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Герман Лукьянов

German Lukyanov (born August 23, 1936 in Leningrad) is a Russian jazz musician, trumpet and flugelhorn player, band leader and poet. Lukyanov attended the Leningrad Conservatory for three years before transferring to Moscow, where he studied composition with [a=Aram Khatchaturian], graduating from the [l=Moscow Conservatory] in 1961. He formed his first trio with Mikhail Terentyev and Alfred Grigorovitch, debuting at the [i]1st Moscow Jazz Festival[/i] in 1962. The trio was notable for the unusual line-up (flugelhorn, double bass, piano) and original repertoire. As musicologist [url=https://discogs.com/artist/2170659]Arkady Petrov[/url] wrote in his article for [i]Soviet Jazz: Problems, Events, Masters[/i] (1987), no one in the Soviet Union played jazz this way at the time: no strict differentiation between solos and accompaniment, plenty of pauses, shifts, "open space" in music. Critic [a=Leonard Feather], who visited USSR with [a=Benny Goodman And His Orchestra], also described Lukyanov's trio as "being at the forefront of the international jazz movement." In 1965, Lukyanov formed a new trio with [a=Leonid Chizhik] (piano) and [url=https://discogs.com/artist/1579834]Vladimir Vasilkov[/url] (drums). They had tremendous success at the [i]3rd Moscow Jazz Festival[/i] in 1966 and received five awards, including Best Ensemble, Best Composer and Best Performer. The line-up changed with [url=https://discogs.com/artist/1104695]Igor Brill[/url] (piano) and [url=https://discogs.com/artist/2991473]Mikhail Kudryashov[/url] (drums) joining by the end of the 60s. German also had been playing and recording in a duo with Brill, both on piano and flugelhorn. From 1969 to 1973, Lukyanov was a soloist in [url=https://discogs.com/artist/1055021]Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra[/url] conducted by [url=https://discogs.com/artist/1069912]Vadim Ludvikovsky[/url]. Ludvikovksy, Lukyanov and saxophonist [url=https://discogs.com/artist/1474909]Alexei Zubov[/url] also gave a few performances with [a=Czechoslovak Radio Jazz Orchestra] in 1972 (one of the concerts was [url=https://discogs.com/release/2229556]released[/url] by [l=Panton]). The musician spent next few years organizing various ensembles, from a quartet to nonet and even decimet (10 musicians). At the beginning of 1978, German Lukyanov established [b]Cadence[/b], one of his best known and most popular ensembles. The group had only six musicians, but each performed on multiple instruments, so they had a timbre and expressive variety of a big-band. Lukyanov used complicated rhythmic patterns, unusual arrangement techniques, chromatics, atonality, dodecaphony. Some critics considered Cadence to be one of the most innovative and advanced Soviet jazz bands of the 1970-80s. Lukyanov reformed it in 2007, and the new Cadence had already released two albums. Since 1990, due to an economic crisis Lukyanov could not afford to keep a whole band, so he disbanded Cadence and started performing in a trio with drummer [url=https://discogs.com/artist/4314259]Vano Avaliani[/url] and pianist [a=Léo Kushnir]. For this project, German built an experimental drum-kit around a gigantic African drum he brought from Uganda. Herman Lukyanov / German Lukyanov (born August 23, 1936 - died July 8, 2019) jazz musician. (aged 82)