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

Sam Riley

“Aesthetically, avant-garde jazz is now much closer to academic music than it is to its immediate predecessor – hard bop,” wrote Leningrad jazz critic Efim Barban. “In this respect, new jazz can be compared to a butterfly, hatching from a caterpillar [gusenitsa] […], that has shed its old shell” (1977: 13, my translation here and throughout). This analogy comes from Barban’s landmark book, Черная музыка, белая свобода [Chernaia muzyka, belaia svoboda], or Black Music, White Freedom – a work published in samizdat^[1] that grappled with the avant-garde aesthetics of free jazz and its stylistic development, primarily in the United States. These words were written at a time when travel beyond the Soviet Union was impossible for most Soviet citizens and the only means of access were through imaginative engagement with objects that mediated across its borders. Indeed, as Alexei Yurchak explains, late Soviet engagement with avant-garde jazz joined a host of distant “elsewheres” in the creation of the Imaginary West (2006: 160): a psychic tourism which potentialized a non-Soviet identity within the bounds of late socialism. Among the wider formation of discursive elsewheres, Black Music, White Freedom imported a distant experimentalism to the Soviet world through a voracious and imaginative engagement with the “new thing’s” mediated traces. This was in a marked distinction from the authoritative discourse around it: breaking with the lines of Soviet officials of this period that denounced avant-garde composition – let alone avant-garde jazz (see, for example, Khrennikov 1979) – Barban made the case for how “the avant-garde, for the first time, create[d] the pre-requisites for the transformation of jazz into a truly high art” (1977: 13). Such a text reveals how musical imagination offers autonomy from wider hegemonic structures and facilitates the carving out of alternative identities and communities.

Yet, Barban felt a discomfort shared by many white critics in North America and Western Europe in the 1960s and 1970s: a perception that the development of free jazz brought with it the assertion that the style was an exclusively African American domain. This brings into focus how the musical imaginary has a multitude of possible articulations: the crystallization of new sociocultural identities and remaking of worlds anew is one, while the reproduction of existing sociocultural categories is another (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000: 36). This residual imaginary – one that this article aims to foreground – is often sidelined in current literature regarding (free) jazz in the Soviet Union. As David Rainbow suggests, ideologies of race in the Soviet Union “emerged as part of a larger global history of race in the modern world” (2019: 20), and close attention to the imagination of new jazz in Leningrad reveals that imagining the West sometimes brought with it Western racial discourses. Writing a decade earlier in the US, for example, Down Beat critic Gus Matzorkis had complained – in an article that would be cited in Barban’s book – that it was “one thing to acknowledge the central role Negro musicians have played in jazz, but quite another to conclude that jazz is Negro music” (1966: 22). In Barban’s theorization a similar issue is at stake, and his position can be parsed as he extends the analogy: “the butterfly, contrary to biology, is aesthetically akin to a bird, not the worm-like [cherv] form of a caterpillar” (1977: 13). New jazz, for Barban, was not Black music, but one with an elevating proximity to whiteness. Stylistic development in free jazz had offered, he wrote, “a completely different ideological and substantive horizon.” And reflecting on the jazz tradition that had come before it, he commented “it is unlikely that a caterpillar [gusenitsa] can judge what is accessible to a butterfly […]. The most significant talents of a jazz earthworm [dozhdevogo chervia] will not be able to transfer it to the aesthetic sphere where serious non-jazz music has long reigned and where, apparently, new jazz has gained access” (1977: 13).

In this article, I attend to the racial imaginary in the reception and creation of new jazz in Leningrad, to enhance an understanding of the late Soviet imagination. After outlining Black Music, White Freedom as a theorization of new jazz, I investigate what this discursive formation afforded in practice by looking to the music of Sergey Kuryokhin, an avant-garde pianist affiliated with Barban. By 1979, Barban and Kuryokhin had co-founded the Klub sovremennoi muzyki [Contemporary Music Club] to facilitate regular meetings for the performance, discussion, and theorization of contemporary music. Kuryokhin was taken under the Barban’s wing in these years, and Barban would play a formative role in Kuryokhin’s creative practice, so much so, that Barban has been referred to as the “ideological producer” (Kan 2020: 38, my translation here and throughout) of Kuryokhin’s first solo release, The Ways of Freedom (1981). Attending to this recording reveals that Kuryokhin’s work fits into the transnational discourse regarding the status of European free jazz in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, scholars have recently noted a distancing from Blackness by white critics and musicians (Drott 2011, Robinson 2005, Coleman 2021). For European critics in the 1970s in particular, this move amounted to a perceived "emancipation" of European musical culture from African American hegemony (Lewis 2004, Kisiedu 2020). Analysis of the discursive constellation around Kuryokhin’s recording reveals how the “freedom” connoted in The Ways of Freedom is one of “emancipation” from perceived African American hegemony as much as freedom from anything else (including state socialism).

In the following, I trace ideas about new jazz as they moved between Barban and Kuryokhin. Attending to this discourse reveals how a particular understanding of “Russian new jazz” took shape in the early 1980s – one that was imagined as both distinct from Western forms and resolutely European. In order to trace this history, I first detail the conceptual space of the Imaginary West and outline the “emancipation” narrative of free jazz in Europe. In my analysis of Black Music, White Freedom, I propose that Barban’s reading of free jazz imagines it as a political music of Black cultural nationalism, which is then reconfigured as a universalist praxis, resistant to bourgeois rationality (rather than simply against whiteness). I then show how Kuryokhin’s reading of free jazz erases African American influence and asserts – through both interview testimony and musical performance – a superiority of European new jazz. Finally, I suggest that Barban and Kuryokhin’s conception of Russian new jazz imagines the genre as a “national style”: for Barban, this aligns with an implied superiority of Soviet new jazz musicians within the transnational ecosystem of the avant-garde, while Kuryokhin reads Russian new jazz as a music rooted in European aesthetics yet inimitable to Western ways of thinking.

Imagining Elsewhere

“Black music, white freedom” – the title of Barban’s text – reflects a familiar interpretative framework within previous studies of (free) jazz in the Soviet Union. Scholarship suggests that “Black music” (i.e., jazz) functioned as a vehicle for the freedom of Soviet people under the strictures of state socialism. This is the meaning that cultural historian Irina Novikova employs directly, borrowing the title of Barban’s text for her article in which she argues that “jazz became a distinct countercultural space of resistance and dissent” due to improvisation’s “political counterpoint” to authoritative totality (2004: 74). For Novikova, Soviet listeners identified with the African American struggle for equality, symbolically identified in jazz, and transformed it into a “struggle against borders and constraints” (2004: 78).^[2] There are many reasons to interpret Barban’s reading of jazz along these lines: for example, Barban has suggested that Soviet jazz provided a “spiritual resistance,” as its late socialist audience identified this music “with a Western way of life, opposing Soviet reality and the values of official art” (1985b: 12).

Alexei Yurchak’s rich ethnography of late socialism, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (2006), is ostensibly opposed to this argument. If there is one central tenet to Yurchak’s work, it is that reading all practices that diverged from Soviet policy simply as “dissent” reinforces a binary view of state socialism that misrepresents the lived experiences of the last Soviet generation. Instead, Yurchak argues for a nuanced understanding of individuals living “simultaneously inside of and out of” Soviet reality, non-reducible to a simple binary politics of opposition and support (Yurchak 2006: 146). 

