Pop Music Reviews : At My Place Has Emotional U.S.-Soviet Collaboration

A mere glance around the intimate Santa Monica club At My Place Thursday night would’ve convinced even an encrusted cynic: Building cultural bridges between the United States and the Soviet Union is a pretty cool thing to do.

You wouldn’t even have to ask L.A. singer-songwriter David Pomeranz and Soviet musician Sasha Malinin, whose collaborative ballad for better international relations, “Far Away Lands,” opened last year’s summit in Washington. This year, the superpower duo’s local live debut added a grace note to the just-concluded Reagan-Gorbachev powwow in Moscow, and many in attendance Thursday night felt (and heard) the political accent.

“I feel a bit gawky for saying so, but this really makes me feel good, to see this,” one woman said to her date as Malinin and Pomeranz worked out on “Livin’ in Perestroika ,” a rather funky call for sympathy for the new, Gorbachev-initiated Soviet (economic) revolution.

“I know what you mean,” the date replied. “It’s like we’re doing something.”

The couple wasn’t alone. You could see the good feelings everywhere: A misty grin on many an audience member’s face and a slightly supercharged quality in the performers’ moves. Every song was lustily cheered, and Malinin (who’s been in Los Angeles for several weeks on an artist’s visa) even got members of the overwhelmingly non-Russian-speaking audience to sing along with a Russian folk-rock tune--in the original language.

While “Far Away Lands” and three other new songs unveiled during the 50-minute first set won’t send INXS or U2 looking for new work, they were hooky and eminently sympathetic to the cause of better Soviet-American understanding. And the band Pomeranz assembled to back the duo was crisp, colorful and unobtrusive.

“Politics are fine, and ideologies will be ideologies,” Pomeranz said during a pre-show interview. “But music will always transcend their messages, because it transcends language.”