Jakow Borissowitsch Skomorowski

Jakow Borissowitsch Skomorowski ( Russian Яков Борисович Скоморовский; born August 19, 1889 in Cherson , † July 4, 1955 in Leningrad , USSR ) was a Soviet trumpeter , jazz musician , conductor and teacher .

biography

Jakow Skomorowski, born in the Ukrainian city of Cherson, completed his basic musical training at the Odessa Music School . In 1912 he graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory with distinction. During the Russian Revolution and the subsequent NEP era , he worked as a trumpeter in the theater and in the Leningrad Opera Orchestra. At the end of the 1920s , Skomorowski played in the first jazz ensembles. Just like the orchestras of Alexander Zfasman and Leonid Utjossow , these formations also served the needs of the urban dance café , bar and restaurant goers for swinging, modern tones. After a brief guest appearance in 1929 in Utjossov's orchestra, Skomorowski founded his own band . The first record was made in 1932 . After an engagement in the Leningrad Music Hall in 1934, Jakow Skomorowski put together a combo that played for the restaurant of the Evropeiskaya Hotel . Meanwhile also known in Moscow, his formation received an engagement in the newly opened Hotel Moskwa at the end of the year . According to contemporary witnesses, the demand for his music was so great that it was impossible to get a table while Skomorowski was playing.

Regardless of its success, connoisseurs and music lovers of the group noted various musical shortcomings - especially a bad hand when engaging good soloists. The US embassy employee and jazz guitarist George F. Kennan, for example, was of the opinion that Skomorowski's formation played "too loud, too fast and too bumpy in terms of rhythm" . The younger Soviet audience, however, saw the group as a reputable swing band and gained an enthusiastic following. The success of the Soviet jazz stars also paid off financially: while a music conservatory teacher earned around 200 to 250 rubles a month, band leaders such as Skomorowski, Ulyossov or Zfasman made tens of thousands a month, and the members of their ensembles around 5,000 had to take on second jobs in the mid-1930s to make ends meet. The German conductor Heinz Unger , who emigrated to Great Britain and visited Leningrad in the late 1930s, expressed astonishment: "How is it possible to build an orchestra or improve the quality of playing when the musicians are always dead tired?"

During the 1930s, Skomorowski and his band recorded the scores for a number of successful Soviet films - including the Volga, Volga and Circus. Together with the other two large orchestras, Skomorowski and his formation managed to survive the campaigns against Western jazz music in 1936 and the purges in the cultural field. From 1941 to 45 Skomorowski directed the jazz orchestra of the Soviet Navy . After the war, from 1951 to 1954, shortly before his death, he taught at the Navy Music School named after the composer Rimsky-Korsakov .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Zel'dovich Skomorovsky , music database mambursoft.org, called 2 August 2011
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} S. Frederic Starr: Red and Hot. Jazz in Russia 1917–1990. Hannibal, 1990, ISBN 3-85445-062-1
3. ↑ Heinz Unger: Hammer, Sickle and Baton. The Soviet Memoirs of a Musician. London 1939, p. 197.

literature

• S. Frederic Starr: Red and Hot. Jazz in Russia 1917–1990. Hannibal, Vienna 1990, ISBN 3-85445-062-1
• SW Bolotin: Enziklopeditscheski biografitscheski slowar musykantow-ispolnitelei na duchowych instrumentach. Raduniza, 1995, ISBN 5-88123-007-8 , p. 257.