WAVE OF FUTURE--COLOR IT RUSSIAN RED?

The jazz temperature is beginning to heat up in the usually chilly cultural climate of the Soviet Union.

A new generation of Russian musicians, playing a strikingly original brand of contemporary jazz, has arrived in the 1980s. The music of these players--most of whom are relatively unknown outside the Soviet Union--represents the most fascinating non-American development in the art since the Brazilian bossa nova wave of the mid-’60s.

What makes this new Russian jazz so special is its very high level of originality. Jazz has had a long and checkered history in the Soviet Union, dating back to the ‘20s, but almost all of it has been dominated by the influence of American jazz musicians.

Sidney Bechet passed through the Soviet Union in the ‘20s, and his gelatinous vibrato was every Russian soprano saxophonist’s sound of choice well into the ‘50s. Benny Goodman’s big-band tour in the early ‘60s and a more recent visit by Chick Corea were, in their own ways, equally influential.

But few--if any--Soviet jazz musicians have come to the attention of the broad American audience. A band led by Joseph Vinestain was heard on an album titled “American Jazz” in the early ‘60s, playing arrangements of pieces by Horace Silver, Cannonball Adderley and John Lewis. And a quintet led by saxophonist Gennady Golstein and trumpeter Constantin Nosov was featured on a Leningrad Jazz Festival recording from the same period.

In 1964, two Soviet jazz players, bassist Igor Berukshtis and saxophonist Boris Midney, defected to the United States and were heard briefly, if inconclusively, in a group called the Russian Jazz Quartet.

Midney and Berukshtis had listened closely to musicians like Ornette Coleman and Gary Peacock, but their music was in no way competitive with the American originals. Like other international jazz players, the Russian expatriates were imitating rather than experiencing, a cultural methodology that they understood only in technical terms.

The situation began to change dramatically in the last decade, when the Pandora’s box of new ideas opened up by the avant-garde jazz of the ‘60s began to have its full international impact. No longer was jazz limited to traditional harmonies, blues phrasing and cyclical improvisations.

The result was a wave of nationalistic variations and influences--Brazilian sambas, Cuban salsa, African high life, Swedish folk songs, Indian ragas, action music and visual theater--stretching and pulling jazz into the true world music that it has always claimed to be.

This liberalizing of jazz definitions has made it possible for improvisers around the world to build personal styles which are not necessarily based on traditional American models.

The effect on Soviet jazz has been especially startling, with the emergence of a generation of performers playing a kind of heterogeneous music that is, ironically (and perhaps appropriately), both collective and free. The music they play is challengingly original--filled with the rhythms and energies of improvisation, yet unrestricted by any of the traditional jazz definitions.

Until recently, recordings of Soviet jazz have rarely been available in the United States. The Hungarian company Supraphon released a few recordings in the late ‘60s, and an odd item or two occasionally has appeared on other labels. Fortunately, most of the new wave of contemporary Soviet jazz performers are on full display as part of a major program of releases by Leo Records, a small English company named after its founder, Russian expatriate and jazz fan Leo Feigen.

Working with tapes of concerts in Moscow, Leningrad, Berlin, etc., Leo Records has begun to give names, faces and sounds to this significant cultural development in Soviet music. (Curiously, it is a development that, despite the new, liberalized Gorbachev regime, seems to have gone largely unchronicled on official Soviet recordings.)

The best-known, most frequently recorded performers are the Ganelin Trio, named after keyboardist Vacheslav Ganelin, with Vladimir Chekasin on saxophones and various woodwinds and Vladimir Tarasov on drums and percussion. Given the unrelentingly avant-garde nature of their playing, it’s astonishing that the trio (based in Vilnius, the capital of the Lithuanian Republic) has been permitted to perform extensively outside the Eastern bloc--in Italy, Great Britain, Austria and Canada.

Ganelin plays like a strange cross between Cecil Taylor and Lennie Tristano. Saxophonist Chekasin similarly mixes the “out” of Ornette Coleman with the controlled passion of Lee Konitz. Every now and then, he surprises the ear with a Roland Kirk-esque instrument called the double alto sax (two horn barrels with one mouthpiece). Drummer Tarasov, a controlled and precise player, moves easily between sound textures and percussive rhythms, managing to impart a strong sense of swing without ever once hitting a high hat cymbal upbeat.

More accessible than, say, Cecil Taylor, as carefully structured as Stockhausen, yet as energetic as a bunch of musicians at a Saturday-night jam session, the Ganelin Trio just may have found a way to bring an audience into the experience of abstract contemporary music.

Among their best performances are the recordings of “Ancora Da Capo,” Leo LR 109, and “Non Troppo,” Hat Hut Records ART 2027.

On the recording “Baltic Triangle,” Leo LR 125, the Ganelin group brings an unusual perspective to “Summertime” and “Mack the Knife.” By the time they’re finished, these well-examined standards seem new again, perceived from utterly different points of view.

In his new book, “Russian Jazz--New Identity” (Quartet, London), Feigen identifies more than 40 other Soviet jazz musicians working in the free jazz idiom, located all over the Soviet Union, from Novosibirsk, Siberia, to Leningrad.

Among those who appear on Leo Records are tenor saxophonist Keshavan Maslak, who has recorded with Western musicians; pianist Sergei Kuryokhin (whose album is titled “The Ways of Freedom”); scat/avant-garde singer Valentina Ponomareva and alto saxophonist Vladimir Rezitski.

The music played by these gifted young Russians is fascinating, vital and original--the best evidence one could ask for to confirm jazz’s great capacity for evolution and growth. It is music that should be heard by anyone seriously interested in the future course of America’s most important cultural export.