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Articles about Sergey Letov

Serguei Letov is the musician whose interests and aspirations wholly flow in the channel of the new jazz or, to be more exact, new improvisation music. Along with this, his broad fame in some paradoxical way goes beyond the circle elite narrow new jazz audience. In spite of the fact that during his music carrier he has been engaged in one and the same thing, namely, in search for new phonations, in widening his instrumental and sonoric state addressing the future of music - either to the utmost radical avant-garde or the utmost ancient past - archaic folklore layers, attempts to work out a new language and develop new musical expression utterances, in spite of such linearity and one-direction development, Letov persistently turns to be involved into a great variety of projects that sometimes are far away from jazz itself. These are theatre performances (Anatoly Vassiliev and Mikhail Mokeev, Alexander Filippenko and Italian theatre groups), artistic happenings (Andrei Monastyrsky and "Collective Actions", Yury Leiderman, TOTART and others), and Literary-musical projects (Dmitry Prigov, Vladimir Druk and so on), participation in academic music performances (Sofia Gubaidullina, Svetlana Golybina), and gala concerts in Rock-groups' stuff («Aquarium», «DDT», «Centre», «DK», «Alisa», and others) and even the clown theatre ("Litsedei - 4"). All this is done without taking into account his new jazz projects with Kuryokhin, Shilkloper, Makarov, Gayvoronsky, Ponomareva, Saynkho and other stars. He is the constant "Pop-Mechanics" soloist, the founder of "TRI O", the author of film music, film actor, the speaker at theory symposia, the author of critical essays in special journals. Of course, such creative breadth leads to wide popularity. But no matter what clothes he is performing today in, he is constantly concerned with one thing - that is playing his instrumental spontaneous and unpredictable music.

Of course, one needn't be an Afro or American derivative to employ the structure, strategies, and freedoms of jazz. [...] particularly provocative small unit - Trio.., led by soprano sax/flute/bass clarinet Sergei Letov... delved deeply into themselves for motives and vocabularies. They emerge with music based on personal and social experiences, generated by the same faith in spontaneous, self-aware utterance and life's vital pulse that gave rise to the earliest and sustains the newest jazz.