The famous Russian jazz ensemble Uralskiy Dixieland turned 55 at the end of 2024.
A birthday celebration concert in honor of this significant date will be held on February 18 at the Chelyabinsk State Philharmonic, the home concert hall to the ensemble. Traditionally, friends of the orchestra — stars of Russian jazz from Moscow — attend these concerts. This time, trombonist Maxim Piganov‘s Dixieland band and jazz vocalist Karina Kozhevnikova will honor their colleagues on stage.
Is 55 years a lot or little for a jazz band? There are not many “centenarian” bands in the history of jazz. Among them, the Russian record-holder is Oleg Lundstrem’s Big Band, which has been around since 1934. If we consider that jazz in Russia celebrated its centennial recently, then the number 55 seems significant.
But perhaps it is more important than celebrating longevity to understand how to play in an archaic style, to preserve freshness and originality in such performances. Is it possible to say something new in this jazz “dialect”? Is this music as interesting to the public as it was a hundred years ago?
If we were transported back to the 1930s and asked the audience if they liked the Dixieland style, the answer would undoubtedly be positive. Back in the USSR, jazz was in great fashion.
Soviet jazz ensembles played in parks, restaurants and cinemas in every city. The term “Dixieland” itself, which refers to the type of orchestra playing music in the New Orleans jazz style that appeared in the 1930s, would become fixed in the Russian language later. In 1930 Moscow pianist Alexander Tsfasman, one of the most advanced jazzmen in the country, assembled his Dixieland ensemble Moscow Boys.
In the wake of the late 1940s-early ’50s New Orleans Renaissance that generated renewed interest in early forms of jazz, a new generation of Soviet jazzmen also felt a taste for Dixieland style. So in 1958, 21-year-old trumpeter Vladislav Grachev organized his Dixieland group in Moscow. In the 1960s, this band performed in the trendy Aelita youth cafe, which essentially served as a Moscow jazz club. Since 1966, his ensemble has been called Moscow Dixieland. In 1958, in Leningrad (which regained its historical name of St. Petersburg after the collapse of the USSR), trumpeter Vsevolod Korolev and clarinetist Alexander Usyskin created the Leningrad Dixieland ensemble.
During these years, teenager Igor Bourco, the future founder of Uralskiy Dixieland ensemble, got acquainted with the music of Louis Armstrong, listened to it on the so-called “ribs” or “bones”, as Soviet music fans called underground recordings made on celluloid X-rays that had popular behind the Iron Curtain, selling on the black market.
Young Igor liked very much how Armstrong improvised on the motif of the famous Russian song “Ochi Chyornye” (“Dark Eyes“). Another huge inspiration for Bourco was trumpeter Eddie Rosner, who received a nickname “White Louis Armstrong” in Europe. In 1920-1930s he was a soloist of the fashionable German jazz orchestra Weintraubs Syncopators, and in 1939, after the beginning of World War II, being Jewish, fled to Soviet Belarus and became the star of Soviet Jazz.
Igor Bourco decided to create his Uralskiy Dixieland in 1969, only 10 years after the Dixieland new wave arrived in the USSR. Not the least role in this was played by aforementioned Vsevolod Korolev (not the journalist/documentary filmmaker of the same name, sentenced in 2024 to three years of prison in for social media posts critical of the war in Ukraine) played a large role in this, as Igor was passionate about his music.
I think the meaning of “Uralskiy” is not obvious for a person who does not live in Russia and does not know the Russian language. Translated literally, the word refers to the Ural, a mountainous region (indicated below in dots) that lies exactly in the middle between the central part of Russia and Siberia.
Chelyabinsk, where Igor Bourco was born, is located in the south of the Urals — separated from Moscow by a distance of almost 2,000 km (1,200 miles). It is a major industrial center of the country, where more than a million people live.
