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Russia has a long, complicated history with jazz, reaching back to the 1920s. Viewed as decadent and forced mostly underground during the Stalin era, jazz has proven remarkably hardy, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Russian jazz scene is now undergoing a healthy period of revitalization. While there’s still no all-jazz radio station in the country, there are now a growing number of jazz clubs and active record labels, and jazz is studied in select music schools and at The Jazz Center in Yaroslavl. There is also a respected and widely read jazz magazine and Web site (http://www.jazz.ru) and a relatively free flow of musicians in and out of the country.

But you can’t have a vital jazz culture without a jazz festival, and there are a number of them operating in Russia. Among the most important is Jazz in the Hermitage Garden, Russia’s first open-air jazz festival. Now in its 11th year, the festival is produced by Mikhail Green and supported by the city of Moscow. It runs for three consecutive nights in a park in downtown Moscow, not far from the Pushkinskaya metro. The Hermitage Garden is a fitting location as this is the same park where some of the first Russian jazz concerts and swing dances took place in the early 1930s. Each night draws between 1,000-1,500 people and runs from 5-10 p.m. The majority of musicians appearing are from Russia, though this year’s line-up also included a trio from Austria, a blues band from Slovakia, a pianist from Poland and a smattering of Americans.

The festival opened on a Friday night with tenor saxophonist Mike Tracy fronting the Open World Ensemble. Tracy is a fine hard-bop player who should be better known, but he’s dedicated his career to running the jazz program at the University of Louisville and helping teach the language of jazz through his workshops, clinics and residencies in Eastern Europe. The young Russian musicians with him demonstrated p

A Conference of Ambassadors: Igor Butman and Wynton Marsalis Celebrate Their 60th-Birthday in Moscow

The history of jazz in Russia does not begin with the fabled U.S. State Department-sponsored traveling shows of the so-called Jazz Ambassadors, which brought a number of American jazz greats to Eastern European countries and beyond during the years of the Cold War. It is, in fact, an almost 100-year-old history waiting to be rediscovered.

Its origins can be traced back to one man, Valentin Parnakh, a dancer and a poet. Parnakh first encountered this new music in the early 1920s during a trip to France. Enamored, he brought back records and instruments to his homeland in the hope of introducing its incendiary rhythms and concepts to his fellow Russian artists and musicians. This culminated in Russia’s first-ever jazz concert, which he helmed in Moscow in October 1922.

Yet, the history of jazz in Russia is also inevitably interlinked with that of the country’s Soviet years, during which all-things Western were suppressed or downright censored. Such was the fate of jazz, America’s one true original art form. Yet, there was little Soviet authorities could do to prevent ordinary people from sneakily listening to Voice of America’s Jazz Hour on radios behind closed doors. In this sense, it is possible to see that the aforementioned Jazz Ambassadors program was beneficial to both the United States and the Soviet Union. For the U.S, it was a way to help counter Soviet stories about American racism. For the U.S.S.R., it was a way to reach compromise in the face of jazz music’s growing popularity with the common folks.

Today, the Russian jazz scene is vibrant and growing every day, and saxophonist/bandleader Igor Butman remains one of its central figures. Butman emerged in the late 1970s and has since had a stellar, wide-ranging career that is difficult to sum up in just a few lines. From recording with some of the world’s biggest stars (Chick Corea, Grover Wash