JAZZ

Hot tickets in Moscow are to the Blue Bird, the capital’s first jazz club. The Soviet news agency Tass reported Friday that one night last week some jazz enthusiasts paid three to four times the normal ticket price to hear musician Igor Butman’s popular quartet playing the club. Jazz was banned in the Soviet Union during the 1930s as decadent and often was not written about openly, even after Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s death in 1953. But under the glasnost, or openness, policy of current Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, jazz has re-emerged as a popular art. Articles have even appeared in the press evaluating performers. Tass called Butman, 25, “the best tenor saxophonist in the Soviet Union.”