Red Hot

The sounds that reverberated through Moscow's Teatr Estrady last week seemed strangely out of place in the drab, disciplined Soviet capital: the salivating slur of a trombone, the mellow wail of a muted trumpet, the throaty murmur of a saxophone and the staccato thunder of drums. U.S. tourists even thought they could identify the nearly indistinguishable melody: Lullaby of Birdland. They were right. At picnics and Komsomol dances, in cabarets and conservatories, the Soviet Union is swinging to the sound of jazz.

Jazz is no newcomer to the U.S.S.R. It has just been on a long vacation. In 1925 pudgy New Orleans Saxophonist Sidney Bechet gave Moscow its first jam session, so enthralled a young music student named Aleksandr Tsfasman that he quit Moscow Conservatory, formed his own combo, took to wearing green and maroon suits. Even the stolid Soviet government got into the act. It formed a 43-piece U.S.S.R. Jazz Band, released top Trumpeter Andrei Gorin from prison (his crime: insulting a Communist Party official), ordered him onto the bandstand. Then, as abruptly as it began, the jazz era died. The downbeater: Stalin, who ordered dzhaz outlawed in 1929 as ''a product of bourgeois degeneration."

Still, jazz survived. Smuggled U.S. recordings were duplicated on X-ray plates, bootlegged for fantastic prices (tab for an Elvis Presley disk: $12.50). Musicians copied new Louis Armstrong arrangements from Western radio programs. Students begged visiting U.S. musicians to play rock 'n' roll. Clandestine jazz bands became so common in Leningrad that the Young Communist League formed roving ''Nightingale Patrols" to stamp them out.

By last week the Soviet government seemed ready to give up the fight. Composer Aram (Sabre Dance) Khatchaturian admitted a personal preference for the "modern music'' of Duke Ellington. In Soviet Culture, organ of the Culture Ministry, Bandmaster Leonid Utesov made it almost official: ''Jazz is not a synonym for imperialism, and the saxophone is not a product of colonialism." There is no reason why the Soviet Union should consider jazz decadent and bourgeois, said Utesov. "Socalled Dixieland existed in Odessa prior to New Orleans."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.