SONGS FROM THE BLACK EARTH: Russian tour, Sponsored by Volvo, April 2008
Thursday 3rd April: This tour, to premier our recent recording Songs From the Black Earth on Flat Five Records, has been long in the making. Leonid has worked like a Trojan to put the schedule together, and we're all deeply excited and full of expectation. Mads is playing some great gigs with the Danish Radio Big Band, so isn't with us on this trip, but I feel rejuvenated and up for it, having just spent an utterly blissful week relaxing in the foothills of the White Mountains in Crete - just the tonic before all the neat vodka to come! I'm also armed with a new instrument: an Eminence EUB, which arrived yesterday. It should be exactly the type of instrument to take on these tours – highly transportable (it dismantles with a really well thought-out system) and with a great tone (it should deliver the type of fully acoustic sound that my Clevinger EUB lacks, and it ought to give a better arco sound, which our new music demands). It certainly made it to Moscow safe and sound (credit to SAS for that), and Petter and I made a successful rendezvous with our driver, and then with Leonid. Duly installed at the Hermitage Hotel (expensive, not very luxurious, but well-located) we took the sleep option, in anticipation of the rigours ahead of us.
Friday 4th April: Any fantasies I've ever had about waking up to find a six-foot Swedish blonde with waist-length hair in my bed were swiftly shattered when the person fitting that description happened to be Petter. We'd had to share the double bed to keep the ferocious costs of Moscow accommodation within reasonable limits – this is a jazz tour, after all. Still, we were only a short walk from Red Square, so we ventured out there, up Tverskaya Avenue to the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, and enjoyed a pleasant morning's sightseeing, before hooking up with Leonid and Nick. Our first assignment was a photoshoot with 'Paparazzi' Pavel Korbut, who takes great pictures: we're going to be on the front cover of the June edition of Jazz.ru, which is Russia's premier jazz publication, and the session seemed to go well, although I don't really see us adorning the bedroom walls of many Russian teenage girls just yet. The gig venue, Cultural Centre 'Dom' (www.dom.com.ru), which is at the very heart of the Russian avant-garde scene, was achingly cool – we arrived to witness rehearsals for a deeply arty fashion show, browse their record shop, which included sections like 'Strange Sounds', and conduct our own soundcheck. The gig was splendid – Leonid in particular played like a complete monster, and the audience liked it very much. My feelings about the new bass are positive too – it'll be a while before it beds in properly, and the intonation of the new strings needs careful monitoring, but the sound (somewhat inhibited by an ageing Ampeg combo with a mind of its own) and the feel are great. It also fits upright in its case on the table of a Russian railway 'coupe', leaving room for beers/crisps/chocolate and other necessities of night train travel. As the mighty 12.30 am train to St Petersburg pulled out of the Lenigradskiy Station we all felt that our adventure had started in very promising style.
Saturday 5th April: St Petersburg looks magnificent in the early morning sunshine. The Tavricheskaya Hotel has views across to the amazing blue-and-white Smolny Cathedral, and our suites are so huge that I find Petter running down the corridor in glee because he can't fit it all into the wide angle lens of his impressive camera! We enjoy a fine breakfast, and I have time to assemble my new bass and get to know it a little better. I get to use a much better amp tonight (an up-do-date Ampeg system), and we start to hear what the instrument can do – big powerful bottom end and some nice singing tones to be extracted as well. It's still bedding in – new strings are never a good thing on a double bass, because it takes ages for them to settle, which isn't helped by taking the instrument apart all the time. Intonation issues make the soundcheck a bit stressful! Still, we are playing at the State Jazz Philharmonic Hall (www.jazz-hall.spb.ru), a beautiful, elaborate concert venue adorned with fine photos of Duke Ellington and the like, and we've pulled in a really good crowd who looked like a fair selection of St Petersburg's cultural elite. Most gratifying is that some of the people from last night's gig have travelled all the way from Moscow to see us at this one too! Fortunately, the performance turns out gratifyingly well. The punters like the first set very much (even though we make no concessions to popularism), and positively howl with delight during the second (still no concessions). This makes us feel very good: we sell lots of CDs, sign autographs aplenty, take some critical comment ('I really like the music, but it would sound much better with a trumpet instead' – why do the drunkest people always know best?), and, once Nick had extracted himself from the adoring pale-skinned, almond-eyed beauties and I'd made my escape from a hairy, malodorous, red-faced alcoholic, we enjoy a vodka-fuelled afterparty in Petter's hotel room after tramping the streets of the city for an hour in a vain search for an open bar.
