Exposition

A Butterfly Akin to a Bird: Imagining New Jazz in Leningrad (2025)

Sam Riley
Samuel Riley
open exposition

About this exposition

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).
typeresearch exposition
date02/10/2023
published03/04/2025
last modified03/04/2025
statuspublished
share statusprivate
copyrightSam Riley
licenseCC BY-NC-ND
languageEnglish
urlhttps://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2321668/2321669
doihttps://doi.org/10.22501/JSS.2321668
published inJournal of Sonic Studies
portal issue27. Issue 27


Copyrights

nameJSS Banner
copyrightJSS
licenseAll rights reserved
usagespicture

Comments are only available for registered users.