Free Jazz and the Soviet Critic: The Mixed Avant-Garde in Leningrad, 1977-1982

This paper examines how free jazz and avant-garde musics were conceived in late-Soviet unofficial in relation to larger ‘Emancipation’ discourses of European jazz in the 1970s (e.g. Berendt 1977). I suggest this reception was formative to the emergence of both musical within this artistic milieu. Of primary focus is Efim Barban’s Black Music, White Freedom (1977), winner of the 1981 Andrei Belyi Prize, which drew from the materio-discursive echoes of African American music alongside European aesthetic theory. Attending to this reception illustrates a constellation of discourses at play within Leningrad’s unofficial intelligentsia. Through these discourses — the radical essentialisms of the Black Arts Movement and Leopold Senghor, structuralist philosophy, and information theory — Soviet critics formulated a specific concept of a ‘new jazz,’ an aesthetically thick genre understood to be the new frontier of academic music and the avant garde. A close reading of Barban’s criticism alongside Sergei Kurekhin’s first recording within the Soviet Union suggests this discursive constellation — which foregrounded authenticity through primitivism, binary mediation, and formal abstraction — was productive in the creation of a (purported) ‘uniquely Russian’ musical style, distinct from both American jazz and a Soviet background.