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Anna Volkova is a figure perhaps best known in the Moscow music business for her managerial flair, primarily with the jazz-funk ensemble Guru Groove Foundation. Currently, however, she is working on recordings of her own, involving the textual and compositional skills of her partner, Nadez[h]da Novosadovich. Volkova has already uploaded a couple of tracks to Soundcloud, and Ms. Novosadovich is about to do the same.
Several of the initial comments at that venue have been very positive: "Well done, you guys! The nation deserves to know your music better..."; "Amazing stuff! The arrangement's really nice - and so is the performance... as always." Within those kinds of observation there's a sense that friends and audience might overlap, creating something of a salon atmosphere. Intimate songs for intimate friends. And yet, as we hear, there's still a general inclination towards the grand scale of torch songs or, at the very least, major drama.
A leaning towards the pre-war, maximally severe palette of chiaroscuro also helps.
Elsewhere online, Ms. Volkova has published a brief text at her account on Vkontakte, recalling how she - at the age of five!- had once looked forward to this future career. Full of spelling mistakes, that tiny announcement is a consideration of how a little girl imagined romance would be - at the age of eighteen. The five-year-old author had anticipated both the joy of "falling in love with a very handsome man" and how the experience might involve "enjoyment of a boundless, yet very cruel love!!!" Multiple exclamation marks served to drive the point home.
The final sentences of the text climb to an exclamatory crescendo in which "all boys and girls" are invited to live in "love and harmony." Little feelings soon required a grand stage. And a great deal of punctuation.
Songs of 'a boundless, yet very cruel love'
Given that we've touched upon the torch song per se, it's worth recalling that - by their very nature - those works are designed to express a yearning for somebody (or something) that has long slipped away. Emotion outlasts reality and, as time passes, the gap between desire and actuality will probably grow larger still. Adult experience makes it increasingly hard to stay idealistic: that same discrepancy, however, will only boost the passion of a performer, working hard against heartless fact.
Volkova came to Moscow some years ago from the frozen northern city of Severodvinsk. The relevance of these impassioned, jazzy statements (and standards) to geography can be extended further still. Take, for example, Carina Cooper, whose name alone is suggestive of international connections. When we last wrote of her work, we pointed out her Russo-American heritage. Now, as then, her career is developing swiftly at the intersection of jazz, pop, and R&B. No matter her travels, though, a classic stance of the proud, isolated chanteuse only grows stronger. As the singer matures, her themes and abilities grow increasingly serious - in ways that play upon issues of space, place, and endurance.
In that earlier article, we mentioned that Ms. Cooper has garnered an impressive number of prizes, both at international festivals and in prestigious domestic competitions. These kind of benchmarks, built upon time-honored academic standards, speak directly to expectations within a Slavic jazz tradition. Cooper's achievements as a live performer are also drawn along lines of success as seen by jazz, rather than anything recognizable to primetime divas. She has played at Moscow's well-respected "Usad'ba Dzhaz" festival, together with a range of cultural events in the capital celebrating cinema, architecture and other lofty pursuits.
Now able to headline at some of Moscow's clubs, she is being courted by a number of US labels.
An interview several months ago set the scene well with regard to further successes and future hopes. The interviewer spoke first of her pleasure at hearing "a really beautiful voice... It's enough to give me goosebumps."
Despite those lofty - and effective! - heights from the outset, Cooper explained how she, just as Volkova, had once moved to Moscow from a provincial location. Things had not always been easy: quite the opposite, in fact. In this case her tale begins in the southern city of Saratov, on the banks of the River Volga. Aware at a very young age that Carina had been blessed with a special ability, her parents began their efforts to get her into a Moscow school - and indeed she would one day graduate from the capital's Jazz Academy.
Here in the Big City a passion for jazz interwove with a more modish love for R&B; that enthusiasm led to a concomitant desire to visit the US, home to both those traditions.
That girl sings like nobody else today...
Carina's parents are professional musicians, with specializations in the violin and clarinet. Their daughter, however, now seems destined for a more popular trajectory. If legend is to be believed, one pivotal moment occurred in that upwards movement when she was seventeen and performing at a Moscow talent competition. Here she was suddenly noticed by a member of the classic Soviet pop group Samotsvety. Apparently he was unable to contain himself: "That girl sings like nobody else today..."
