Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
In the 1960s and ’70s in Moscow, Nina Brodskaya was a singing star.
“I used to sing for the biggest band in Moscow,” said Ms. Brodskaya, who performed with the illustrious Eddie Rosner Jazz Orchestra in the Soviet Union before she moved to the United States in 1980. She made records here with names like “Moscow-New-York” and “Come to USA” but never equaled the renown she had in the Soviet Union.
But she still appears regularly in a cramped basement alongside a longstanding group of fellow musicians from Russia and other former Soviet-bloc countries who have settled in and around Brighton Beach, the heavily Russian neighborhood in Brooklyn.
There is no audience, but Ms. Brodskaya has the joy of jamming with her fellow immigrants as they gather on Tuesday nights below a dentist’s office in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, in a modest room adorned with posters of American and Russian jazz luminaries.
The musicians are mostly over 60 and often learned jazz clandestinely and resourcefully in Soviet-era Russia, where the authorities were suspicious of people interested in American culture, especially cultural traditions that emphasized improvisation and artistic freedom.
“They would tell us, ‘Today, you’re playing jazz; tomorrow, you’re selling your country,’” recalled Ms. Brodskaya, who was a singer in the band led by Eddie Rosner, a trumpeter and bandleader known as the Polish Louis Armstrong who was imprisoned for years in a Soviet gulag under Stalin.
read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/17/nyregion/in-a-brooklyn-basement-jazz-with-a-russian-accent.html?_r=1
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