, the opening of the festival was delayed, so Schilkloper had only four rooms in the program. Out of politeness, our Valtornist chose only the things of the participant in his trio of the Brazilian singerist Allegre Correa (in the orchestra he is also a drummer). And when Correa sang, the trio generally sounded like a soundtrack for some Brazilian series - only in high -quality export performance.

The Vienna Art Orchestra showed the program Art & Fun ("Art and entertainment"). The head of the International Orchestra Swiss Matias Ryugg gathered him in Austria to recall: jazz is also an “art”, art, and not necessarily based on the African American primary sources. However, for its 25th anniversary, the orchestra prepared a program of old things with flax quotes from Viennese classics to rock in the spirit of Jimi Hendrix, but in a completely different, easy and affordable form. A one and a half hour program (with an inserting blues of a wilkloper), played against the backdrop of black and white slides, liked the jazz purists. And besides, we have never heard such a sound with jazz - the volume does not suppress the audience, on the contrary, the illusion is created that you are inside the orchestra and you yourself participate in execution.

The quartet of Yana Garbark has a great show - a voluminous sound, color backlight on three screens in the shape of a sail. The quartet played a kind of “symphony” not so much even European as in the spirit of new world folk music, imaginary folklore of the utopian global village. The saxophonist himself even made it on the Bulgarian flute - Caval - and in the fashionable Balkan style. As expected, the “symphony” consisted of four blocks. Along with the new things, the hits from the last jazz album of the Garbark Rite (“Rites”), including “Pan” (according to the novel of Knut Gamsun) and “where there are rivers are found”, also included in each of them. The compositional center of the Symphony Garbark, in my opinion, is an unsolved simple play that imitates an ordinary accordion on the synthesizer and composed in the 70s not even by the saxophonist himself, but the brilliant creator of the “global folklore” by the African American Don Cherry.

At the press conference, Garbarek asked the question: that, in his opinion, the music has recently lost, and what she acquired. Garbarek answered almost aphorism: “I acquired music those opportunities that electronics provide, but lost ... the ability to do without this electronics.”

Actually, two concerts of the Hedliners of the IV festival "Bohemia -jazz" are nostalgia for music without electronics. According to the street brass marches of the early jazz banks and the circus polking of Johann Strauss, which the Vienna art orchestra hinted all the time. And on the African American blues, without which jazz may well do. What he cannot do without, Garbarek also hinted without utopia. All his late things are simple hymns like Lennonovsky Imagine: “Imagine that the world is one.”