Yurchak details that, rather than engaging with and being defined by Soviet discourses, Kuryokhin’s milieu intentionally “remain[ed] oblivious to it, imagining [themselves] elsewhere” through a stated “disinterest” in politics (2006: 128, 145). This practice of withdrawing from official politics constituted a form of political action – one that operated outside the binary logic of state support and state opposition (Yurchak 2008: 212). For example, drawing on the distinction between pravda (political, binary truths) and istina (spiritual, deep, artistic truths) (Cushman 1995: 95, Fürst 2017: 8), Yurchak summarized that performing political disinterest “was not a nihilistic position, but a kind of politics that refused heroic ‘clear truths’ [pravda]. This was a politics of ‘deep truths’ [istina] that were grounded in deterritorialized spaces and times” (2006: 157). Thus, Yurchak differs from Novikova, understanding jazz not as a form of dissent but as a practice of deterritorialization. However, with regard to the meaning of jazz in the Soviet Union, Yurchak’s nuanced account merges with Novikova’s in suggesting that “Black music” offers a source for freedom from the state – albeit through a different strategy than direct resistance. In his theorization, jazz contributed to a site of freedom within Soviet borders in the symbolic space of the “Imaginary West” (2006).

According to Yurchak, the Imaginary West was constructed by late Soviet citizens through imagining beyond the Soviet Union’s western borders to “introduce into Soviet reality a new imaginary dimension that was neither Western nor Soviet,” thereby producing a similarly deterritorialized positionality (Yurchak 2006: 203; see also Toomistu 2016). Avant-garde jazz was one of these imported Western symbols and practices that illustrated this imagination (Yurchak 2006: 164). The possibility to frame jazz as a “good” internationalist genre, detached from “bad” cosmopolitan categorization, opened a paradoxical space for Soviet listeners to engage with foreign music without it necessarily seeming incompatible with authoritative policy (Yurchak 2006; Tsipursky 2016). Yurchak describes how this ambiguity allowed jazz fans in the 1950s, including a young Barban, the freedom to listen to American music in what Barban described as “the same way it was listened to in America” (in Feiertag 1999: 81, Yurchak 2006). Thus, to Yurchak, jazz brought with it a freedom from authoritative control by creating an “internal ‘elsewhere’” (2006: 162) for Soviet listeners.

The phrase “Black music, white freedom” has an alternative, second meaning. This meaning is one that was, at the time of its writing, widespread across European jazz writing in relation to the perceived “emancipation” of European jazz from (African) American hegemony (Lewis 2004; Schuiling 2019; Kisiedu 2020). In the 1960s, as composer and musicologist George Lewis (2004) explains, European jazz was in the throes of an identity crisis, driven by the perception that American improvisers dominated the jazz field and held a hegemonic position. As a result, European musicians and critiques sought to develop a purportedly culturally specific sound. The year that Barban finished writing his monograph – 1977 – marked a pivotal point in European jazz criticism. This was the year in which German critic Joachim-Ernst Berendt named European jazz (starting from 1961) die Emanzipation – a periodization that denoted European musicians’ escape from (African) American musical hegemony with the emergence of new European jazz ([1977] 1980: 217 in Kisiedu 2020: 9). As Lewis explains: “if ‘American models’ of jazz were effectively African American models, then in Berendt’s re-presentation of the emancipation narrative, Europeans became Spivak’s voiceless subalterns” (2004). Berendt’s terminology had a significant impact on German jazz history and was widely adopted in subsequent years. 

A decade later, jazz musician and historian Ekkehard Jost reflected on “the Emancipation” as the moment when European musicians “simultaneously began to detach themselves from the almost obligatory influence of their former American models” through a “liberation from the structural principles of traditional jazz” (Jost 1987: 12 in Schuiling 2019: 55). Although contemporary work in jazz history has sought to decenter the binary logics that underpin such perspectives (see Kisiedu 2020; Schuiling 2019; Lewis 2004), contemporaneous pockets of discourse in Europe sought to carve out localized identities of jazz experimentalism – which, this article details, also occurred in late socialist Leningrad. Under this paradigm, “white freedom” comes to mean freedom of white musical production from African American domination; a freedom for Europeans to join the larger network of free jazz and improvised music without being seen as pale imitators of African American music. It is this meaning – a “white freedom” from Black musical ownership – that dominates Barban and Kuryokhin’s discourse on new jazz – an understanding that has, so far, been absent from the literature on jazz in the Soviet Union, where the topic has only been analyzed within an exclusively Soviet context rather than situated in a more complicated transnational network that included a disavowal of Afrocentric creativity.

It is not my intention to say that Soviet free jazz did not create these sites of freedom from state control through an imported Western semiotic.^[3] Rather, it is my contention that free jazz in the Soviet Union is not reducible to this aspect alone. Thinking about Soviet jazz as part of a larger push towards an identity for free jazz divorced from Black experimentalism (i.e., a “white freedom”) leads to questioning the adequacy of the “Imaginary West” to explain the plural meanings that free jazz carried. Rather than simply framing the Soviet reception of free jazz as an importation of an (African) American style that offered an imagined space (in)distinct to Soviet discourses, free jazz’s meanings were more complex. The imagination, as Science and Technology Studies scholar Sheila Jasanoff reminds us, can function as both a “glue and a solvent” that may both reinforce existing power dynamics as well as dissolve them (2015: 29). Musical imaginaries can be productive for the creation of both “emergent and labile” identities (in this case, the carving out of a non-Soviet position within Soviet reality) while also “marking and reinforcing” existing problematized sociocultural categorizations (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000: 35-36). As will become clear through detailing Barban and Kuryokhin’s discourse of new jazz, “imagining the West” did not prevent Othering imaginaries from forming around, for example, Black musicians.

The Universality of Free Jazz

Free jazz appeared to many critics as an afront to what were perceived as universal harmonious features of the jazz tradition in the 1960s. Kwami Coleman’s recent study of free jazz in Down Beat magazine, for example, illustrates how “detractors of the ‘new thing’” found that its amorphous, heterophonic sounds “could only be explained in the racialized terms of black grievances, not universal values” (2021: 276). For critics such as these, the writings of Archie Shepp and Amiri Baraka that pointed toward continued racial injustice meant that free jazz appeared “as a turn against white patronage itself” (2021: 291) in a way that denied its rhetorical humanism. Yet, this was not the only response available. Instead, Barban sought to assert a new kind of universalism for free jazz, one that challenged the racial exclusivity he heard in certain discourse, which positioned the “black grievances” of free jazz within a larger, universal, struggle.

Amiri Baraka’s Blues People (1963a), a study of Black music in America, was influential as one of the first endeavors to theorize the interactions between race, politics, and music. Baraka, then known as LeRoi Jones, was a writer and activist who, in the 1960s, became the foremost spokesperson for the “new thing” in magazines like Down Beat, where later he advocated for free jazz as a manifestation of Black cultural nationalism. Due to his prominence in the American press, Baraka’s politics were perceived by many white readers and critics in the United States as representative of the voices of all Black free jazz practitioners – ascribing an understanding of the Black avant-garde as an expression of a monolithic cultural nationalism – when, in reality, Afrodiasporic avant-gardists held a variety of political views that were anything but homogenous (Monson 2007; Robinson 2005; Coleman 2021; see also Spivak 1988).

