Jazz for the Russians - To Russia with Jazz
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Jazz for the Russians - To Russia with Jazz |
| Original title | To Russia with Jazz |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 2011 |
| length | 98 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Konstanze Burkard |
| script | Konstanze Burkard |
| music | Benny Goodman |
| camera | Roland Breitschuh |
| cut | Stefan Kolbe |
| occupation | |
Jazz für die Russen - To Russia with Jazz is a German documentary film by director Konstanze Burkard about Benny Goodman's 1962 tour of the Soviet Union and his all-star band from 2011 .
action
The tour of the Benny Goodman Orchestra is documented using historical images, concert recordings and interviews with a number of participating American musicians and Soviet artists. In interviews, the musicians John Bunch , Bill Crow , Jerry Dodgion , Phil Woods , Joe Wilder and the singer Joya Sherrill describe their experiences during the tour. David Goloschtschokin and Gennady Golstein report on the encounters with the American guests, including at a night jam session in Leningrad . Phil Woods tells the anecdote of the “talking bushes” in Moscow's Gorky Park : Since people were too afraid to speak to the American guests directly and could not speak English, they simply gave names of musicians they knew; the Goodman musicians replied with other names. After Goodman's visit, Gennadi Golstein received an invitation to go on a fully funded tour of the United States, but fearing that he would be mistaken for a spy and arrested, his wife burned the letter.
background
In the summer of 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the US government sent the swing clarinetist Benny Goodman on a tour of the Soviet Union with 19 young jazz musicians. It was intended as an answer to Khrushchev's cultural offensive, in the hope that the music of the big band could give the local population a positive impression of the United States: “ Jazz , which was considered inferior in the former USSR, should be audible, tangible and subversive Embody the American way of life . The Benny Goodman Orchestra, including six black musicians, was the first American big band on Soviet soil. It was supposed to conquer the hearts of the supposed archenemies and to counter the cultural challenge of the Soviets, embodied by their great virtuosos in classical music, with the original American symbolic music of freedom par excellence ”.
Under constant observation by the KGB, there were only a few encounters with Russian or Georgian musicians. Benny Goodman and his orchestra played 30 concerts in front of around 180,000 people in Moscow , Sochi , Tbilisi , Tashkent , Leningrad and Kiev .
publication
The film was first broadcast in Germany on October 29, 2011 on 3sat TV. Before that he ran u. a. in March 2011 at the Montrealer Cinémathèque Québécoise.
Web links
- Jazz for the Russians - To Russia with Jazz in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- To Russia with Jazz at United Docs
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Liz Ferguson: FIFA 2011: To Russia With Jazz- Benny Goodman in the USSR. In: Montreal Gazette. March 25, 2011, accessed September 6, 2018 .
- ↑ a b Jazz for the Russians - To Russia with Jazz Informations. In: Zelluloid.de. Archived from the original on February 12, 2013 ; accessed on September 6, 2018 .