On 17 June, the book “Jazz 100: one hundred years of the Russian jazz scene 1922–2022” was presented in the bookshop “Amital on Pushkinskaya” as part of the project “A Large University for a Large City”. The book was written by a music journalist and jazz historian Kirill Moshkov.
And the next day, on 18 June, a documentary of almost the same name “JAZZ 100”” was shown in the hall of the hotel complex Degas. The script for the film was also written by Kirill Moshkov. Both the presentation of the book and the screening of the film in Voronezh were supported by the Don Jazz festival and Larisa Dyakova, Associate Professor of the Faculty of Journalism of VSU and the host of the project “A Large University for a Large City”.
The book and the film were made based on the request of the Igor Butman Fund for the 100th anniversary of Russian jazz celebrated on 1 October 2022.
“The history of jazz in Russia is not simple and is full of dramatic events. Strictly speaking, there were three starting points. We count it from 1 October 1922, the date of a semi-mythical concert on the stage of the Theatre Institute in Moscow presented by the “First in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic eccentric orchestra, the jazz band of Valentin Parnakh”. There was also great popularity of “Soviet jazz” in 1930s and the hard “era of saxophone bending” of the post-war times when the development of jazz in the USSR almost stopped. And then the so-called “generation of physicists” appeared mainly from amateur university performances and created a new world-class jazz scene in the Soviet Union in 1950s–1960s.
The time for the simultaneous creation of both the film, a full-length documentary with the duration of one hour and 54 minutes, and a book of 600 pages was limited, they had to be done in just a little over a year. This is why I agreed and I dived with great interest into the topic which I have been studying for a quarter of a century. But doing it all alone would have been impossible. A great part of the basic work on the book and the film was completed by Natalia Kravchenko, a graduate of the Faculty of Journalism of VSU. She worked on the set of the film in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don, Arkhangelsk, and other cities. Natalia transcribed more than forty hours of interviews that we did for the film and used for the book, she did a lot of meticulous research in federal archives and museums, and she also proofread the book. Thanks to Natalia’s invaluable contribution, the book and the film had great information coverage which the author would not have achieved on his own.
The most important thing for me in this book was an opportunity to tell the story of Russian jazz. And I also had to bust some myths, for example, that jazz was banned in the USSR (it wasn’t!), that in the USSR people could go to jail because of jazz (actually they could, but not because of jazz), and, what’s most important, that “your jazz is not our kind of music”. But it was our jazz! The one hundred year biography of Russian jazz is our own art achieve through hardships and suffering, and it has its own face presented by a vibrant generation of modern Russian jazz players. The book has several chapters dedicated to them as today’s jazz in Russia is also an important part of its history,” said Kirill Moshkov during the meeting at “Amital”.
Photo by: Natalya Kravchenko, Andrey Parfenov