The tendrils of Baraka’s writing extended far beyond the United States, and Blues People became a go-to explanatory text for many European jazz listeners who were trying to comprehend the unfamiliar sounds and amorphous structures of free jazz. In France, for example, Baraka has been described as the only critic that “really mattered” (Lewis 2008: 235). Indeed, in studying sonic culture of the 1960s, Eric Drott finds that French critics, when looking for a new criterion to evaluate the seemingly incomprehensible music of free jazz, found the answer in Baraka’s thesis that jazz was an expression of Black social consciousness: “As it [Black consciousness] had changed in response to economic and political forces, so too had the music” (2011: 120). However, for myriad reasons – including the justification of white French performance of the style – some critics expanded Baraka’s political encoding as not only the response of Afrodiasporic subjects to racial oppression but as a political vehicle for resisting exploitation on a wider plane, “between capitalism and its victims” (Drott 2011: 133, citing Carles and Comolli 2000 [1971]: 29).

Baraka’s writing suggested that free jazz was an expression of Black social consciousness as an improvised music that provided an alternative to the oppressive logic of white, capitalist American society (1963a) and – controversially – argued that Black music, including experimental jazz, drew from a common trait of Blackness, “the blues impulse” (1967: 180). In one sense, then, this thesis resonated with aspects of the – albeit ambiguous – attitudes of Soviet officialdom to jazz music: as Yurchak outlined, the possibility remained for American jazz to be framed as compatible with Soviet ideals if it were figured as a response to the oppressions of bourgeois capitalism (2006). As such, it is perhaps unsurprising that Baraka’s writing (which had achieved global influence by this time) found its way into the Soviet Union as a resource to explain the meanings, criteria, and function of (new) jazz music.

To give one example, Soviet musicologist Valentina Konen drew from Baraka’s thesis to explain how the “savage music” of blues and jazz that “so blatantly broke away from the canons of European classics” had suddenly become, in the twentieth-century, acceptable to the ears of those with a “European musical psychology” (1984: 13, my translation here and throughout).^[4] Citing the “eminent cultural historian, writer, musician and critic LeRoi Jones” and motivated by her reading of Blues People, Konen found that African and European descendants in America had a “fundamentally different psychology” which connoted an appreciation of different styles of music (1984: 16). As such, she suggested, there was a conundrum in white listening habits in the twentieth century: if European listening was fundamentally different to African American aesthetic values, why had Afrodiasporic musical styles – such as jazz – become so readily enjoyed by white listeners? (1984: 17). Her solution to this problem was another form of expansion: just as Baraka argued Black music was an expression of Black social consciousness, so too was European music an expression of its own underlying psychology (1984: 17). Through her readings of musical modernism, she found evidence that the European musical psychology of the twentieth century had also broken away from the canons of European classics – characterized by a move to atonality, contra-standard structures, and other innovations. In this way, both “European” and “African” psychology in the modern era converged towards a shared aesthetic trajectory. For Konen, jazz and the blues were “the first phenomenon to respond to the demands of the new psychology of the twentieth century within the framework of mass light-genre art [massovoe legkozhanrovoe iskusstvo]” which, like high modernism, “reflected typical features of the new in the artistic psychology of our contemporaries” (1984: 269). A similar move appears in Barban’s scholarship.

It is unclear whether Barban engaged directly with Baraka’s writing or encountered his work through other critics – perhaps others also featured in the pages of Down Beat – or through another circuit of mediation. Barban did, however, find Baraka to be the “ideologist of black music” (1978a: 3, my translation here and throughout), and thus Baraka’s controversial claims were applied to all new jazz practitioners.^[5] Barban argued that the “creators of new black music” – here, Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, Baraka and “many other practitioners and theorists” – held that new jazz could not be “analyzed on the basis of Western culture” (1977: 18). In Barban’s view, these creators viewed free jazz only “as a new aesthetic stage in the development of black racial consciousness” while “the problems of both national and class consciousness” were ignored (1977: 18). Similarly, Barban suggested Black new jazz practitioners believed there was a “jazz inferiority of most white musicians” due to racial difference and “also question[ed] the adequate perception of this music by a listener of another race” (1977: 18).^[6]

Some of these assertions align with readings of Baraka’s work and hint toward Barban’s motivations. As Baraka wrote in “Jazz and the White Critic,” a “native knowledge and understanding of the underlying philosophies and local cultural references” were required for the adequate criticism of jazz – a knowledge lacking, he argued, in mid-1960s white criticism (1963b: 34). Baraka’s critique took on a monolithic character in white anglophone reception of free jazz in the 1960s (Robinson 2005). As Jason Robinson has illustrated, this significantly shaped the discourses of Down Beat magazine where critics such as Gus Matzorkis – who appears later in Barban’s arguments – reacted to assertions of what they perceived as racial exceptionalism. “Today’s angry young doctrinaires,” Matzorkis argued, had leapt too readily to conclude that “only Negroes can play great jazz” (1966: 21). Significantly, Matzorkis namedropped Baraka as “one of the ideological leaders of the militant doctrinaires” (1966: 22). And, in his argument against Baraka, Matzorkis appealed to a color-blind universalism: “there is no ‘Negro-ness,’ there is no ‘whiteness’” (1966: 22).

Just as Barban’s writing resonated with Matzorkis’s in the reactionary diagnosis of claims for racial exceptionalism, his response was similar. Barban set out to theorize new jazz as a universal musical language. Barban disagreed with any need to belong to a specific cultural group in order to perform, understand, or comprehend free jazz. He maintained that the “new jazz language” emerged as a “consequence of the particular socio-cultural dynamics of the African American ethnic group”, though this did not preclude the “functional use of the language of new jazz in any social and cultural situation similar to the Negro minority in the United States” including “virtually any musical non-conformist movement” (1978a: 42). As a result of this expansion, Barban argued that

we can perceive the language of new jazz not as a specific musical jargon of a particular segment of the African American ethnic group, but as a means of communication suitable for a wider socio-cultural community associated with diverse national traditions. (1978b: 43, my translation here and throughout)

Illustrating his universalization thesis, he suggested that just as Baroque music originated as a particularly Italian phenomenon that became the dominant musical style of Western art music, so too had African American jazz become a language beyond any particular origin. Hence, the comprehending listener need not understand the specifics of racial oppression but simply be an “improvisatory listener” who possessed a “serious type of perception,” an “open mind,” and, perhaps most importantly, a familiarity with both jazz and European classical forms (1978b: 48-49). Positioning the transgressive nature of new jazz within a broader universal framework, Barban – like the French critics in Drott’s account – argued that free jazz improvisation was not a racially specific phenomenon but rather the “antithesis to bourgeois rational consciousness,” a defining negativity of the avant-garde more broadly (1978b: 42). 

