Leo Records

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Leo Records is an independent record label specializing in jazz music with over 400 releases. The label was founded in 1979 by the Soviet émigré Leo Feigin in London.

General information about the label

After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, a phase of isolation and isolation began in the cultural life of the USSR . Festivals in Moscow and Leningrad and in all parts of the country had an important communicative function for the Russian jazz scene. Although contacts with the West were relatively cut off, the German clarinetist Hans Kumpf made efforts to promote the Moscow and Leningrad avant-garde jazz. Parallel to the efforts of Kumpf, the émigré Leo Feigin from London made Soviet jazz better known and fought against collective purism and organized xenophobia in Soviet cultural policy.

Leo Feigin (2017). Photo: Mark Nakoykher

Feigin founded the independent record company Leo Records in the late 1970s as an organ for free music from his home country - in conjunction with his Moscow friend Nick Dimitriev (1955-2004). Feigin responded to the arrest of the jazz musician Anatoly Wapirow by releasing an LP entitled Condemned To Silence . The numerous records that Feigin released on Leo Records aroused interest in Russian jazz in the West and encouraged musicians in what was then the USSR.

The work of the Ganelin Trio by Vyacheslav Ganelin appeared on the label . Without exclusive contracts, numerous albums by Anthony Braxton , Marilyn Crispell and Gebhard Ullmann as well as by Simon Nabatov ( Spinning Songs of Herbie Nichols ), John Wolf Brennan , the Pago Libre quartet , Carlo Actis Dato and his Brasserie Trio and the duo Ivo Perelman were released there / Karl Berger . Leo has also released records by Hans Kumpf , Reggie Workman , Jaki Byard , Valentina Ponomareva , Misha Lobko, Vladimir Chekassin , Maggie Nicols , Sun Ra , Sainkho Namtchylak , Alexei Kruglow , the Trio Second Approach and by Amina Claudine Myers .

literature

  • Starr, S. Frederick: Red and Hot. Jazz in Russia from 1917–1990 . Hannibal Verlag, Vienna 1990
  • Bielefeld Jazz Catalog, 1988

Web links

Commons : Leo Records  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Notes / source

  1. ↑ cit. according to Starr: Red And Hot, p. 256