Herman Lukianov Celebrates His 75th Birthday

75 Years of Independence, stated the caption on the cover of this year's #3 Jazz.Ru magazine on top of Herman Lukianov's portrait. Herman, primarily a composer, arranger, and music thinker, was one of the leading forces in Russian jazz in the 1960s, when he studied composition at the Moscow State Conservatory with none other than Aram Khachaturian, and played trumpet in jazz bands of the era; he kept his leading positions in the 1970s when he switched to flugelhorn; he led his KADANS (Russian abbreviation for Chamber Jazz Ensemble, and, by a coincidence - Herman is fond of such coincedences! - an obsolete old Russian word for both cadence and cadenza) thoroughout the 1980s and was the first Russian jazz musician to perform at the famous North Sea Jazz festival in the Netherlands; after a decade of relative oscurity in the 1990s he reinvented his KADANS (first under the title of KADANS Millenium, after which he reverted to the old two-syllable name) in 2000 and continues to work hard ever since, now on a rarest of his horns - the massive, low-pitched tenor horn, which he assembled by his own hands using an old trombone bell and an unusial mouthpiece of Herman's own design and production. Everybody in his current band is at least twice his junior, and all of them, diametrally differently aspired as they are, share respect and passion for Lukianov's tricky, tight, driving music, which often sounds modernistic and vintage at the same time. To make the long story shor, ladies and gentleman,would you welcome to the stage Mr. Herman Lukianov and his KADANS! Herman Lukianov and his KADANS perform Lukianov's "Summertime Transition" during the September 14, 2011 celebration of Herman's 75th birthday at the ArteFAQ club, Moscow, Russia (Herman Lukianov - tenor horn, Alexey Kruglov - as, Anton Zaletayev - ts, Alexey Becker - p, Makar Novikov - b, Alex Zinger - dr)

Published with artists' permission

Here's one more, for good measure ("Dizzy With Success" - Herman is very fond of unusual titles: this one, which became a proverb in Russian, is also a title of one of Joseph Stalin's newspaper articles from the early 1930s, which Russian intelligentsia learned to use in an ironic, figurative manner.)