Rabble Without A Cause
Wednesday October 17th, 2012 with Bernard Stepien
Russian avant-garde: Alexey Kruglov and Vladimir Tarasov

Avant-garde Jazz in Russia has gone through a parallel process to the political and economic changes that led to the collapse of the former Soviet Union. Before, Free-Jazz was a way to shock the musical establishment that was mainly centered on either official classical music or folk music, the music of the people after all. Back then, musicians like the late Sergey Kuryokhin went to great length to shock the public using for instance a band composed of real pigs or entitling his projects like “Lenin Was A Mushroom”. Today and over the last decade, Russian avant-garde nicely melted with its counterpart in the rest of the world with considerably more tamed projects very comparable to what you can hear even here in Ottawa at the remarkable IMOO series but also conceptually somewhat going back to the roots of Russian avant-garde as far back as the music of great Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. Some critics even talk about very concrete and well thought constructions mixing all the characteristics of avant-garde improvised music like irony, meditative, aggressive, explosive, drawing from the sounds of nature and as many theatrical sounds you can imagine. More important is the fact that Russian avant-garde musicians are not isolated. They perform frequently with their western counterparts. Drummer Tarasov performs frequently with Andrew Cyrille, Joelle Leandre, Anthony Braxton and many others. Also, they now face exactly the same consumerism hurdles as their western counterparts. Tonight, we will sample their Dialogos CD on the Solyd records label, a very Russian impressionistic recording where the duo draws as many sounds as possible from a vast collection of reed and percussion instruments. More on: http://homini-lupus.livejournal.com/168216.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3lKOkZMpUY