Profession — "nanny-manager"

"Profession — Manager"

Festival manager—or you might say Manager of Everything—at "Mostakh," Ekaterina Perelyigina talks about the inner workings of the festival, overcoming language barriers, and how a California Cheburashka finds friends at blues jam sessions.

Manager

Once I came to a festival in Yekaterinburg with the band Folkline, which I was managing. After the festival, we lost one of our members—he went to visit someone and then a taxi took him to who knows where. And Volodya Rusinov's band Jumping Cats had one of their members lose his passport. There was total chaos, but then our musician turned up and made it to the train, and the passport ended up at the hotel reception. Jumping Cats even managed to make it just in time for their concert in Petersburg.

After that Volodya called and said he needed a manager for the band so he wouldn't have to keep track of passports. So we started working from a situation of universal losses.

Nanyedger

We used to joke about my job title that way. When you bring a foreign artist to town, you disappear from your life for a week — breakfasts, lunches, sightseeing tours, tickets, walks — the only thing you do differently is sleep somewhere else.

It was a very happy period in my life: such artists would come, you'd walk around with them, chat and learn. You'd find out so much about music, how it's constructed, about blues, about its essence. I wasn't a musician myself back then and kept thinking: if only our musicians could all hear this. Absolutely priceless experience.

Sevkabel

During the time of the first Sevcabel festival, the venue was still under construction. Volodya sent me to check out the space, and we were supposed to sign the contract that evening. I arrived, approached the security guards—very pleasant people, by the way—and explained the situation. I'm walking around, inspecting the venue, and it's really beautiful—the sea, the sunset. Then Volodya shows up with the woman we needed to sign the contract with. She looks at me and says, "How did you even get in here? This is a closed territory." And Volodya answers: "This is our manager, she can get in anywhere."

Montage of lanterns. The clock reads 4:00 a.m.

Everyday Life

At night you're calculating the number of toilets and diving into sanitary regulations. At the last moment you remember about the ambulance that's supposed to be on standby and you find one. You order some food, and when it arrives, you find out it's a whole KamAZ truck. Volodya said then: "We'll throw the musicians who play badly in there."

The Scale of the Disaster

My family was moving, buying a bigger apartment in an old building. The deal was set for July 30, we were moving on August 1, and the festival was August 3. And the apartment is in Moscow, but the festival is in St. Petersburg. And the "old building" really is old — the last repair was done, God knows, back in 1993. I go to the festival, my husband calls and says, what kind of horror did we buy, it's impossible to even be in there, and I answer: I'll fix everything, but later. And the next day, together with my husband, we're already hauling toilet stalls around Sevcabel.

English language

The musicians we brought over were all interesting. Of course, there are those who are only interested in drinking and girls, but there are very few like that. One artist came with a list of what interested him in Russia: cabbage rolls, jellied meat, herring under a fur coat, and the Tretyakov Gallery.

My beloved friend Aki Kumar always came with a purpose — to see what's new this time — the Pushkin Museum, the Hermitage.

Mark Hamel definitely wanted to get to the Kremlin and Sparrow Hills.

I don't speak English perfectly, and when Aki Kumar arrived, we were dealing with blockages—Google Translate was blocked. We're standing on Palace Square, I'm telling him something, recalling every bit of English I know, and whatever I can't explain, I draw on the ground with a stick.

"Bridges" really helped: there was a breakthrough in language proficiency. Artists come for a week, and you speak only English the whole time. On the first day you strain all your theoretical knowledge, by the third day you start thinking in English, and by the end of the week Russian has "flown out." English hasn't fully taken over yet, but Russian is already gone. After the festival I dozed off in the kitchen, my mom said something to me, and I started answering her in English in my sleep.

RAO

One of the copyright managers sent me a letter two days before the festival saying, look, we need to draw up a contract and you need to transfer us money for the festival. But the festival was already in full swing, some artists had even arrived, we were solving everything on the fly, so I ignored the letter. The day after the festival, he sent me a heart-wrenching letter: I came to the festival, you were selling records there, and that's separate money. And he named an absolutely enormous sum.

