Russian jazz has come a long way since the days of Valentin Parnakh's First Eccentric Orchestra (pictured) and Stalinist repression. This second abandoned poem is about a night in late December when we attended a jam session at a basement jazz club in central St. Petersburg. It also includes a couple of scenes from the journey home, through the centre of the city and under the river with the last metro back to Vassily Island. Somehow these frozen nights out on the town and the dash (or should I say ice-skate?) through the streets to make the last metro have become so tangled in my memories that it's difficult to imagine one without the other.In a sense, it could have been anywhere. The quality of the musicianship and the standard bop repertoire would have been equally at home in Amsterdam or Berlin. But there were tell-tale signs. The peculiarly Russian faces and careless dress sense, and the rich ethnic mix of Slavs and musicians from other parts of the former USSR. The couple of bored, pretty girls at the side, ignoring the music and just hoping to meet a rich foreign businessman. Right down, of course, to the drinks that never arrived.
Russki Dzhazz
Fleamarket nudes spoil beige walls
Above ill-lit front tables
Glowing faces flowering from
Woolen polo neck sweaters
Nicotine nails
Scratching greasy once-blonde hair
Girls
Inspecting the blue shadows for wealth
Deaf to our cacophony
Alert to the cut of the silk
The stuffed leather
Here hiding out
Amidst the dusk of Armenian eyes
And lightbulb foreheads
- A thankless task
They'll go home sighing
And
On bandstand
Portly pianist
Some rogue bank clerk, shirttails ousted
Grimaces into ivory
Punctuates
Nods, shows teeth at
Drummer – what to say – he drums
Swipes, slaps, smacks, alliteration
Of a kind
Waiting on drinks, still
American jazz, yes, but Russian service
Banker just quoted Gillespie
Salt-peanuts salt-peanuts
Where’s champagnska to wash them down with?
Baritone bell raised gleaming street level
Bassman hunched like yesterday’s washerwomen
Over his mournful charge
Wringing those old guts dry
Misses cue, nods at polished bar
-All change over
I’d sit in I don’t know how-
Midnight run for metro
Man at grim coatcheck’s
Polar moustache moved by laughter
Really it’s just getting started
But paka
Patchwork chords locked in cellar
Paka
Home over the Nevsky Prospekt
Snow piles swim
In the restless grand Christmas lights
Million dreamless colours evade
Nikolai Gogol's ragged ghost, hunched in the shadows
Madly
Under the Neva in the tunnel's death rattle
Out past frozen sodium-bright kiosks
And the Soviet grocery
Up darkened, complaining stairs
Into the flat where warmed icicles
Whisper unseen, electric
Joining courtyard drains
Echoing now, I hear them clearly.
