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Toward a Far Eastern (and Far Northern) History of Jazz in Russia

The popular narrative of how jazz was introduced to Russia has often been told like a legend, full of embellishments and sensationalized headlines taken out of context. As the story goes, Valentin Parnakh introduced jazz to audiences in Moscow for the first time on 1 October 1922. His debut concert ignited a fierce debate in the Soviet press, which eventually led to a temporary ban on the foxtrot and other forms of “eccentric dancing” that lasted for several years. Beyond the major cities in the western reaches of the country, however, these debates were largely inconsequential, and the ban was rarely enforced. Turning our attention to the geographic extremities of the early Soviet Union—namely the Far East and Far North—reveals a much more vibrant story of the foxtrot, one-step, and other jazz dances dating back to 1918.

Drawing on previously unresearched letters, memoirs, provincial publications, and 78 rpm recordings, this talk endeavors to rewrite the early history of jazz in Russia by decentering Moscow and Petrograd/Leningrad. I reframe the notion of “eccentricity,” the guiding principle of Parnakh’s revolutionary jazz aesthetic, to show how the cities of Harbin, Vladivostok, and Arkhangelsk developed into auxiliary foci of jazz activity during the Allied Intervention. Ultimately, I argue that bodies in motion, both on the dancefloor and on the frontlines, characterized much of the experience of the Russian Revolution from the territorial margins. Attending to the far-reaching geography of jazz sheds new light on the stylistic diversity of music under early Bolshevik rule and the artistic permeability of the Soviet border.

Ryan Gourley is a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Berkeley, working at the intersection of global music history, media archeology, and cultural mobility studies. His research addresses issues of imperialism, political ideology, and musical aesthetics in the Russian Far East and Northeast Asia. His dissertation explores how music intervened in armed conflict in Russian Manchuria during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, supported by fellowships from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, the American Musicological Society, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities. His publications appear in Cambridge Opera Journal (forthcoming), The Routledge Companion to Diasporic Jazz Studies, and Periodical of the Zubovskiy Institute (Временник Зубовского института). Since 2018, he has served as the curator the Collection of Recorded Sound at the Museum-Archive of Russian Culture, San Francisco, where he has worked to preserve and digitize over 3000 rare musical recordings.