Here, “bourgeois rationalism” functions as a quasi-Adornian construct and seems to refer to a perceived logic of aesthetic commodification, encapsulated in the easily digestible sounds of commercial music. In Barban’s prose, popular music is understood as a “tool for manipulating the listening consciousness” (1978a: 50), whereas “the content of any serious music (in particular, new jazz) always retains a critical pathos” (1978a: 51).^[7] Following an Adornian reading, this implies that free improvisation (with its often irregular structures and dissonant movement) joins contemporary avant-garde composition as a music opposed to the “bourgeois” logic of commercial pop music and the culture industry. It is hard not to hear an echo of Adorno throughout Barban’s writing. Indeed, Adorno serves as a key reference for various analytic points that Barban hopes to illustrate with regard to new jazz. For example, Barban cites Adorno’s arguments from Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1962) pertaining to the self-referential form of the Second Viennese School to illustrate (including a passing reference to the probabilistic cybernetics of Norbert Wiener [Barban 1977: 131]) how new jazz accorded a high aesthetic value to the structural indeterminacy of free jazz as a self-reflective music (Barban 1977: 128-134).

Where Barban’s analysis differs from Adorno’s, of course, is that Adorno attended only to a superficial selection of commercial jazz and deemed it a superficial music – with a wide array of the style far from his purview. In this sense, Barban updates Adorno’s philosophy to take free jazz seriously. This is a move not dissimilar to Max Paddison’s “attempt to rescue the baby with the bath water” and salvage Adorno’s critique for “self-reflective popular music” (1982: 201, 218). Yet, Barban agrees with Adorno’s critiques when Black Music, White Freedom turns to older forms of jazz music: criticism of (traditional) jazz as a facile music of false consciousness go unchallenged (Adorno 1989; see Gracyk 1992).^[8] New jazz, however, escapes such criticism, as the forms of traditional and new jazz – their “architectonics” – belong to “different aesthetic systems that use a different language” (1977: 129-130). Where jazz runs the risk of regressive complicity, its vanguard forms – for Barban – offer inherent social critique.^[9]

Indeed, Black Music, White Freedom positions new jazz not just as the vanguard of the jazz field, but of music in general. For Barban, new jazz represented the forefront of the avant-garde: unlike the jazz that came before it, new jazz was not limited to “aesthetics prescriptions” such as modes or conventional harmony (1977: 129). And, unlike the cold rationalism of the “serious” avant-garde (à la Stockhausen and Xenakis), it brought with it the embodied, carnivalesque spontaneity of improvisation (1978a: 36). Thus, in Barban’s reading, improvisation succeeded where European serialism had not: it provided “the combination of the creator and performer in one person” through its spontaneous composition (1977: 133-4). In this way, it held on to the directness of the countercultural gestures and symbols of pop music without falling into the traps of commercialism and "hedonistic ecstasy” (1978a: 46). As he put it: “free jazz gave birth to a new specific structure of aesthetic perception, the main feature of which was the combination of emotional and sensual imagery with a high intelligibility of the musical idea” (1978a: 54). For Barban, free jazz was a music that combined the “direct, elemental spontaneity [stikhiinost] of jazz” with the “intellectual rather than sensual type of intuition” found in European new music (1978a: 36). 

Barban’s appeal for new jazz, then, was seen to meet the challenge posed by Adornian critical theory. Moreover, theorizing new jazz as a synthesis of the emotional and the cerebral was key in his argument for understanding new jazz in universalist terms while countering the claim that free jazz was racially exclusive. It is here that another node is added to Black Music, White Freedom’s theoretical constellation: Négritude, which Barban drew principally from the thinking of Léopold Sédar Senghor.

Négritude was a decolonization movement associated primarily (though not exclusively) with the poet-politicians Léopold Sédar Senghor, Leon Damas, and Aimé Césaire (Rabaka 2015, Wilder 2015, Reilly 2020). The shared goal of these writers was the overcoming of colonialism and “unthinking” empire (Wilder 2015:7). In mainstream Soviet perspectives, Senghor’s thinking and writings were perceived ambivalently. As recent research by Paul Betts and Radina Vučetić, for example, notes: “Eastern European cultural elites rejected Senghor’s pan-Africanism as racist and exclusionary, not least because they were the ones being rejected as outsiders” (2022: 169). Yet, it is worth understanding, as Gary Wilder outlines, that Négritude was more than simply “an affirmative theory of Africanity,” as it is often framed, in that it aimed to provide a “critical theory of modernity” writ large (Wilder 2015: 8). And further it is necessary to appreciate that Négritude took on a distinct form for each of its founders, who manifest divergent strategies and, ultimately, a “different pursuit of goals” (Rabaka 2015: 203). 

We see a distinction, for example, through different approaches to ontology. Senghor’s Négritude, as I discuss further below, concerned Black being – what it meant phenomenologically to live as Black, but equally, what it ontologically meant to be Black (Wilder 2015: 51).  It is this aspect that fuels charges of racial essentialism in critiques of Senghorian philosophy and a key demarcation from Césaire’s writing. Indeed, Césaire’s position is one that explicitly states that “Négritude […] is not a philosophy. Négritude is not metaphysics. It is a way of living history within history” (Césaire in Bachir Diagne 2011: 34; see also Césaire 2000: 51). Rather than attempting to theorize Black ontology, Césaire’s critical/theoretical project has been described by Gary Wilder as “a poetics of clairvoyant futurism,” a transgressive project of imagining – and attempting to enact – an alternative humanism premised on “unconditional equality” (Wilder 2015: 33-37). The aim was to attain a “concrete universality,” avoiding the pitfalls of both essentialism and abstract universalism.^[10] As Césaire articulated upon his resignation from the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1956: “I am not burying myself in narrow particularism. But neither do I want to lose myself in emaciated universalism. There are two ways to lose oneself: walled in the particular or dilution from the universal” (Césaire 2010 [1956]: 152). Césaire’s double critique becomes particularly relevant as Barban’s engagement with Négritude is illustrated further.

For Barban, Négritude was the affirmative theory of Africanity. This is key to Barban’s argument here, as he asserted that there was “no doubt” that the philosophy of Senghor and Césaire was “borrowed by the apologists of new black music” for extolling the idea of “African American exceptionalism” (1977: 18). Of course, such ideas where unlikely to have been borrowed wholesale – given the divergent strategies proposed by Senghor and Césaire – and the framework that appears in Barban’s writing appears starkly Senghorian. A highly illustrative example of this is the quotation Barban used as an epigraph: “the spiritual beginning of the Negro goes into his sensuality, into his physiology” (1978a: 1). This alludes to one of Senghor’s formulas – oft noted as defining his position – which offers an essentialized division between the “Black soul” and European reason: “Emotion is Negro, as reason is Hellenic” (Senghor 1964: 288; see Bachir Diagne 2010). This marks a key distinction between Senghorian and Césairean positions – a demarcation noted, for example, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Black Orpheus, which contrasts Senghor’s objective to Césaire’s subjective conception ([1948] 2001: 119).^[11] From the perspective of contemporary critical race theory, Reiland Rabaka argues, Négritude in its Senghorian form “solidifies and ossifies African culture,” offering only a static essentialism (2015: 204) and attempting to describe, as Frantz Fanon wrote, “not a Negro but the Negro” (1986: 127).^[12] Given its distinct philosophical position, Césaire’s conception of Négritude does not fall prey to the same critique.  

