Misha Alperin & Arkady Shilkloper - Live in Grenoble (1993)

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Misha Alperin & Arkady Shilkloper - Live in Grenoble (1993)

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Historically speaking, there is nothing so strange about an organic fusion of such diverse musical elements as jazz, traditional folk music, and a classically trained pianist s approach to his instrument. In fact, the very origin of the music we call "jazz”, includes virtually anything from African drums and French menuets to Irish folk songs and religious hymns. We experience a sense of newness and unfamiliarity, however, when we are no longer able to fit a new piece of music into already defined categories.

How, then, should we define Mikhail Alperin's music?

Is it jazz? You will indeed find the undefinable swingy nerve, the groovy improvisation, and the foot-tapping energy most people associate with both contemporary and traditional jazz music. But Alperin's music consists of so much more that some people have difficulties calling it "jazz”.

Is it folk music, then? Yes, you will find roots and structures stemming from old Moldavian, Russian and other folk song traditions. Listening to the disc you're now holding in your hand, you may feel, at times, that you are at a country wedding in Moldavia, at a Russian square dance from ages past, or at some countryside festival in the Balkans. To most of us, however, folk music is something that was created in a remote past by unknown and long-since dead local troubadours, and dredged up by musical archeologists from past cultures and put in museums, untouched by contemporary notions. Alperin, quite on the contrary, continues folk song traditions, filtering them through his own very contemporary mind. He uses not only one source of traditions, but all possible styles and moods that he feels drawn to, believing all true folk music to be interconnected. (The first time he heard Jan Garbarek playing Norwegian folk song material, he could swear it was Moldavian!) If Alperin is a folk musician, his compositions are no more dated than contemporary jazz is.

Is his music classical? Yes, there are piano techniques that you would expect from an Ashkenazy and a disciplined compositional approach worthy of a Stravinsky. You will, however, also find a kind of freedom, a kind of crazy and uninhibited savagery that you would certainly not ascribe to most classical music. Listening to this disc, you may suddenly find yourself quietly leaning back (as I do, as Edvard Grieg obviously did and like Alperin has done many a time) dreaming of craggy shores along a Norwegian fiord.

To complicate matters further, there is Arkady Shilkloper, formerly a well-schooled and articulate French horn player in the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra and the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra, who once upon a time felt he had to struggle to overcome the rigidity of his background as a music-reading classical performer when playing jazz improvisations and "folksy" material. Five years of playing with Alperin and with his own free-jazz groups, however, gradually gave him the freedom and boldness to exploit his virtuosity in the service of his own musical ideas. This recording may be the (as yet) finest example of Shilkloper's fully ripened and independent creativity, in addition to the professional musicianship for which he is already well-known.

Which shelf should you put this record on? It doesn't really matter, as long as you place it alongside your other favorites, regardless of genres or "schools".

Isak Rogde, writer. Norway, 1993 (liner notes)

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Misha Alperin & Arkady Shilkloper - Live in Grenoble (1993)

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Misha Alperin & Arkady Shilkloper - Live in Grenoble (1993)

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Misha Alperin & Arkady Shilkloper - Live in Grenoble (1993)

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