Sunday 6th April: Culture time! We had almost a full day to kill in St Petersburg, and we made great use of it. We walked to Nevskiy Prospect, dodged the girls who were rollerblading everywhere on the city's wide streets, enjoyed coffee and cakes, and then headed down to the Hermitage, where we feasted on the Greek and Roman Art collections: I was delighted to get to see so many first-rate pieces, including one of the best and most interesting statues of Kleopatra VII; Nick was very taken by a special exhibition of Roman frescoes from Stabiae which featured some typically Roman pornographic images labelled 'frescoes with architectural motifs'! We all gawped at the astounding opulence of the interior decoration, which would be worth a visit in itself without ever looking at an art work, and finished in the wonderful post-Impressionist collection. In danger of reaching 'cognitive overload', we decamped to a bizarrely decorated 'spy-bar' to watch the Bahrain Grand Prix and eat some pretty decent fish, before girding our loins for the train to Kursk (which in that uncompromising Russian way goes all the way to Sebastopol). The wheels on my new bass case are an absolute godsend on the massive Russian station platforms, where it can often take about 10 minutes to walk to your wagon. There was no raging party tonight, just contentment in our compartment as we roared our way into the vastness of the Russian night.
Monday 7th April: A pleasant spring day to greet out midday arrival in Kursk. Petter and I are housed in the Hotel Oktyabrskaya, where we stayed on our first ever visit here in 2000. They've now got a fish tank in the reception, and are trying desperately to renovate the great behemoth of the building, but the showers are still a glorious relic of Soviet austerity, and it is quite impossible to describe the colour scheme of the bathroom, the bizarre collection of plumbing that goes nowhere, the ever-changing levels of the floor, the various fungus that lurks in all corners, or the smell, which would need the expertise of a Master of Wine to pinpoint. Petter has no hot water either, though my room (just down the corridor) does, even if the sheets aren't quite big enough for the bed. Still, since Volvo are sponsoring our performances here, we are taken to a sparkly new restaurant called "Dacha" and fed very well for lunch – salad, salyanka, Russian casserole, sticky cakes, vanilla cappuccino (the latter ordered due to ignorance of the Russian language). Notwithstanding the hotel bathrooms, Kursk has developed incredibly over the time we've been coming here – the whole place is brighter, more outwardly prosperous, and more optimistic on every visit. The Philharmonic Hall has been nicely renovated, and they are building a gigantic supermarket on Ulitsa Lenina. Many people here in Kursk have been unfailingly good to us, and we hope very much that they can maintain their upward trajectory. I worked a little on A Brief Guide to Classical Civilisation before enjoying a couple of mellow beers with Petter in the hotel bar. The same scary prostitute that is always here is still luring customers away for an hour or so, and we had to contend with the obligatory over-persistent drunk, but otherwise we spent an enjoyable and relaxed time recharging ourselves for the busy times ahead. The 'Baltika 3' beers cost 50 roubles each for the first round, 30 for the second. Why? I have no idea!
Tuesday 8th April: The grey skies eventually gave way to pleasant spring sunshine as Petter and I breakfasted at "Dacha", did a little shopping (again, there is so much more on offer since our early visits), tried in vain to reactivate the SIM cards of our Russian phones (just don't think about fighting the system here), found Petter a room with a shower that worked (worth fighting the system if you can win), and ended up at Leonid's house for coffee (he's been fighting the system for his entire life). We've never been chez Vintskevitch before, so it was a real treat to see their home, and very fine it is too. We spent the afternoon in rehearsals, working on three of Petter's great new tunes: the meditative 'Brother Nick'; the groovy 'Moscow Night Train'; and the Monk-meets-rockabilly ('Monkabilly' – sounds a bit like Nina Simon's 'My Baby Just Cares For Me' if Nina had overdosed on Prozak) 'The Tone, The Whole Tone and Nothing but the Tone'. We were interrupted by news that Leonid has managed to secure government funding for this year's Festival Jazz Province – a huge step forward for Jazz within Russia, and worthy of our celebratory feast at "Dacha". I worked a bit more on the Minoan chapter of A Brief Guide to Classical Civilisation, prior to Petter and I having a beer in the hotel bar (20 roubles each for the 'Pikur' beers) before Kolya picked us up and took us the 'Chelsea' sports-bar to watch tonight's Champion's League football matches. We drank 'Chelsea' beer ('Chelsi', they call it) as Chelski beat Fenerbahce and Liverpool triumphed over Arsenal on the adjacent screen. At 500 roubles (about £10) for the entire night's beer and garlic bread for the three of us, served by a leggy Russian lovely, it was a total bargain. Kursk rocks!