Furthermore, I am taking the time to dwell on this topic because Black Music, White Freedom is an important source that is unduly neglected in histories of Soviet experimentalism. It has, however, been cited as evidence of how Négritude was imported into Soviet discourse, providing a theoretical foundation for a perceived “authenticity” of jazz music when performed by Black musicians (see Ritter 2013, 2019). As I hope to illustrate, this framing does not fully capture the way Senghor’s ideas function in Barban’s prose. Rather than citing Senghor to make specific claims about the authenticity of jazz through Blackness, Barban uses Senghor’s concept of Négritude to “check the veracity of the claims by the creators of free jazz about the decisive influence of ethnicity in the perception of their music,” realizing this by comparing the elements of new jazz against the criteria that “Négritude sees as the quintessence of the Negro soul” (1978a: 1). It is a test that results in an argument against race-based authenticity for new jazz performance.

Barban’s employment of Senghorian Négritude serves as a foil to claims of Black exclusivity that he perceived to align with the politics of “creators of new black music” (1978a: 1). Yet Barban’s inferred connection between new Black music and Négritude is undermined when one examines the work of the writers and musicians that he explicitly refers to. For example, Baraka’s work contains critique of the essentialism in Senghor’s thinking: Baraka aligned himself, in his own words, with Cesairé’s “fluid definition of blackness” as opposed to Senghor’s “static cultural essence” that resulted, he writes, in the “shameless bootlicking of French imperialism” (1991: 322-33).^[13] On this point, then, Barban’s target of new jazz practitioners (which is already abstracted and homogenized) are homogenized further, their ideas/positions merged within a narrow framing of Senghorian Négritude. 

Starting with Senghor’s claims that African American consciousness has a fundamentally “sensual character” (Barban 1978a: 1; see also Senghor 1962) – something distinct from bourgeois rationalism – Black Music, White Freedom compares Black essences to new jazz.^[14] Barban argues in each case that, though resonant with Black aesthetics, each feature ascribed as a unique Black essence is also found in European experimentation (1978a: 6-20). One such “essence” is the “complex polyrhythm,” which Barban argued was both “the main principle in African music making” and of “contemporary European aesthetics” (1978a: 19). As such, he claims: “not all the components of the new Black music stem entirely from African aesthetics. Some elements, in particular its main element of rhythm, turned out to be not so Black after all” (1978a: 19-20). So, Barban suggested, although new jazz functioned for the political purposes of African American exceptionalism, the politics of new jazz was not necessarily exclusive to racial identity politics. Black Music, White Freedom therefore employs Négritude as a means to undermine (through a shaky logic of connection) an argument (largely constructed by Barban) about free jazz’s racial exclusivity.

While it seeks to separate new jazz from cultural particularism, Black Music, White Freedom concurrently makes an effort to establish and maintain a sense of the style’s politically encoded radicalism. The solution in Barban’s writing comes from a widening of what the music pushes against: rather than acting to impose whiteness, new jazz expresses a universalized humanist politics. Barban writes that “free improvisation (its ecstasy, spontaneity, refusal-to-be-standardized [nenormativnost]) guarantees the personal and ideological authenticity of music” (1978b: 5). This “authentic ideology” is described as existing on a deeper plane than consciousness; it is not the “external ideology” – i.e., a person’s intentionally chosen politics – but an immanent ideology (1978b: 6). So, in principle, Barban maintains that free jazz is a praxis that may “express not just the racially specific, but the universal” (1978b: 8). Citing Gus Matzorkis (1966), he asserts that new jazz was able “to express ‘the deep truth about the situation of the person’” (1978b: 8). Improvisation’s ability to express the “existential issues of man” is “precisely the guarantee of the universality of free jazz” (1978a: 49). For Barban – who explicitly notes that “there are many white jazzmen within this genre of music” – new jazz improvisation was not exclusively an affirmation of Africanity but contained a resistance to bourgeois logics. As he put it:

This deep inner craving for African culture and the “African idea” is caused not only by the explosion of racial identity, the need for racial self-affirmation, but mainly by an attempt to find a solid foundation, solid ground for total criticism of modern post-industrial American society: its social, cultural, and political structures. (1978a: 28)

There are elements of Barban’s text that serve as rejoinders to the structures that have excluded Black-associated music from the wider history of musical experimentalism. As a manifesto for new jazz, Black Music, White Freedom prioritizes improvisation over systems of indeterminacy – a position that overturns traditional hierarchies in experimental music. Moreover, certain aspects of his critique prompt a reconsideration of experimental music as a de-essentialized musical form that finds formal parallels between European and Afrodiasporic experimentalisms (see Lewis 1996, Kim 2012, Piekut 2014). Though such reparative readings may emerge in response to Barban’s writing, the various issues of the racial imagination in Black Music, White Freedom cannot go unnoticed. Césaire’s double critique – of both essentialism and universalism – is pertinent to Barban’s misreading of new jazz politics. If Barban attempts to argue against a perspective of Senghorian essentialism, his solution is the emaciated universal. 

As Jason Robinson argues, “[t]he de-essentializing of this music is not meant to produce a bland relativism that does away with ‘race and ethnicity’” but should instead draw attention to the “voices of the musicians themselves to explain their diverse intentions, beliefs and dreams” (Robinson 2005).^[15] Barban’s call for a universalized reading of new jazz, as outlined above, arose through subsuming plural perspectives of Black voices under a single monolith (a Barakian caricature), which is in turn defined exclusively through Senghorian Négritude. The result is a call for universality as a rhetorical device to carve out a space for European musicians, an emancipation discourse that comes into existence through a negation of cultural particularism.

Barban thus positions new jazz as a universal genre, inherently resistant to the bourgeois rationalism of commercial culture. Although Black Music, White Freedom recognized that the style originated within a Black American context, it was a form that – as Barban analogized – “can be compared to a butterfly that has shed its old shell. The butterfly, contrary to biology, is aesthetically akin to a bird, not a worm” (1977: 13). New jazz had broken with all jazz that came before it, undergone a metamorphosis and cast off any biological limitations: as the style embraced increasing complexity, it became a genre with an increasing proximity to whiteness. In opposition to what he portrayed as a simplistic insistence on Black exceptionalism, he asserted – by deploying Senghorian essentialism as a stand-in for the plural positions of Black practitioners – that new jazz was a style that was “not so black” (1978a: 20).

While Yurchak’s description of the Imaginary West helps us to understand the disidentification from Soviet reality through the transportation of Western musical signifiers into Soviet imagination (2006), it does not quite describe the full picture of free jazz’s various transformations in Barban’s reception. A full description of Barban’s new jazz imaginary includes an Othering gaze of Black-associated music culture. In this understanding we can discern the hallmarks of Orientalism: the European projection of monolithic/homogenous understanding of alterity that reads the Other exclusively through materio-discursive echoes without imminent interaction (Said 1978: 63; see also Weheliye 2005). Without hearing the heterogenous voices of Black experimentalism, Barban summoned a homogenized discourse – an exaggerated Barakian caricature conflated with Senghorian essentialism – conjuring an imagined geography that erased the heterogeneity of positions within African American music and its plural politics.