Judging by those words, a grandeur and dignity within lyrical expression - taken from a jazz heritage - had long been missing from mainstream pop.
The same lyrical force has led to moments of social significance, too. Most importantly and impressively, Cooper recently sang the American national anthem at an NBA game in New Jersey. This honor came on the heels of a local contest, designed to find the best young singer for the job. Something (loud and proud) within the Russian jazz canon had traveled well to the other side of the world. Her love for the US continues in the same spirit, actually - and in several interviews she has stressed once again the ways in which the American songbook introduced her to a lasting value system. Music brought some moral benefits.
Put differently, this is a relationship between song and selfhood best reflected in the 1905 gospel compsition Cooper sometimes performs, "His Eye Is on the Sparrow." The title refers to God's care for a small, singing figure, but divorced from a strictly ecclesiastical context, it also speaks to the salvationary power of music itself. As with Volkova's worldview, song and life on stage here become a form of "deliverance" from troubles. Even when they fail, they usher in a grander harmony:
His eye is on the sparrow / And I know He cares for me...
"Whenever I am tempted,/ Whenever doubts arise,/ When songs give place to sighing,/ When hope within me dies,/ I draw the closer to Him,/ From care He sets me free./ His eye is on the sparrow,/ And I know He cares for me..."
Keeping these traditions alive in Russia, Ukraine, and beyond is very much a matter of live performance. Radio shows scant love for jazz, but the summer shows come thick and fast. Consider, in that light, the work of Tanya Balakyrska (using a slightly shortened version of her Russian surname Балакирская). Originally from Donetsk and then Kramatorsk in Ukraine, followed by time in Kiev, she now lives and works in Moscow. Through her managerial and journalistic activity, she bridges that geographic gap, working both for Jazz.Ru and a related publication in Ukraine, UA Jazz.
Once on stage, she operates with a wide range of musicians from several Russian towns including Samara and Yekaterinburg. Balakyrska likes to define the result as a melange of "indie, minimalism, aspects of jazz, pop, lounge and 'symphonic fusion.'" The Moscow press has drawn parallels with Lisa Gerrard, Kate Bush, and Joni Mitchell.
Indie, minimalism, aspects of jazz, pop, lounge and 'symphonic fusion'
As with Carina Cooper, a recent interview helps to span the distance from a musical upbringing to an adult worldview. Her parents are conductors and vocalists by profession, but their academic background - grounded in classroom experience - made it slightly easier for Tanya to develop musical and journalistic skill-sets. With either pen or microphone in hand (sometimes both), she has now performed in close to thirty towns and cities around Russia and Ukraine.
...Including the Koktebel Jazz Festival on the shores of the Black Sea.
Balakyrska's recent songwriting has sometimes been developed together with the Canadian poet and performer Sienna Dahlen, although a more familiar textual reference point has been the verse of E.E. Cummings. Some of the tracks on Balakyrska's newest recordings have been directly built around Cummings' poetry. Most striking of these is arguably the poem "I Thank You God..."
Here, with Cummings' trademark complexities in place, we find a song of endless affirmation. It begs comparison with "His Eye Is on the Sparrow." The gospel song chosen by Cooper implied that God's love was in no way altered by the "sparrow's" small size; in fact, the bird's nothingness was actually proof of God's ubiquitous affection. The smaller the songbird - and the greater its distance from "natural" importance - the louder it would sing, aware of a ubiquitous, divine harmony. Likewise, with Balakyrska's text borrowed from Cummings - full of his syntactic ambiguity, lower-case typography, and closing affirmation - we see a similar process.
...everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes (Cummings)
"i thank You God for most this amazing/ day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees/ and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything/ which is natural which is infinite which is yes." Divinity and illogically grand confirmation are one the same.
As these three singers have moved to Moscow from Severodvinsk, Saratov, and Donetsk, they've become increasingly aware of physical or cultural distances - yet they've also realized the power of music that made the transition possible. Saying "yes" to that traversable divide - and the challenges en route - is synonymous with self-realization: it's a note, therefore, that sounds louder still from far-flung locations.
In which case, we should not expect the drama from these three solo singers to lessen any time soon. Not to mention the penchant for monochrome.
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