Wednesday 9th April: The rigours of the first ever tour I did in Russia left me feeling like my face had been rubbed with sandpaper. My remedial action was to spend a vast amount of money on Clinique Skin Supplies for Men products. I've never looked back. These days I take the shaving oil, post-shave healer, face scrub, scruffing lotion, M lotion, and the daily eye hydrator. Excessive perhaps, but at least there's a human being looking at me from the mirror this morning, and not a werewolf. Today brings beautiful spring weather and a busy schedule: a TV recording for GTRK Russia; rehearsals at the Philharmonic Hall; the collection of our washing (still wet, one T-shirt missing); and a three hour drive to Gubkin for our next gig. It's a fascinating journey across the vast expanses of Russia's fertile 'Black Earth' (chernozem): Leonid pertinently asks, 'How can such a rich country have so many poor people?' as we lurch along bumpy roads, through small villages with wooden houses and poultry running free along the side of the road, make a photo-stop at a monument honouring the biggest meat-factory in the region (a silver, over life-size Soviet-style woman with a sow and lots of piglets), and a receive a guided tour of the impressive local Music School on our arrival. The venue is another fine concert hall – The Cultural Palace of the Construction Workers – and it is full. My relationship with my new bass is improving all the time, assisted this time by a pretty decent Hartke rig, and overall the performance was a good one, particularly in the first part. Personally, I had a really hit-and-miss evening, producing some of my best playing and some of my worst, which made it rather embarrassing when the head of the Music School was gushingly appreciative of my 'flexible fingers' and invited me to conduct a Bass Masterclass the next time we go there. I didn't feel worthy. Still, the audience were extremely happy, and we signed zillions of autographs before necking a few good Nemiroff honey-and-chilli vodkas to soften the jolts of the homeward trip.
Thursday 10th April: Up very early to get the to TV studios of the NTAKT TV Company for a 'live' appearance on their Breakfast Show. The studio is the perhaps the brightest place I've ever been in – glaring studio lights reflecting off acid green and orange swirly wall decorations – and is a total shock to my sleep-filled eyes. Still we said all the right things, mimed beautifully from our bar stools, and everyone was happy. Back to Leonid's for breakfast, then to the hotel, which now has no hot water at all ... Not until April 12th, anyway! This is unfortunate, since Petter has taken to going running again, and, despite the sunshine outside, you can't turn the central heating down to less than 'full'. We spent the afternoon looking at, and discussing, some big-screen projections that a guy called Dennis had done for tomorrow night's show. There was time for more work on my book, and have dinner at "Dacha", where, having eaten our way through most of the menu we are on very good terms with the serving staff, who all seem to work 13-hour days. A short rehearsal in the evening was followed by a search all over Kursk for an internet café, which we abandoned after an hour or so in favour of beers in the hotel lobby. The local prostitutes had seen us on the TV this morning, and seemed to be most impressed! Petter and I brushed off their (doubtless mercenary) adulation, and had a good strong conversation on musical matters instead.
Friday 11th April: There was definitely a werewolf in the mirror this morning! It had a headache and the no-shower situation was not doing a great deal for its relationship to the world at large. My fellow-werewolf Petter, Nick and I finally found an internet connection, and then drove out to a newly developing suburban area, where blocks of new apartments are being constructed, along with a brand new church and lots of big expensive houses – another strong indicator of the way Kursk has moved over the past few years. We took a look at some old military hardware (T34s and the like), viewed the tomb of the Unknown Soldier and Marshall Zhukov's statue, wandered down to the Go-Kart track, and then headed back for our soundcheck at the Kursk Philharmonic Hall. I was delighted to find that the sound engineer was Dima, who has done every Jazz Province tour since the beginning, and who knows our sound inside out. He was fascinated by the EUB, and extracted some fine, deep-voiced tones from it. Following more TV interviews for NTAKT, the blissful shower facilities at Leonid's house saw us transformed, rather like the first humans evolving from the Neanderthals. Given that we're now banned from drinking beer and 'strong alcohol' at "Dacha" after last night, we ate at the Vintskevitch house too. I was utterly delighted, mainly on Leonid's behalf, that the gig ultimately went so well – a full house, who really enjoyed the music and bought shed loads of CDs, and a band that was on top form. I'm now feeling very much at one with my new bass, which is playing beautifully, and Petter remarked how my playing has grown of late, which is especially pleasing coming from such an astute observer of all types of music. After autographs, vodkas and speeches backstage we descended upon the "Admiral Bembow" restaurant where we were treated to a fine dinner of calamari, cured meats, garlic bread, and onion rings, washed down with good German Weissbeer. The Vintskevitch clan was well represented: Leonid's charming wife Veronika, his wonderfully mischievous bass-playing brother Sergei and his equally charming wife Olga, and their son Vlad, who has an absolutely encyclopaedic knowledge of early 1970s British Heavy Metal. Also in the party was Dima, the head of Kursk's Rubbish Collection Department, and his glamorous wife Nadia: he told endless very funny and either non-translatable or non-repeatable jokes. These usually started, 'A story from England …' and the main themes seemed to revolve around Sherlock Holmes, as, in Kolya's inimitable translation, 'Dr. Watson and Mrs. Watson make sexy time …' You get the drift!