A European School

If Barban’s writing articulates a certain theoretical framework for new jazz, how did this figuration play out in practice? Perhaps the answer to this question is best approached through listening to the music that Sergei Kuryokhin recorded during this period. In this section, I turn to the musician’s reading and concurrent performing of new jazz, encapsulated in the record The Ways of Freedom (1981). It is worth noting that Barban’s theory and Kuryokhin’s practice are biographically intertwined: both critic and musician would meet regularly from the late 1970s and onwards (Kan 2020: 22), attend the same symposiums (Semenov 1978), and – perhaps most notably – ran the Contemporary Music Club together. Meeting as often as weekly between 1979-1982, the club provided a space for lectures, discussion, and performance of contemporary music where the aesthetic developments of new jazz and free improvisation took center stage (Malev 1979; Kan 2020).

Where Black Music, White Freedom attempts to carve out space for white musicians within a perceivably homogenized discursive field, Kuryokhin’s reading of new jazz foregrounds their emancipation. To the pianist, new jazz was an entirely emancipated domain in which white musicians were imagined as the avant-garde’s superior creators. In Kuryokhin’s conceptualization, Barban’s universalism slides away from equity. This reveals that universality does not necessarily end exclusion. As jazz scholar Kwami Coleman, drawing on the work of Paul Gilroy (1991), elucidates: “marginalized subjects remain alienated because power hierarchies, based on race, class, and other facets of identity, undergird all social relations” (2021: 275). This failure of universalization was expressed in Kuryokhin’s performance: where Barban’s argument suggested that jazz prior to the 1960s lacked value, Kuryokhin added that contemporaneous Black jazz musicians had returned to this state. Kuryokhin’s conception of new jazz attributes the avant-garde mantle of “high art” – the musical frontier – exclusively to white musicians, framing their assumed transcendence of jazz music’s Black signifiers as a marker of artistic superiority, perpetuating a Eurocentric perspective.

In July 1978, Kuryokhin sat with Barban to answer questions about the state of new jazz piano for the samizdat jazz journal Kvadrat. Kuryokhin’s focus during the discussion was the place of European musicians in new jazz and his own position in the network. Kuryokhin surveyed a genealogy of jazz pianists and made two divisions. The first was in dividing modern jazz pianists into two genealogies, or “two lines of development” in jazz piano (1978: 40, my translation here and throughout). The first, starting from Art Tatum and ending with Keith Jarrett, was described by Kuryokhin as “essentially only a variation of the same idea” where “the aesthetic and ideological limitations of these musicians can be seen by any layman” (1978: 40). The second, starting with Cecil Taylor and including Kuryokhin himself, represents new jazz: these musicians “broadened the range and scope of pianistic thinking tremendously” by alerting the listener to the limits of old jazz and aiding in its “deconstruction” with extended techniques and musical features beyond the “jazz tradition” (1978: 40).

The second boundary Kuryokhin established in this interview was drawn within this nexus of new jazz pianists, between Black and white practitioners:

In general, now new jazz is clearly divided into two schools: black people [chernye] turn to their roots, while Europeans are introducing their own culture into free jazz, which is based on post-Webernian music. All of this also applies to pianists, where this division is clearly visible. Of course, I myself belong to the European school. (1978: 41).

Kuryokhin explains that his reasoning for this was because European musicians, following chief exemplar Alexander Von Schlippenbach, “brought new elements to jazz that [were] unheard of in America.” From this, he argued that white performers had surpassed their African American counterparts because “Europeans have turned out to be less restricted aesthetically, nationally, racially” (1978: 41). “Because of this,” Kuryokhin concludes, “Europeans have become the exponents of the global spirit, the world’s musical culture. This is precisely where their avant-gardism (progressiveness) lies” (1978: 42). Kuryokhin would later repeat the same perspective in an interview with Aleksandr Kan in 1981: “black musicians, […] have gone backwards. More and more, they play music that is closer to bebop than to avant-garde. One can’t say that of white jazzmen” (1985 [1981]: 106). In support of his answer, he stated that “the ‘serious’ avant-garde is an essential part of European culture, noticeably influencing almost exclusively white free jazz” (1985: 106).^[16]

In a recent biography, Aleksandr Kan reflects on the 1981 conversation with Kuryokhin in relation to his apparent shift toward nationalist politics in the mid-1990s. This allegiance – though perhaps not a sincere ideological commitment but an extension of his techniques of ironizing wider culture (see Yurchak 2011) – was most explicitly marked by a performance in support of Aleksandr Dugin’s 1995 election campaign for State Duma as well as his wider interactions with the National Bolshevik Party (NBP) between 1995-1996.^[17] Kan articulates how Kuryokhin’s interaction with the NBP brought him towards discourses that were “openly nationalistic, state-orientated, anti-western and anti-liberal” (2020: 170). To Kan, this stood in marked contrast to Kuryokhin’s pre-perestroika position, where he and his broader milieu regarded “Westernism [… as] the unconditional and unqualified norm” (2020: 164). And yet, revisiting this early interview, Kan notes Kuryokhin’s own assertion: “I’m a national chauvinist, you know” (Kuryokhin 1985: 107; Kan 2020: 50). 

When Kan first heard this assertion in the early 1980s, such a claim appeared to be nothing more than shocking hyperbole. However, in hindsight, Kuryokhin’s assertion takes on a different tone: a foreboding of Kuryokhin’s “extremely engaged alliance” with the NBP (Kan 2020: 51). In the following, I extend Kan’s dilemma by examining the racialized aesthetic discourse in this interview and Kuryokhin’s broader performances, which problematize a straightforward dichotomy between Westernism and nationalism. Instead, I suggest that elements of cultural nationalism were already at play, particularly through a perceived sense of “emancipation” from (African) American cultural domination.

Kuryokhin’s statements regarding Black experimentalism are fundamentally at odds with the notion of a universal praxis of improvisation. Perhaps the most obviously problematic assertion in Kuryokhin’s presentation is the spurious aesthetic value, or aesthetic demerit, he assigns to performers returning to ‘their origins,’ depending on the performer’s race. For Kuryokhin, Black experimentalism referencing bebop, for example, is read as a demerit, a regressive step. Yet, when a white musician references “their own culture” (perhaps Kuryokhin had in mind a pointillistic Webernian flourish), this is imagined as an innovative development in new jazz practice.

This conception illustrates what sound scholar Marie Thompson (2017) terms a “white aurality” – a positioning of European avant-garde sonic practices as detached from history and unanchored from any situated position. Such an approach reinforces the de facto superiority of whiteness. Additionally, it exposes an “oxymoronic” perspective of the Black avant-garde. Discussing Black radical aesthetics in the US, Fred Moten finds that “[t]he idea of a black avant-garde exists, as it were, oxymoronically – as if black, on the one hand, and avant-garde, on the other hand, each depends on the exclusion of the other,” highlighting the Eurocentric assumption the avant-garde is “necessarily not black” (2003: 32). Since new jazz is categorized as artistic progress, it becomes attainable only to white performers influenced by the “serious avant-garde.” Such categorization perpetuates a Eurocentric perspective in which Black music (when performed by Black musicians) is valued only in its proximity to whiteness (the avant-garde a priori).

Simultaneously, Kuryokhin’s perspective suggest that referencing Black music itself does not necessarily demerit the avant-garde: rather, it is only a demerit when a Black musician performs Black music. For Kuryokhin, new jazz was defined by its transcendence of prior limitations, presenting a pioneering musical frontier: a status that, in his view, is only attainable in relation to whiteness. Discussions of contemporary American popular music have articulated that the attribution of genre transcendence is more difficult to obtain for people of color (James 2017). Kuryokhin’s framing offers a similar dynamic: European engagement with free jazz is perceived as progressive (avant-garde), whereas Black musicians (performing similar music) are denied this status, regardless of an ostensibly universalist understanding of new jazz.

