Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Leaning on the Classics

In downtown Moscow, there's a small but cozy park, Hermitage Garden. Last weekend it hosted the 13th edition of the three-day Hermitage Garden Jazz Festival (annual since 1998) - the de-facto start signal for the next Moscow jazz concert season.
This year's edition had on board the likes of Jeremy Pelt, Greg Tardy, Poland's Adam Wendt PowerSet and Austria's Ulrich Drechsler Quartet, as well as eight worthy Russian bands.

I could not miss a chance to record a couple of tunes for the Jazz.Ru Magazine's brand new YouTube channel; our photographer, Vladimir Korobitsyn, made this nice shot when I was using the garden's signature statue of the great Russian composer, Mikhail Glinka, as a tripod to get a more steady picture. You can see that the equipment I use is far from being fancy: the picture was shot on an old Lumix photo camera (I simply don't have a video camera,) and the camera's built-in microphone is a nightmare, so I captured the sound on a Zoom H2 digital recorder (in my left hand under the camera) and then inserted the soundtrack from it into the video file. I hope Glinka did not mind it. There was also a Tchaikovsky statue on the other side of the stage, but it was less accessible for my purposes.
Here is what I have been shooting:

Moscow-based trombonist Max Piganov and his Trombone Show perform Cole Porter's "You Do Something To Me" at the Hermitage Garden Jazz Festival in Moscow, Russia, on August 21, 2010. Piganov plays the 1st solo.
With artist's permission.

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