Russians Trumpet a Love of Satchmo

Music lovers worldwide will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Louis Armstrong’s birth on Saturday, but they’ll be hard pressed to come up with a warmer salute than the one he’ll get from a group of jazz-loving Siberians this weekend in Costa Mesa.

Among those saluting Armstrong at the second Orange County Classic Jazz Festival will be the Siberian Dixieland Jazz Band, a group formed 13 years ago by the son of a soldier in the Soviet Army who was introduced to jazz by American soldiers who liberated him from a German concentration camp at the end of World War II.

“It has been the dream of all my life to come play in the United States,” the group’s founder, Boris Balakhnin, said from Moscow a few days before that dream becomes a reality.

The group’s manager, Olga Ramer, is handling the translating. She is Balakhnin’s daughter and named her newborn son Miles--after Miles Davis--because of the passion for jazz she inherited from her father and grandfather.

Ramer, who lives in Croatia and is married to an American businessman working there, arranged the sextet’s first U.S. visit after her father asked her to locate any American jazz festivals that might book the group. It has played several European festivals, most recently the Molde International Jazz Festival in Norway.

Orange County festival officials were sufficiently impressed that they arranged for Balakhnin’s group to record a new album that is being released in conjunction with its performances here. “Memories of Satchmo” offers the Siberians’ take on such early Armstrong classics as “West End Blues,” “Potato Head Blues” and “Creole Love Call.”

“I listen to Armstrong more and more, and the more I listen, the more I admire him as a musician and as a singer and as a person,” Balakhnin, 54, says. “Now I think he is the greatest jazz musician of all time.”

The significance of a band of musicians from deep within Russia, none of whom speak English, playing songs popularized 70 to 80 years ago by a black trumpeter from New Orleans would have touched no one more deeply than Armstrong himself.

As a boy, Armstrong worked as a junk collector for the Karnosky family, who were Russian Jewish immigrants. Their kindness toward Armstrong shaped his view on race relations and allowed him to transcend the black-white animosity typical of turn-of-the-century New Orleans.

Balakhnin didn’t know about the Russian connection in Armstrong’s past. What he does know about Armstrong he learned from the 78 rpm discs he heard as an infant--thanks to his father, who was captured by the Germans two days after joining the Soviet Army.

When he and others were liberated from a prison camp in France, American soldiers gave him stacks of records they had carried along while fighting in Europe. They included many by Armstrong and other traditional jazz groups, as well as big bands and early bebop sides by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

Two years after his father returned to Siberia, jazz recordings in tow, Balakhnin was born. When Balakhnin was a baby and would cry, Ramer says, his parents found that playing the jazz records would calm him.

Growing up outside the Siberian capital of Novosibirsk, Balakhnin took up the trumpet at the earliest opportunity, then switched to saxophone.

“From the age of 7 I remember that I liked the sound of the saxophone very much, but I didn’t know what kind of instrument it was,” he says. “I asked the other people in the village, and they didn’t know either. Only at the age of 12 or 13 when I first saw a saxophone [in a military band] did I realize that was the instrument that made the sound I loved.”

As a teen, he took up clarinet and saxophone simultaneously, but instead of studying the music of Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev or Shostakovich, Balakhnin jumped on one of the signature tunes of another New Orleans jazz legend, Sidney Bechet.

“The first song I learned on clarinet was ‘Petite Fleur,”’ Balakhnin says. “It is still my favorite.”

Balakhnin and his group favor traditional New Orleans-style jazz over bebop or avant-garde styles that are more popular with Russian musicians who have taken up jazz following the demise of the Soviet Union.

“I think that traditional jazz is actually the most difficult in terms of expressing yourself,” he says. “You have the tune that everybody knows and you have to make it your own way. You have to do something that the other musicians before you didn’t do--that’s why it is so challenging, and why I chose it ... That’s why it doesn’t die.”

The Russian government now supports jazz and has awarded Balakhnin the title of “honorable artist of Russia.”

The group’s visit to the U.S. is underwritten by the Novosibirsk Philharmonic Society, which named the Siberian Dixieland Jazz Band a state orchestra seven years ago.

The turnabout in public policy toward jazz has led to some ironic parallels between the way Russians view jazz and how it is regarded in its native country.

“Jazz festivals are allowed, officials are welcoming it, but for the general public I think the interest has weakened,” Balakhnin says. “It is not forbidden fruit any more. It’s also connected with the economic situation, and people are pumping all their money now into pop music, which is everywhere on TV and radio.”

Consequently, “Jazz is only played by the enthusiasts who passionately love the music. They know they are not going to make [any] money,” Balakhnin says through Ramer, who starts laughing when she hears what her father says next.

“He says,” she comments, trying to mute her chuckling, “that it wouldn’t be bad if they were paid.”

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The Orange County Classic Jazz Festival runs Friday through Sunday at the Hilton and Holiday Inn hotels, 3050 Bristol St., Costa Mesa. Hours: 10:30 a.m. to midnight Friday and Saturday, 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday. $30 to $40 per day, $70 for a three-day pass that also includes admission to a Thursday night pre-festival party, 6:30 to 11:30 p.m. Information: (714) 438-4922 or https://www.oc-classicjazz.org.