Returning to the discursive formation this creates, while it could be understood as a facet of the creation of the Imaginary West, the space it creates remains complex. Edward Said elucidates that Orientalism functions by structuring discourse around binaries where the Other is “always symmetrical and yet diametrically inferior to a European equivalent” (1978: 72). This logic manifests in Kuryokhin’s imagination of new jazz, where Black musicians are denigrated as aesthetically inferior to their European counterparts. Such a framing resonates with George Lewis’s description of this emancipation as “the 1970s drive to distance the new tradition from its jazz roots by asserting a purely European character for it” – a movement rooted in the perceived “need for the musicians to distance themselves from historical and aesthetic responsibility for specifically African American cultural tropes” (2004).

Moreover, the erasure of African American influence was not only evident in Kuryokhin’s remarks during interviews but was also a pivotal component of his creative practice during this period. Kuryokhin’s first album, The Ways of Freedom, reflects his testimony. Recorded in April 1981, after Barban advised Kuryokhin to abandon “long piano improvisations,” the record was conceived as a compositional assemblage of “several six- or eight-minute individual tracks” (Kan 2020: 39). Given Barban’s proximity to the LP’s genesis and production, Kuryokhin’s music is particularly revealing when read alongside Barban’s commentary. Barban suggests that the entire record demonstrates an “inclination to unite [each track into] a single text,” where “new pieces are not so much new works as montages of fragments from earlier works” that had been reused and recycled into different configurations of “micro-modules” (1985a: 151). For Barban, this approach was crucial, as it bestowed the album with an increased aesthetic value relative to earlier “forms of jazz variation” (1985a: 151). It thus provided a means to discursively align the record with European classicism as opposed to the Black American avant-garde.

In his review, Barban suggests that “the central aesthetic antinomies of [Kuryokhin’s] music [are] clearly shown in the first piece,” a track titled “Theory and Practice.” He describes the track as consisting of “intricate intelligible labyrinths and rhetorical puzzles,” created through a “hitting (purely rhythmic) technique” that departs from a conventional homophonic jazz piano approach, where a right-hand melody is supported by left-hand accompaniment (1985a: 149). This description closely aligns with what can be heard in the recording. 

Almost immediately the recording corroborates Barban’s reading of “labyrinths” created through “hitting.” Between [0:35-3:08], we hear chromatic movement and note clusters that seem to lack any obvious tonal center, combined with irregular rhythmic patterns permeated by abrupt stops and starts. This builds through a quasi-cadential progression into a section of harmonic stasis, featuring a right-hand melody over a two-chord vamp that establishes a sense of regular meter [3:08-4:10]. At first, this moment seems to contradict Barban’s claim that the piece departs from “conventional homophony,” as the static vamp sets up an expectation of the “standard homophonic style.” However, rather than affirming this expectation, the music continues in what sounds like an intentional rejection of it. Over the metric ostinato, Kuryokhin’s melody feels rhythmically and harmonically detached from the chords beneath it, ultimately culminating in chromatic broken glissandi that break away from any sense of meter created by his left-hand [3:55-4:05]. Suddenly, Kuryokhin plays a turnaround over the vamp that could be interpreted as an “old jazz” pastiche [4:06-4:10], which then fragments and cycles back to earlier ideas (e.g. [4:14] recalls [0:35]) and the sonic landscape prior to the ostinato [4:14-6:20], characterized by its labyrinthian texture. Thus, Barban’s perception of the track as “antithetical” to conventional jazz melody and accompaniment appears apt in Kuryokhin’s dramatized movement. And, as Kuryokhin vamps this “old jazz” pastiche, with its swinging rhythmic style, it is difficult not to recall his earlier racialized discourse on an aesthetic divide. That is, his critique of jazz experimentalism sliding closer and closer to bebop functions as an aesthetic limitation applied specifically to Black musicians. “Theory and Practice,” as an exemplar of white European improvisation, appears to escape such a demerit.

When writing about the album, Barban identified the final track, “The Other Way,” as the most striking example of the album’s collage-like structure. He read the final track as a microcosm of the album as a whole – a track that “sums up the structural ideas of the foregoing pieces” (1985a: 150). What is absent from this recording, and indeed from most of the LP, is any “beat” – “the rhythmic brand mark of old jazz that guaranteed its belonging to pop culture” (1985a: 150). Thus, rather than attributing to it any resemblance to a narrow jazz tradition, Barban read Kuryokhin’s rhythmic content as exemplary of “wild violence and intoxicated aggression resembling a sadistic ‘rape’ of the instrument,” a characterization that he explicitly linked to Luc Ferrari’s (1967) Société II: Et si le piano était un corps de femme (1985a: 150).^[18] There is, however, one track in which a regular beat emerges – “Inner Fear” – which is also the most [harmonically] tonal on the LP. Kuryokhin opens with a minor-seventh chord progression, evoking the sonic landscape of contemporaneous jazz pianists – a lineage he had otherwise relegated to the Tatum-Jarrett line. Yet, to Barban, even this track diverges from the jazz tradition: rather than emphasizing Kuryokhin’s jazz harmony, for example, Barban instead finds it to be “Classical in form, tonal in idiom” due to its structure being “constructed like a sonata allegro,” a hallmark of European Classicism (1985a: 150).

Barban surmised that Kuryokhin’s performance was premised on “[e]scape from reality, from existence, from fate or destiny, from music itself” (1985a: 15). While this might be interpreted as an analogy for “escape” from Soviet reality, Barban’s interpretation directs the term elsewhere. The dominant notion of escape in his review was not political but rather an escape from the limited aesthetic world of old jazz: in Kuryokhin’s recording he hears the desire to “emphasize his abandoning of the ‘black tradition’” entirely (1985a:152). To Barban, Kuryokhin’s music “[did] not by any means spring from a genetically pure jazz tradition” rooted in Black music. Instead, aligning Kuryokhin’s musical approach with the broader network of European jazz emancipation, Barban suggested that Kuryokhin’s escape from the realm of Black music was part of a shared aesthetic trajectory with “European pianists with the same aim” such as Fred van Hove and Keith Tippett (1985a: 151-152). Thus, to Barban and Kuryokhin, The Ways of Freedom was a “white freedom,” an exemplary European record that was imagined as escaping from African American influence.

However, the notion that Kuryokhin’s work had detached itself from the influence of Afrodiasporic music was largely fictional. Despite assertions to the contrary, Black experimentalism remained a significant influence on his practice. Perhaps the clearest illustration of this is Kuryokhin’s first experiments with large-group conducted improvisation – a practice that eventually led to Popular Mechanics. The first performance of such a group took place under the name “Creative Music Orchestra” (Duffill 1983). Kan (2020: 55) recalls that this name was “quite obviously” inspired by the AACM (Associations for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), arguably the most influential collective of African American musicians in postwar improvisation and experimental music (Lewis 2008). Thus, beyond the Eurocentric imagination that shaped the understanding of new jazz in Leningrad, Soviet new jazz was – despite claims to the contrary – deeply influenced by and interconnected with Afrological practices (see Lewis 1996) and Black experimentalism.

