"People Decided for Themselves That This Was a Blues Club"

Yuri Ivanovich Kostin on musical projects, particular instances of magic, and whether "Dom u Dorogi" on Dovatora was a blues club.

Week

Mishuris comes in. I don't remember where they were playing regularly before that. But their contract fell through somehow. He had a big band. I think it was about six people.

He comes up and says, let's play at your place on Wednesdays. For just a little money. Because we need to rehearse anyway, and I need to develop the program, work it in, polish it with all the nuances.

Basically, I figured we've got nothing to lose anyway. Let's do it. Besides, we already have the core of it — four working days at the club.

And that story went away too. Some time passed, I can't really remember how much now, maybe half a year or a year. Then we look—and Wednesday was working.

Vova Rusinov says, let's do "Jumping Tuesdays." Well, Jumping Cats and Jumping Tuesdays. The approach is roughly the same: small money, we play, we invite guests.

So it wasn't like they were testing out their program in any obvious way—maybe they were working things out, but you couldn't really tell from the outside. They'd invite different musicians over to expand their sound and maybe add more color to their musical palette. Vovka Kozhekin was with them, Anya Koroleva... and so many other musicians.

It wasn't like an actual jam session. But they would invite one or two people as special guests to their concerts. Ahead of time. They'd discuss which pieces they would play. That's how that story went too.

Then Monday remained.

First of all, I didn't understand who could actually get Mondays off the ground, so it wouldn't just be some empty hall, but so that people would actually come.

Second, I had maybe a bit of cowardly feeling, maybe selfish, I'd say. But damn, these days I'm definitely here six days a week. I have at least one free evening, and if we do Monday, I'll just be living here around the clock every single day.

But music won out. Dima Veteran showed up. He says, let's you and me and Dima Kazantsev do an acoustic set on Mondays. Same principle—just the two of us, plus we invite either some guest we've lined up beforehand, or people just come by. But acoustic. No drums, nothing like that. And that took off pretty quick too.

It was 2006, I think. Fedya recommended the Norwegians to me, but I was very skeptical.

There was also this band from Vladimir, they were called Blackmailers back then, and I really liked them—a strong group, just so powerful, you know. And I think it was they who introduced us to Svet from Svet Boogie Band. At first it was confusing too, because I was going in blind, as they say, but I trusted the people I was dealing with.

And then Svet appeared, and of course that was something really special, like a real bomb, you know. It's a real shame he wasn't as well-known as he should have been.

Magic

In 2006, a man named Omar Itkowitz appeared on our scene, and it turned out that Omar personally knew a lot of American musicians — North American, Chicago, black bluesmen. He came and said, "Listen, let's do this — I'll bring someone over." And the path was completely uncharted. I don't remember who came first, but there were many of them, the most famous musicians.

Then Zhenya Kolbashev got involved in this too, but that was all later.

Omar took these shipments on himself, and for us it was no problem at all, but there was such a thrill to it—like you were some kind of explorer, discovering something unfamiliar, and it was happening for the first time.

I always understood, when we made arrangements with Omar, that this project wouldn't be commercial in terms of profit. I knew what the expenses would be, and I prepared for it in advance. I was ready to spend that money and not worry about whether we'd make anything back or not.

We'll make money, so when you're ready to make that emotional investment, you stop thinking about it—you're thinking about something else instead, so that everything goes well.

And so in 2007 we had Bob Stroger, a Chicago musician, he was already getting on in years back then, and by now he must be nearly a hundred.

And this was a rather strange story for me, I was cautious about it, and they're telling me he's cool, and I'm like, cool how? — the old man's dark-skinned, yeah, there's something on the bass going boom-boom-boom, his voice isn't strong, are you even sure everything's going to be okay?

So the concert starts, and with this feeling of caution, I'm thinking, maybe I made a mistake getting drawn into this. Ten, fifteen minutes pass, and it's not just my personal impression—it's something else, it's some kind of voodoo magic, I can't explain it any other way. This old man sitting there on a high bar stool, doing boom-boom-boom-boom, he's got the whole room swaying. Everyone in that hall is just rocking back and forth.

I don't understand what it is, it's impossible to explain, it's some kind of mysticism, magic. And this transforms into such rapture that there's a girl sitting at the bar, maybe seventeen years old, who probably ended up here by accident—I saw her for the first time and possibly the last, and usually I remember faces of my guests, the place is packed, and this girl is shouting into her phone "come on, hurry up and get here, it's so cool!"

You look at all of this and understand what's happening—it's something unbelievable, real magic, honestly. There are plenty of such moments when you reach a point and realize your life worked out, that it was exactly this kind of life, vibrant and full of energy.

Approach

I've never really looked at any projects, as you put it, wondering whether they'd "take off" or not. Why? I'll say it again: I wanted things to happen that I actually enjoyed. Second, let's say there are 30 concerts a month—if 4 or 5 of them don't take off, that's fine, that's actually good, because that's just normal statistics.

When things "don't take off" there with 10-15... There are so many, many incomprehensible factors that influence whether people will come to concerts or not. It's not just the day of the week, the weather, atmospheric pressure, whether it's a holiday or not, and everything else.

It used to happen that you'd schedule a concert, thinking, well, this should be fine, and then nothing—or the opposite, you'd think, God, just let it be something, and then, damn it, there's nowhere left to stand. You just can't predict with any kind of certainty—not even fifty percent certainty—which shows will work and which won't. It's completely impossible to know.

That's why from a commercial standpoint it was important to get overall monthly results, and so people would come and dig it, even if there weren't necessarily crowds right away. Okay, so everything's happening the right way, it just means we need more time for more people to come along who are into this.

Here are the Jumping Cats, all that crowd around Volodya Rusinov and his whole approach—it's so different, unlike everything else, I don't know how to describe it.

It's probably just some generational thing, you know, because Petrovich is one thing entirely and Vova Rusinov is something completely different. As for the music itself, I wouldn't say I was absolutely thrilled by what they were performing or how they were performing it, but I saw this fire of emotion in it, in all of it—both in them and in the people who came to that concert. And that means they did everything right, that's all there is to it.

And besides, people would periodically say, "What kind of blues club is this when God knows what's going on here." They said that about "Kukuruza" too, and about Dima Kazantsev himself, and I'd have Beatles nights as well.

And that's the thing — it was the people and the audience who decided it was a blues club, not me. And then they turned around and complained about it themselves.

Move

It all ended simply. We were renting the space, you see. And the manager of the office where we rented it—he was that kind of person from the nineties, if you know what I mean.

When we started there, and this went on for seven years, it was a two-story building, a little house, and they owned the first floor. Somehow they managed to buy the second floor too and turned it into rooms. So he put his wife in charge of managing those rooms.

And so it began. But then, for our guests, for them everything, tensions started, conflicts. And, in the end, he decided to show who was really in charge. They doubled our rent. Just like that, doubled it overnight. Even though it was already pretty steep to begin with.

We spent several months trying to work something out, but it didn't happen. And then we were offered to move to "Rhythm-Blues Café," because they were having problems with attendance there.

There were people who liked the changes. There were people who said that everything had died and everything was now some kind of fake, and the tsar was fake and everything in general was fake now.

At first it was hard for me too. The struggle, overcoming obstacles — that's also a kind of competition with yourself.