Synopsis

Today’s date in 1906 marks the birthday of Alexander Naumovich Tsfasman, a Ukrainian composer from pre-revolutionary Tsarist Russia who would become an important figure in Soviet jazz.

Jazz first came to the Soviet Union in 1922, four years after Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution, and at first was welcomed as the music of the oppressed African-American minority, and therefore considered an expression of the worldwide class struggle. Tsfasman encountered jazz while still a student at the Moscow Conservatory and formed his own jazz band in 1926, the first to be heard on Soviet radio. In the decades that followed, Tsfasman made over 140 records, composed music for films, and gave concerts during WWII for Red Army soldiers.

But after 1945, jazz fell out of favor in the USSR. During the Cold War, it came to be seen as a prime export of the decadent bourgeois West and performances were limited. “Today he plays jazz, tomorrow he’ll betray his country” was a widespread propaganda slogan in the Stalinist post-war USSR. Only in the 1960s did attitudes change, and we’re happy to report Alexander Tsfasman lived to see it before his death in 1971.

This music is from his Jazz Suite for piano and orchestra.

Music Played in Today's Program

Alexander Tsfasman (1906-1971): Snowflakes and Polka (excerpts), from Jazz Suite;
Zlata Chochieva, piano; BBC Scottish Symphony; Karl-Heinz Steffens, conductor; Naïve V-8448