Is it possible to describe 55 years of musical career in a few lines? From early on, Uralskiy Dixieland toured the entire Soviet Union. In the early 1980s, the band began traveling abroad: first to Eastern European countries, and after 1989 to Western countries also. In the 1990s it had a long contract in the Netherlands, thanks to which the group traveled all over Europe and performed at many prestigious jazz festivals.
Of course, the ensemble’s lineup has changed. Igor Bourco said that over the years about 200 musicians had passed through it, and sometimes provoked serious disagreements. For instance in the late 1970s, at the initiative of pianist Oleg Plotnikov, the ensemble experimented with then-fashionable jazz-rock. It has often had to accompany popular singers and play Soviet pop songs. But New Orleans jazz and the Dixieland style has remained the mainstay of the repertoire.
In 2000, the Uralskiy Dixieland ensemble, having completed a European contract, returned to Chelyabinsk, where Bourco, a naturally gifted producer, launched intense activity. He founded the International jazz festival “What a Wonderful World”, which was attended with joy by the stars of Russian and world jazz. His ensemble turned into the “backbone” jazz band of Chelyabinsk, the creative core of our jazz festival and many other important projects for the region.
Without a doubt Bourco has contributed greatly to the musical education of Chelyabinsk listeners. Traditional jazz, which he’s loved with all his heart, became the basis of the repertoire of his ensemble, his concerts and festivals. But moreover, it was thanks to Igor Bourco that Chelyabinsk jazz received municipal funding.
Uralsky Dixieland became the city’s jazz orchestra. The “What a wonderful world” festival was being held at the expense of city and region administration. The children’s jazz studio “Baby-Jazz” was opened in the city, the municipal big band Jazz-Academia was created. Since 2010, the Uralskiy Dixieland has been an ensemble of the Chelyabinsk State Philharmonic. The pace of its touring life has not decreased; the group performs on the philharmonic stage, travels all over Russia and outside it. The repertoire is still traditional jazz, as well as the pieces by Soviet jazzmen, and the audience welcomes this music with great enthusiasm.
In post-Soviet Russia, the Dixieland style is sincerely loved. Many cities have their own Dixieland bands. The Moscow Ragtime Band of trumpeter Konstantin Gevondyan, the Capella Dixie ensemble of trombonist Lev Lebedev from Moscow, the famous Leningrad Dixieland band and the Easy Winners Ragtime Band from St. Petersburg, the Kickin’ Jass Orchestra from Yekaterinburg, the Siberian Dixieland from Novosibirsk, and the Dixie Friends jazz ensemble from Rostov-on-Don all perform across the country, successfully. In 2024, Kazan, Russia’s oldest city, even hosted the grandiose DIXIE-BRICS festival, which brought together almost all the country’s Dixieland bands, as well as ensembles from Brazil, India, China, Iran, Ethiopia, Cuba and Turkey.
In 2018, Igor Bourco flew away to play in the celestial orchestra forever. Some doubted that his projects, including the Uralskiy Dixieland band, the festival “What a Wonderful World”, could continue to exist with the same success and scope without their charismatic frontman, the “golden trumpet of Russia”, as Bourco was called.
However, the worst fears melted away. The projects are now being led by Bourco’s creative heirs. Guitarist Valery Sundarev is the artistic director of Uralskiy Dixieland, and I serve as festival art director.
The band continues to tour. In 2022, it was the only orchestra from the Russian regions that joined leading Moscow and St. Petersburg jazz ensembles in a celebration concert honoring the centenary of jazz in Russia. The concert took place in Moscow at the Bolshoi Theater, where jazz was played for the first time. Uralskiy Dixieland regularly participates in major festivals directed by Russian jazz stars Anatoly Kroll and Igor Butman. It still maintains its status.
In recent years, its audience has become much younger. Maybe the reason for this is that jazz has become fashionable among young intellectuals in Russia? Or maybe listeners are still attracted to the pure emotion of early jazz, its joyful message?
When I was writing a book about jazz in Russia and the Urals, I interviewed Igor Bourco many times. One day I asked him, “Why do you all your life play Dixieland music?”
“I just like it,” he said.
