Milcho Leviev No Longer Has to Imagine

Milcho Leviev sat on a stool in the North Hollywood home he shares with his wife, Deborah, watching with obvious elation a video of a recent solo piano performance in which he plays John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

This wasn’t just any performance. It was held on Jan. 1 before 6,000 enthusiastic fans at the People’s Palace of Culture in Sofia, Bulgaria. And it was Leviev’s first performance in his homeland since 1981.

On Nov. 10, President Todor Zhivkov’s regime was peaceably replaced by that of moderate reformer Petur Mladenov. Shortly thereafter, Leviev, a 52-year-old native of Plovdiv, received an invitation to perform at the fourth annual New Year Music Festival, held in the nation’s capital. He’s one of a number of musicians from Eastern Bloc countries who have returned to their native lands in recent months.

On the tape, Leviev looks thrilled. A beaming smile on his face, he comes on stage wearing a blue-striped, open-neck sport shirt and dark slacks, walks in front of a seated symphony orchestra, bows to the audience and then sits down to play.

In between low, throbbing chords and high, accenting tinkles, Leviev plays Lennon’s simple melody, and even though the Bulgarian is best known as a jazz musician, there is little improvisation in this rendition. It receives a rousing ovation.

“The audience wouldn’t let me go. I had to play another tune,” he said. On the tape, he launches into “Bulgarian Boogie,” a Bulgarian folk tune that was performed by the late Don Ellis’ orchestra during the early ‘70s.

The ecstasy of that moment has been somewhat tempered since Leviev returned from Bulgaria earlier this month. “All of a sudden I had become very famous,” he said, taking a drag on a cigarette and shrugging philosophically. “I don’t think it’s my music that made it so, so much as what I represented--the freedoms of America.”

It was the call of America and its freedoms that caused Leviev, who was experiencing substantial artistic repression in Bulgaria despite his status as a major musician, to defect to West Germany in 1970. In 1971, he emigrated to the United States and settled in Los Angeles--bandleader Ellis was his sponsor--and in 1976 became an American citizen.

He traveled to Bulgaria in 1980 and 1981--during the latter visit with flutist Jim Walker--to perform at the International Jazz Meeting in Sofia. Then, he said, he really felt the presence of the Communist regime.

“I was followed everywhere,” he says. “Sometimes the guy stood so close to me, I’d invite him to sit down and join me and my friends,” he added with a laugh.

“No reviews of my performances were printed. And when I was filmed either in performance or for an interview, the tapes were never played on the air. An interview with Jim Walker was televised. Mine wasn’t. I felt like I was a ghost.”

His latest trip to Bulgaria, a two-week excursion that began in late December, was more to his liking.

“Now I was treated like a real human being,” he said. “I was free to go where I chose. My performances and my interviews appeared on both Bulgarian television and radio. In fact, a tape of a 1981 performance of mine was shown with a statement on the screen that said it was being telecast for the first time. And I received many reviews in the press.”

Leviev took part in eight concerts, including “a big jam session with a lot of my old colleagues” and a performance at the People’s Palace with Theodossy Spasov, “who plays the kaval, a Bulgarian folk flute that has no keys and is played at an angle to the mouth.”

Leviev’s impressions of the changes occuring in Bulgaria are “twofold. People finally feel a big breath of freedom. They can talk, they can gather and demonstrate, they can strike. There’s freedom for artists that was never there. That lack was the main reason I split before. Artists would have to gather in cafes and whisper so they wouldn’t be heard. Microphones were everywhere. Now it’s open. That’s good.

“But there are still a lot of basic shortages. I saw a line a mile long where people were waiting for bread. And musicians can’t make a living. They all have other jobs. Maybe with these reforms, there can be a stronger situation for musicians.”

Polish pianist Adam Makowicz is another musician taking advantage of the shifts in political climates to make a trip back to his native land. Makowicz, who left Poland in 1978 for purely musical reasons--”I wanted to be in New York, in the center of the jazz family”--returned last spring.

“I couldn’t go back when the Communists were in power,” Makowicz said from his home in Manhattan. “It was decided that anyone who had moved abroad without government permission was breaking the law, so I couldn’t go back. Plus, they could have jailed me for speaking in favor of Solidarity.”

Ironically, even before the first Polish free elections in 40 years in June returned a solid victory for the Solidarity movement, Makowicz was able to return to his homeland at the invitation of the Polish Jazz Society.

Like Leviev, Makowicz found his return to be a two-edged sword. “I hadn’t been there for over 10 years and people knew my work from radio and TV, all the concerts were packed, it was a great, exciting time. I stayed in wonderful hotels and ate excellent food.

“But outside, prices for ordinary things were so expensive, and people have so little money. The Communists have caused a lot of damage, psychological as well as economic, to the people. And changes won’t come fast. Poland won’t become a Western country overnight.”

Soviet saxophonist Alexei Zubov, 53, who operates the Sound Choice Studios in Hollywood, finds from talking to friends in the U.S.S.R. that while glasnost is providing more freedoms, economic changes are hard to see.

“In 1980, my being married to an American caused me to be expelled from the orchestra for the state-run Melodiya label,” he said. “And that expulsion was not political but was done by my fellow musicians, who were afraid there would be consequences to them. This fear was created by the political atmosphere. That would absolutely not happen today. There is much more freedom to do whatever you want to do.”

But as far as making money playing jazz, Zubov--who was both an established jazz saxophonist and a well-known film composer before he left the Soviet Union in 1984--isn’t so encouraging. “Jazz was half an underground thing, so with this new freedom in the artistic community, there’s suddenly less interest in jazz,” he said. “It’s as if the absence of freedom was what was creating that interest. . . .

“If things keep going the way they’re going right now, (they are) getting closer to the situation here in the U.S., where the possibility of playing will be determined by economics, rather than by artistic freedom. That’s good and bad.”

Leviev finds that now that he’s been back to Bulgaria, it’s on his mind more than before.

“A lot of my thoughts are still there,” he says. “Spasov, the kaval player, called and said, ‘You enchanted us, you put the magic in me and now you’re gone.’ I told him things will be better.”

Leviev can be heard at the Comeback Inn in Venice with reedman Buddy Collette on Friday and with Katoomi--his quartet featuring violinist Karen Briggs, drummer Tootie Heath and bassist Nedra Wheeler--on Feb. 16. He will return to Bulgaria in June with Katoomi, playing quartet concerts and also appearing with the Bulgarian Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra, performing his “Orpheus Rhapsody,” with the composer at the piano.

And if life goes well for Milcho Leviev here, he is now, more than ever, reminded that life in Bulgaria does not. “Emotionally, it’s kind of a hard thing,” he says. “I have relatives and friends there and they are struggling. It’s very hard.”