Music: Low Taste

The Russians, busy cleaning house on the political levels (see FOREIGN NEWS), found time to cock an ear at the subject of Chattanooga Choo Choo and related items of sub-basement culture. They were not amused. Moscow’s mighty Izvestia, whose nods and scowls are promptly imitated by all right-thinking bureaucrats, scowled at “dzhaz.”

Izvestia frowned particularly at a jazzy comrade named Eddy Rozner, who leads the Government-sponsored State Jazz Orchestra of White Russia, and is one of the hottest of the Soviet Union’s not-so-hot bandsmen. His band is one of the six most popular in the U.S.S.R., ranks with Leonid Utesov and his “Merry Lads” who go in for such literal stunts in showmanship as mounting the drummer on a massive 20-ft. high stand built like a drum.

When Eddy Rozner plays the kind of “jazz” that the commissars approve—Russian folk-songs in bouncy dance time—Eddy has the admiration of Stalin himself. But sometimes he remembers the days of his youth when he visited the U.S., studied the jazz ways of Harlem, placed second to Louis Armstrong in an international hot trumpeters’ contest in 1934. Then Eddy lets himself go, cuts out on St. Louis Blues, Choo Choo or Alexander’s Ragtime Band.

Said Izvestia last week: “A complete lack of ideas, low professional culture, bad taste—these are characteristics of the band. . . . Homemade wit and a vulgar musical stew . . . fills nearly all the program. . . . Perhaps this can be tolerated in forgotten places of western Europe, but not on the Soviet stage.”

Americans in Moscow, who have heard Eddy Rozner’s dzhaz, were inclined to think that Izvestia had something there. Eddy’s band has a good hot fiddler, a talented pianist, and an uncertain beat. Its arrangements, based on 5-&-10¢ store sheet music of U.S. hits which reach the U.S.S.R., is either imitative of U.S. jazz circa 1930, or unrecognizable.

The night of Izvestia’s blast, Radio Moscow—which must not have read its daily paper very thoroughly—put on another half-hour of Eddy Rozner’s band. Included in the program: a hepped-up version of the Volga Boat Song, a swing finale full of cracks at Russian grand opera.