Soviet Jazz Musicians Get in Tune with <i> Glasnost</i>

Onstage at Congress Hall, where Communist officials hold major party meetings, Soviet jazzman Vladimir Chekasin simultaneously squawked on two saxophones, blew a toy whistle, shouted into a synthesizer and kicked his feet in a Russian folk jig.

The audience at Warsaw’s Jazz Jamboree, which usually is extremely tough on Soviet jazzmen, responded with enthusiastic shouts to the performance by Chekasin and his longtime partner, drummer Vladimir Tarasov, the top Soviet free jazz musicians.

“It was a great surprise to me; these Russians have great fantasy,” said Waldemar Debski, a Polish rock musician, referring to recent concerts that were billed as “Glasnost Jazz.”

“I personally couldn’t believe that the most avant-garde groups at the festival were the Soviets,” he said.

During the Solidarity labor upheaval and subsequent martial law crackdown in 1981-84, no Soviet bands were permitted to perform at the Jamboree, Eastern Europe’s oldest and biggest jazz festival.

But this year, the Soviets sent the largest group of jazz musicians, critics and promoters ever to travel abroad to any event--about 25 people--showing the growing acceptance of jazz since Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev proclaimed his glasnost (openness) policy.

At one club, Soviet musicians jammed with Poles and even a few Americans, including saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, the 21-year-old son of the late jazz legend John Coltrane.

For years, the Polish Jazz Society wanted to present the top Soviet avant-garde jazz groups at the Jamboree, but instead had to settle for humdrum bands favored by Soviet officials.

“The audience used to be very rude (to the Soviets),” said Tomasz Tluczkiewicz, the Polish Jazz Society’s chairman. “But now that’s changed. . . . The Soviets have discovered the power of their jazz scene is in the real creative music.”

Jazz has been banned or grudgingly tolerated since coming to the Soviet Union 60 years ago. However, in recent years the Soviet jazz scene has had opportunities to develop and increase contacts with the outside world, including jazz’s birthplace, the United States.

“I think jazz means glasnost because it is an open form of music,” said Tarasov, who added that the high point of his jazz career was a coast-to-coast tour of the United States last year with Chekasin in the Vyacheslav Ganelin Trio from Lithuania.

Under a U.S.-Soviet cultural agreement, two American jazz groups--pianist Dave Brubeck’s quartet and guitarist Pat Metheny’s band--toured the Soviet Union, playing to sold-out crowds in Moscow, Leningrad and other cities.

The Ganelin trio was the first Soviet jazz group ever to tour the United States, opening the JVC Jazz Festival in New York, which is sponsored by Japanese Victor Corp., an electronics firm. The trio broke up last year and pianist Ganelin immigrated to Israel in October.

This year, another Soviet band, Leningrad Dixieland, was the surprise hit at the Sacramento Dixieland Jubilee and appeared on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.”

Both tours were organized with the help of East Wind Records, a Washington-based label that has released six albums since 1965 by Soviet jazzmen.

“The first time I heard a variety of recordings with Soviet musicians, I heard music that was just totally unique and unexpected from the Soviet Union,” said Steve Boulay, East Wind’s president. “I feel great about the whole thing because it has opened up a whole new world for me and these musicians too.”

Back in the Soviet Union, Tarasov said, there is a new feeling that the country might again become a center of avant-garde music, poetry, art and film as in the early 1920s before dictator Joseph Stalin imposed a tight yoke on culture.

“We have many conservative jazz musicians, especially in Moscow and Leningrad, who play typical American jazz like bebop, trying to play like (saxophonist) Charlie Parker all their lives, which is not too interesting,” he said. “They say what we play is not jazz, but we want to play music that has feelings from the country we are born in.”

Within the past five years, the number of jazz groups granted professional status by the Soviet culture ministry has almost doubled to about 40, and the Soviet jazz discography now totals about 250 albums, according to Alexei Batashev, the foremost Soviet jazz critic, record producer and promoter.

About 35 jazz festivals are held each year, and about half a dozen music conservatories from Moscow to Irkutsk in Siberia now teach jazz, he said.

A former engineer, Batashev learned his jazz and English listening to the Voice of America during the Stalinist era when jazz was condemned as a symbol of American decadence.

But rather than something that divides the superpowers, jazz is a bridge, he said. “In jazz, Americans will always be friends and good human beings because it’s the people’s music. We just need more opportunities to play together.”

The strong point of Soviet jazz is its ethnic diversity, in “the one and only country which broadly lies on two big continents with a great musical legacy--Europe and Asia,” Batashev said.