Russian New Jazz

Perhaps the greatest irony of this episode is where it ends. Although Black Music, White Freedom sought to challenge (monolithic) claims of cultural exclusivity for new jazz – likely in response to assertions such as Baraka’s (1963b) that Black music required a deeper understanding of its local cultural referents than most white critics were able to offer – when the discussion shifted Soviet new jazz, Barban and Kuryokhin advanced a strikingly similar strategic argument. For Stuart Hall, Black cultural nationalism was an example of strategic essentialism: “nothing could have been done to […] win some space [in mainstream popular culture] without the strategies through which those dimensions were condensed onto the signifier ‘black’” (Hall 1992: 29). In George Lewis’s (2004) reading, a similar strategic essentialism took shape in 1970s German free jazz, which offered a “complimentary cultural nationalism” by “asserting a purely European character” of European improvisation, which ultimately resulted in the total erasure of African American influence (2004: 20).

In a related move, both Kuryokhin and Barban regarded Soviet new jazz as a culturally specific formation, distinct from Western tradition yet incorporating (most explicitly in Barban’s work) both European and Afrodiasporic elements. For example, Kuryokhin discusses what he saw as the “unique” status of Russian jazz, inimitable to Western sensibilities. Discussing the Ganelin Trio – the most internationally recognized Russian new jazz group^[19] – he found their reception outside the Soviet Union inadequate. To Kuryokhin, these exemplars of “Russian new jazz” were “so different from what is being done in the West in all ways […] it is a completely different principle which could never have happened in the West with the pragmatic rationalism of European culture” ([1981] 1985: 108). He suggested that “one’s whole national cultural heritage is reflected in one’s music” and asserted that non-Russian critics would be unable to fully comprehend the true aesthetic value of Russian jazz (ibid.).

Barban likewise took issue with Western reviews of Soviet new jazz, including The Ways of Freedom. He found foreign reviewers – such as those from Down Beat and The New York Times – to only “consider Kuryokhin’s music from existing aesthetic standpoints, stretching it on the Procrustes [sic] bed of the stereotyped cultural associations of Russian jazz and frequently giving it unwarranted political interpretation” (Barban 1985a: 152). Unlike Kuryokhin, however, Barban’s disappointment with the album’s reception did not stem entirely from an assumed “psychological” difference between foreign and local listeners, but was equally triggered by the negativity of those reviews. The Down Beat review of the record, for example, foregrounded the record’s political importance (as an illicit product smuggled out of the Soviet Union) and concluded that “the mixing of music and politics can often result in simply uninteresting music.” In contrast, The New York Times was more positive but aligned Kuryokhin’s performance with the music of Russian Modernist composers, such as Scriabin and Shostakovich (see Kan 2020: 40).

While The New York Times review was upbeat in its appraisal, its association of Kuryokhin with Shostakovich undermined Barban’s understanding of the cultural specificities of “Soviet New Jazz,” a central theoretical concern of his since around 1982 (Didenko [1982] 2015: 292). Barban proposed that new jazz in the Soviet Union was a culturally distinct genre that combined “American and European free jazz” with Russian aesthetics drawn from the avant-garde forms of Malevich, Kandinsky, and Russian Futurism (1985b). Additionally, Soviet new jazz blended “contemporary intonational resources from all over Russia” into its sonic content – an aspect Barban emphasized: “Russia’s phonic riches (more than a hundred different peoples make up its population) can be compared only with the riches of its mineral deposits” (1985b: 21). From this perspective, Soviet new jazz functioned as “a national music” in which “the phonic past and acoustic present in Russia is organically reworked by the musicians into jazz forms” (1985b: 21). Thus, Barban suggested, Soviet new jazz musicians had little in common with “their immediate predecessors – Sergei Prokofiev or Dmitrii Shostakovich” (1985b: 18). Instead, he maintained, the contemporary sound of new jazz was produced through a rejection of recent Soviet history and rooted in a distinctly Russian aesthetic imagination. In this discourse, Soviet new jazz was identified as a culturally specific style – the same rhetorical strategy that Black Music, White Freedom had set out to critique.

As Barban had imagined new jazz writ large, Soviet new jazz was akin to a jazz-caterpillar that had transformed into a high-art-butterfly. In alignment with his advice to Kuryokhin, Barban argued that Soviet new jazz was characterized by a distinctive “mixed composition” that represented the interests of its musicians, an interest that has “always interested European composers,” namely, structural development (1985b: 17). He wrote, for example, that musicians had attained a

superb balance between composition and improvisation in their work, and that [the] level of ideas in it is qualitatively equivalent to that of the work of European composers in the post Webern era. (The degree of talent in the music is another matter). (1985b: 17)

While the form, as new jazz, contained the “tradition and spirit of Afro-American music,” Barban suggested that this influence had been “assimilat[ed]” as “an organic element of their own language” (1985b: 19-20).^[20] Moreover, “Russia’s relative dissociation” from the jazz tradition had actually facilitated the creation of new jazz, as Russian musicians were said to “find it easier to experiment with jazz form than their American colleagues” (ibid.). However, the “musical fusion” of Soviet new jazz – alongside its incorporation of uniquely Russian characteristics – was not reducible to the “mere sum of all the aesthetic parts which make it up.” Instead, the new avant-garde domain that it created was understood as “capable of breathing new life into Western jazz,” which Barban diagnosed as having suffered an aesthetic decline in recent years. (1985a: 20). Thus, Barban asserted that this unique cultural specificity, combined with the exceptional artistic talent of Russian musicians, positioned “Russia’s new jazz [as] the foremost phenomenon of European musical culture” (1985b: 21).

Conclusion

The “white freedom” of the new jazz imaginary was more than just freedom from state socialism. New jazz, here, was imagined as a means of carving out a distinct identity in a field where African American jazz was perceived as hegemonic. This framing aligned with Barban’s positioning of new jazz as a color-blind universal, Kuryokhin’s obtuse racial commentary, and the co-creation of a discursively European album. In these contexts, new jazz was imagined in a way that denied coeval status to Black experimentalism, privileging a European counterpart, where Black music was valued only in relation to its proximity to the European avant-garde. Even then, any divergence from this pre-established trajectory was perceived by Kuryokhin as a “step backwards.” The result was a discursive construction that emphasized the European aesthetics of Kuryokhin’s early recordings while distancing African American influence, positioning new jazz as a localized form ostensibly impenetrable to Westernized ways of thinking. While imagining the West describes a process by which avant-garde jazz was imported from America into the Soviet universe and then adapted locally, new jazz was not imagined as an imported tradition at all. Instead, this imagination came to resist a perceived African American hegemony and denied its Afrodiasporic roots. New jazz was imagined, across this discursive and performance process, sequentially as a universal, a European, and ultimately a Russian musical form. Such an ideology functioned to carve out a distinct cultural identity, one that offered a form of cultural nationalism. Here, improvisation became configured as a mode of reactionary emancipation: not from the Soviet state, but from Black music.

Acknowledgment

This article was written during a Midlands4Cities doctoral training partnership. I’d like to sincerely thank Polly McMichael, Christopher Haworth, Valentina Bertolani, Zach Dawson, Vadim Keylin, Sharon Stewart and the editors and reviewers of this special issue for their close attention and advice.

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