Saturday 12th April: A long lie-in on a gorgeous sunny day, made immeasurably better by the reappearance of hot water in the hotel. Our budget has now run out at "Dacha", which called for some firm-handed negotiations at breakfast time. But duly refuelled I spent a productive afternoon working on A Brief Guide … before walking over to the Philharmonic Hall, to be greeted by the magnificent surprise of about 50 gorgeous young Russian women dressed in belly-dancing costumes waiting backstage for their show. Suitably inspired, we went off to deliver our obligations to Volvo, our sponsors. It's a while since I did a gig in a car showroom, but it turned out pretty well, despite the cavernous acoustics. There was also an art exhibition there, and we played a couple of sets to a small, invited audience, before the serious business of TV interviews and drinking with the 'Big Boss'. Russian car showrooms have bars (of course!), and the evening finished in surreal style with me teaching Vlad about the finer points of whisky drinking (he'd been banned from drinking beer by his father Sergei, who was suffering the mother of all hangovers after last night – 'Father make puke' as Vlad put it), listening to Barbara Streisand, and toasting the health of Yuri Gagarin. That seemed to satisfy everyone's honour and go a long way to securing further financial support for future projects, and Nick, who by this point was 'absolutely drunk man', had to be restrained from kissing the 'Big Boss' in the hope of securing a hefty discount on the purchase of a soft-top Volvo.
Sunday 13th April: Time to check out of the Oktyabrskaya Hotel and collect our things for the road. We drove a couple of hours out of Kursk, again across the great expanses of chernozem through peasant villages, until we reached the Marino Sanatorium, a huge, opulent country house dating from the early 19th century, which now functions as a swanky hotel. We were treated to Soviet-style food in the Tsarist-style dining room before the gig. The room we played in was utterly beautiful: a neo-Classical rotunda with astonishing chandeliers and the most exquisite inlaid wooden floor. It had really extreme acoustics, but in fact this really suited some of the more lyrical pieces we played. Another plus-point for the EUB here was the nifty end-pin system that rests on two rubber feet, which caused no damage whatsoever to the priceless flooring. The inevitable TV interview was followed by a private guided tour of the house and its gardens, prior to the big journey to our final venue. So it was back to Kursk, then on to the night train to Moscow for a minor party in the corridor and a fitful night's sleep.
Monday 14th April: Arrival in Moscow at 7:00 AM on a rainy morning. A dash across town on the rightly fabled Moscow Underground, and onto another train for the four-hour ride to the delightful town of Yaroslavl. There's a much wintrier feel to the air here, but our welcome is a warm one. Our host, Igor Gavrilov, is the director of the Yaroslavl Jazz Centre, and one of the great Heavyweight Champions of Jazz. An old-school communist, he has single-handedly built and run this establishment, starting from his own resources. It now boasts a concert venue, rehearsal rooms, archives, recording facilities and the like. There is nothing like it in the UK: if only there were! We eat at a plush hotel on the banks of the Volga, take a shower at the Jazz Centre, and then renew our acquaintance with some old friends, including the centre's librarian Anya, who typifies the Western stereotype of the beautiful and intelligent Russian female, and who very graciously chaperoned us on our first visit here. After a frenetic start to the gig, with Leonid starting the first tune at a frighteningly fast tempo, we settled down to give a thoroughly pleasing final concert of the tour. There were some really nice pieces of musical dialogue between Petter and Leonid, as well as some satisfying ensemble moments, in front of an audience that included students from Oxford! Igor treated us to some fine Volga fish after the gig, before we retired to our somewhat basic Hotel "Parus" for a final round of Yarpiva Beer and a vodka or three.
Tuesday 15th April: A long, but generally uneventful, travel day from taxi to train to underground to car to airport to coach to car to home and a gorgeous welcome from my wife and dog. The EUB caused a certain degree of discussion among the airport security people and the check-in staff, but ultimately there were no problems, and the instrument made it home safe and sound with no excess baggage charges. It has been a contributory factor in the success of the tour: it sounds great and is extremely easy to get from A to B, and once I had started to find out where it kept its notes I was able to get all the noises I like out of it. There is plenty of depth and resonance in its tone – power and growl in the lower registers, some sweetly singing sounds in the middle, and it keeps its quality of notes right up into the thumb position for melodic playing in that area. The arco sound is nice too. You need to get it assembled and tuned up as soon as you possibly can before the gig if you dismantle it, but I kept it in the gig bag except for the plane and train journeys, and it held its tuning very well. There's talk of more dates in Russia before very long, plus a visit to Finland later in the year, so it'll definitely be seeing a good deal more use before the year is out. I get the feeling that the cost-per-play ratio will be coming down pretty sharply!