Natan Leites carries an American flag at Pulkovo Airport to welcome jazz musician Wynton Marsalis to St. Petersburg in 1999. Photo: for SPT
By Sergey Chernov
The St. Petersburg Times
Published: January 16, 2014 (Issue # 1793)
Jazz promoter Natan Leites, who was a fixture on the Leningrad and St. Petersburg jazz scene for more than 50 years, died at the age of 76 on Dec. 30, 2013. He was cremated on Jan. 5.
For nearly 50 years, Leites headed the Kvadrat Jazz Club, Russia’s oldest surviving jazz association, which organized concerts and festivals, produced albums, held lectures and published a typewritten magazine containing information about jazz music at a time when it was officially discouraged by the Soviet state.
A true jazz aficionado, Leites was at the center of everything that happened on the local scene, inspiring and educating generations of musicians.
“I first came across something resembling jazz music at the Mayak Club on Krasnaya (now Galernaya) Ulitsa,” Leites said in an interview with The St. Petersburg Times in 1997. “They played music there starting from the Stalin era at some dance nights and stuff.”
“The trendiest and best-known was a band led by [Izrail] Atlas. Generally, people danced a lot after the war, in the 1950s and the early and mid-1960s. It became a growth medium for so-called Leftfield ‘ensembles.’ I heard something of the kind for the first time in around 1952.
Read more: http://www.sptimesrussia.com/story/38886
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