We were already in Moscow by then, so I ran to the local RAO office, and there was a really good manager there. I presented all the documents and reports, and they came up with a perfectly reasonable sum. But my St. Petersburg friend couldn't be stopped — he threatened to sue, but in the end the Moscow documents won out and there was no court case. He was probably upset about it — such a festival and without him.

Domestic Rider

Musicians had different demands: some had lactose intolerance, others needed a special gold tequila in their dressing room. But delivery services didn't exist back then, so we had to run around to different shops and buy everything manually.

The summer of the first festival turned out to be very cold. What months have +8 degrees outside? That's right, January and August. And my husband ran to the market with a "shuttle trader" checkered bag to hand out 200 raincoats right at the festival in case of rain. And I went to buy blankets for the musicians.

So Russian musicians once wandered into the green room where the foreigners were, and there's this spread laid out according to the rider—that fancy tequila and all. "See," they say, "you don't love us." But of course none of our guys had sent a hospitality rider, so immediately someone was dispatched to the store and the situation got sorted. So colleagues, send those hospitality riders!

Cheburashka from California

Aki Kumar kept threatening me with marriage the whole time. He's a well-known comedian, never stops joking. At one point we showed the musicians some Soviet cartoons, and Chino Twingstyde fell in love with Winnie the Pooh, while Aki Kumar started comparing himself to Cheburashka. Because he hosts jam sessions in California, and like Cheburashka, he's looking for friends.

Americans have a custom at jam sessions of praising you for something, anything. Maybe you've got great foot-tapping rhythm, or your hat looks cool. But there are people, according to Aki, who really have nothing to praise. Nothing at all. And to those people he usually says: You do what you do, man!

Kumar plays at the festival, it all looks so beautiful, sounds divine, he comes off stage, and I give him a slap on the shoulder and say: You do what you do, man!

Being an Artist

Rick Estrin is an older man. He was nearly 80 when he arrived. So this grandfather comes in, dragging his foot a little. But he gets on stage, straightens his shoulders, and young girls are watching him and screaming louder than they would at some Kirkorov concert. He got the crowd so worked up—most of them didn't even know who he was—that it felt like we were at a world-famous rock band's concert. And then he comes down from the stage, grabs me and says: let's dance! And we're dancing, he's running on adrenaline, and I'm thinking, I just hope his blood pressure doesn't spike.

Western musicians are very different offstage and on stage. A guitarist arrives—standing around in a stretched-out T-shirt with a stain, in flip-flops, we're talking. And then he goes into the dressing room and there it is: crocodile-skin boots, rings, a hat, a bandana under the hat, lots of accessories. These observations really changed my attitude toward music and the profession of an artist. People come to listen to you and they come to look at you: you go out on stage, you look good and you're not playing for yourself, or there for God, but only for people.

The Teacher

We were driving through Moscow to Kozlov's club for an afterparty. I'm sitting next to the driver, and the musicians are in the back. And the driver asks me if I happen to be a teacher. Yes, I say. And then our bassist Kolya Syrsev comes out with: They talk about penis again.

Here's what Aki Kumar parries with: "We were at the Pushkin Museum, we saw all the penises in the world, so why not talk about it?"

Bridges

There are no analogues to the "Mosty" festival. Volodya was so eager to show our country in the best light to all the foreigners, to put them up in the best places, to take them to the best venues, that I sometimes asked him to be a little more careful with the budget. But they would leave as our friends, tell their colleagues about us, and those colleagues would ask to come the next year.

"Mosty" is not a multiformat festival—it's blues only, but such varied blues that people, many of whom thought classical "good man, bad luck," ended up discovering that blues is dancing until you drop. "Mosty" challenged people's ideas about blues. If it had continued, maybe blues would have become more popular here. Though why speak in the past tense—we don't know what's ahead?