Those Cool Reds

The wonderful thing about music is how it manages to filter past the most heavily soundproofed door. Though U.S. jazz as such is not officially banned in Russia, the culture commissars take pains to ridicule it as "bourgeois decadency"; concerts are nonexistent and nightclub jazz is discouraged; the importation and sale of U.S. jazz records is taboo. But last week two topflight U.S. Negro jazzmen just back from a month-long trip behind the Iron Curtain had news that the Russians not only know all about U.S. jazz, but play it with fervor whenever Big Brother is not looking. Jazz Pianist Dwike Mitchell, 29, and Bassman Willie Ruff, 28, came home amazed: "They have a real feel for our music."

Undercover Cats. Musicians Mitchell and Ruff have the credentials to know. Both are fine classical musicians (Mitchell played with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Ruff has a B.A. and M.A. from Yale) who formed a jazz duo and split their time between lectures and nightclub dates. In Russia, traveling with 30 members of the Yale Russian Chorus on an informal tour, the pair made contact with the young musicians of the Moscow Conservatory, gave an impromptu concert, and were introduced around to Russia's undercover cats.

The U.S. duo found that the Russians enjoy their jazz in small groups in the privacy of their homes. They discovered only one place that approached a formal jazz club--a small cabaret in Leningrad. The big surprise was how well up the Russians are on every U.S. style from old-time gutbucket New Orleans to brassy progressive jazz and the slightly atonal West Coast styles so popular in 1959. How do the Russians find out? Simply by taping everything they hear over the Voice of America and by smuggling records through Poland. In literally dozens of homes, the U.S. visitors found big tape collections; one Moscow physicist, who plays "a real cool saxophone." had everything from Ella Fitzgerald to Dave Brubeck and Sarah Vaughan. Poorer musicians who cannot tape or smuggle records cut their own homemade disks on discarded X-ray plates. "We saw one," says Mitchell, "on which you could still see somebody's bones."

Break Out to Bop. Russia has always been a musical nation, so it came as no surprise that the Russians played well. The stunner was how closely the Russians caught the sense of the music, particularly the sad throb of the blues. There were times, says Ruff, "when the renditions came close to eloquence." Where the Russians fall short is on improvisation. After one demonstration at which Ruff and Mitchell improvised around a current Russian song, a young man asked for the score. "They couldn't understand." says Mitchell, "that except for the basic chords, it was all on the spur of the moment."

The U.S. jazzmen are convinced that the Russians will some day break out and really start bopping. Says Ruff: "The spirit is there, and I'm sure that once they feel free to really let go, they'll start adding their own bars. They're starved for something new."

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