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 Aram Khatchaturian, graduating from the Moscow Conservatory in 1961. He formed his first trio with Mikhail Terentyev and Alfred Grigorovitch, debuting at the 1st Moscow Jazz Festival in 1962. The trio was notable for the unusual line-up (flugelhorn, double bass, piano) and original repertoire. As musicologist Arkady Petrov wrote in his article for Soviet Jazz: Problems, Events, Masters (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 Leonard Feather, who visited USSR with 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 Leonid Chizhik (piano) and Vladimir Vasilkov (drums). They had tremendous success at the 3rd Moscow Jazz Festival in 1966 and received five awards, including Best Ensemble, Best Composer and Best Performer. The line-up changed with Igor Brill (piano) and Mikhail Kudryashov (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 Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Vadim Ludvikovsky. Ludvikovksy, Lukyanov and saxophonist Alexei Zubov also gave a few performances with Czechoslovak Radio Jazz Orchestra in 1972 (one of the concerts was released by 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 Cadence, 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 Vano Avaliani and pianist 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)