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Soviet Jazz Funk from the Seventies
10.31.2010
12:34 pm
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An old pal, the writer Tommy Udo, alerted me to 1970’s Soviet Jazz Funk, which led me to check up on how Jazz developed in the USSR from the 1920s-70s.

Since its beginning in the 1920s, Russian Jazz has been in constant flux between prohibition, censorship and state sponsorship - dependent on who was leader and their domestic, foreign, economic and political policies. Jazz came to Russia via Valentin Parnakh, a musician who caught the jazz bug when he saw the Louis Mitchel Jazz Kings, while in exile in Paris in 1921.

On 1st October, Parnakh returned to Moscow and performed his own October Revolution with his newly formed jazz band, Pervyj v RSFSR Kscentričeskij Orkestr džaz-band Valentina Parnakha. Their first gig was slated, but that didn’t count for much as Parnakh had imported Jazz into Russia at just the right time, as the State’s New Economic Policy (NEP) encouraged “private initiatives into Soviet economic policies,” which meant a sharing of both cultural ideas and finance. This openess led to a Russian Jazz boom through the 1920s, which the government attempted to regulate and “professionalize,” even sending a cultural delegation to America.

This incredibly fluid cultural exchange ceased when Stalin (prior to his radical Five Year Plan) enforced a Proletarian view of the Arts and Culture, that was “anti-modern, anti-Western, anti-jazz and often also anti-classical.” Stalin feared outside influence, in particular music, which he believed could undermine the revolution. For a time, Jazz was tolerated, and became a focus for heated debate; but when Maxim Gorky returned from Fascist Italy, at Stalin’s invitation, the writer penned a controversial essay that “equated jazz with homosexuality, drugs and eroticism,” and the music was slowly forced underground.

Jazz and other forms of popular music became the signature tune for the dissident and liberal intelligentsia.  By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Jazz was making its reappearance, with recordings made in secret, usually at night amongst like-minded musicians, keen to adopt and experiment with other musical forms and influences, especially Funk and Soul from America. Few of these Soviet Jazz-Funk recordings remain from the vast number of recorded, but a selection of great tracks can be found here.
 

 
With thanks to Tommy Udo
 
Bonus clips of Soviet Jazz Funk after the leap…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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10.31.2010
12:34 pm
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