Free Jazz and the Soviet Critic: Efim Barban, Sergei Kurekhin and New Jazz

Looking to music, contemporaneous interviews, and samizdat literature in late Soviet Leningrad, this paper examines how avant-garde musics, including free jazz, were conceived in unofficial culture and aided in the creation of a ‘deterritorialised milieu’ through the imagined elsewhere (Yurchak 2006). Engaging with materio-discursive echoes of western music cultures (both academic and vernacular) critic Efim Barban theorised the concept of ‘new jazz’ in his samizdat monograph Black Music, White Freedom (1977) to name an aesthetically thick genre understood to be the new frontier of the avant-garde—a theorisation that aided the creation of a deterritorialised zone within Soviet space. I suggest this reception was formative to the particularities of musical aesthetics through Barban’s interactions with composer/improviser Sergei Kurekhin. Tracking ‘new jazz’ from 1977 to 1982, between Barban’s theorisation and Kurekhin’s musical enactments, I unpack whether jazz was given a ‘coeval’ role in Soviet experimentalist discourse. I find that new jazz was a heterotopic term as it circulated from critic to performer and back again, its meaning shifting between the aesthetically universal and culturally particular. Looking to these figures’ understanding of the particularity of Soviet new jazz, such movements can be understood as productive in the creation of a ‘uniquely Russian’ musical style.