Samuel Riley

affiliation: University of Birmingham
en

Sam Riley is a PhD student at the University of Birmingham. They research late and post-Soviet experimental music between the 1970s and the mid-1990s. This research is supported by the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership.

research

research expositions

  • A Butterfly Akin to a Bird: Imagining New Jazz in Leningrad (2025) author(s): Sam Riley published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
    Drawing from samizdat literature, contemporaneous interviews, and musical recordings, this paper investigates the reception and creation of “new jazz” in late socialist Leningrad. Figures of interest are critic Efim Barban and pianist Sergei Kurekhin. In my analysis, I read an understanding of “freedom” in this instance as more than simply a freedom from state socialism and position these works in a larger discourse regarding “the emancipation” of European jazz from African-American hegemony. This analysis reveals that new jazz was an amorphous concept in its circulating from Barban to Kurekhin and back again, its meaning shifting between the aesthetically universal and culturally particular. This enlivens understandings of avantgarde jazz in the late Soviet imagination – most often framed as a part of the “imagined West” (following Yurchak 2006) – by illustrating that new jazz carried a more complicated imagination variously projected as a universal, a European, and a Soviet/Russian musical form (rather than an American importation).
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