A film about Russian jazz was shown at the Moscow International Film Festival: the era of saxophone extension

2023-04-29 09:00:32

One of the highlights of the Moscow Film Festival that has just ended was the documentary Jazz 100 presented by Igor Butman. The two-hour tape is more like a movie encyclopedia, detailed, accurate, but not dry, but with lively energy, emotionally colored, according to which you can now safely study the century-old history of Russian jazz, which has gone through its complex, dramatic, and sometimes tragic path.

This is a big movie about our jazz. It was filmed in 48 filming shifts, has 71 hours of footage, 65 characters and unique fragments of newsreel, which was considered lost for a long time. Presenting the picture to the audience, screenwriter Kirill Moshkov admitted that he thought – he wrote the script for a year and a half, but it turned out to be 25 years. That is how much he has been studying the history of jazz, becoming the largest jazz theorist in the country. And director Alexander Bryntsev, paraphrasing the words of Walter Pater, the main ideologist of aestheticism, that “any art strives to become music”, clarified that it strives to become jazz. And he never faltered.

And now the starting point of Russian jazz is on the screen – Moscow, GITIS, October 1, 1922. Yes, yes, at the theater institute, in the current 27th auditorium, the first concert of the Jazz Band of Valentin Parnakh took place. It was this slender-looking and plastic man who brought the American musical curiosity to the USSR. He wrote poetry and practiced eccentric dance, which still surprises today with strange, anti-classical and daring movements. But the jazz band of an enthusiast of a new kind of dance and music liked Meyerhold, who invited the musicians to participate in his play “The Magnanimous Cuckold” at GosTeam (the State Theater named after himself). But it seems that the acquaintance of the theatrical innovator with the brainchild of Parnakh took place earlier.

The film “Jazz 100” is divided into six chapters that record the various stages of its formation and development: the era of pioneers, the time of the so-called extension of saxophones and the Thaw, as well as the axial time of Soviet jazz, the time from stagnation to Perestroika, the change of jazz eras, and, of course, jazz of recent history. A harmonious system – no one is forgotten, not a single fact is missed. Igor Butman, Kirill Moshkov act as guides on a journey through jazz history and commentators in the film, and, importantly for such a film, famous actors – Viktor Sukhorukov, Evgeny Mironov, Alexei Guskov, Viktor Dobronravov and Anya Chipovskaya. By the way, for her participation in the film is also personal – she is the daughter of the famous jazzman Boris Frumkin.

From the screen, we learn about the first steps of black music on Russian soil, that the first pop artist awarded the title of Honored Artist of the Republic of Belarus in the USSR in 1943 was jazz instrumentalist trumpeter Eddie Rosner, which, however, did not prevent the authorities from sending three years later him to the Khabarovsk Territory in the camps. Thank you for not cutting down the forest there, but for directing the orchestra he assembled from the imprisoned musicians. And the first People’s Artist among pop artists in 1965 was the singer, musician, actor Leonid Utyosov, who was not at all alien to jazz. In the State Archive of Film and Photo Documents in Krasnogorsk, the first sound footage of his Tea Jazz (Theatrical Jazz), captured by a cameraman in 1932, was found. And in the same place – the only surviving copy of the film “Happy New Year” (1935), where the orchestra of the young and talented Alexander Tsfasman was filmed, as well as the film “Concert Waltz”. It was believed that these rare shots were irretrievably lost.

From the archive of Kirill Moshkov.

It was Utyosov who coined the expression by which he dubbed the saddest period in the life of our jazz – “the era of unbending saxophones”. These are the years (1946-1954) when jazz, as an art from America, was administratively placed in unbearable conditions and actually went underground. Interestingly, there was no complete ban on jazz, contrary to popular myth. There is not a single document that would prohibit it. And as soon as the Thaw began, jazz revived, quickly caught up with the world stage in terms of development, and in the 60-80s of the last century even enjoyed fairly broad state support.

On the screen in 1957 – the Festival of Youth and Students: someone in a red jacket sings on a street stage and in a free manner to hold on to the microphone, it is clear from the expression on his face that this is not our man. Cafe “Molodyozhnoye” on Tverskaya is the first jazz club, among the jazz lovers at the table there is a very young Andrey Tarkovsky. And then – a gallery of portraits of young Soviet jazzmen – Kozlov, Frumkin, Kondakov, Goloshchekin, Bril, Kroll, Ponomarev, and the generations following them, who seriously and for a long time picked up this jazz bacillus from them. Self-taught, mostly with an engineering education, achieved heights in a new profession for themselves. So, in the 70s, trumpeter Valery Ponomarev was already playing drummer Art Blakey in Jazz Messengers, and saxophonist Anatoly Gerasimov in Duke Ellington’s orchestra. As early as September 1974, jazz specialization will be opened in 26 Russian music schools, and in 1982 the first jazz department will start working at the university.

Valentin Parnakh, 1924, photo by Alexei Temerin. GTsTM them. Bakhrushin

In 1996, a Russian-American jazz ensemble toured Russia for the first time – the quartet of pianist Andrey Kondakov with saxophonist Igor Butman, double bassist Eddie Gomez and drummer Lenny White. And in the next frame, the already eminent Butman tells his story: how he ended up in the States, what he learned there, what luggage he returned with.

And here are the achievements of recent history: in 2019, a musician from Russia – guitarist Evgeny Pobozhiy for the first time won the most prestigious jazz competition in the world – Herbie Hancock in Washington.

After the film, I asked Kirill Moshkov – what was the main conclusion he made, having studied the fate of domestic jazz to the letter, having watched kilometers of films?

– My main conclusion about the history of Russian jazz is this: not only did it survive, it is quite alive. And now, perhaps even more alive than in past eras. There is a great story behind, but there is still a lot of interesting things ahead.