"People decided themselves that this was a blues club"

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

Week

Mishuri comes by sometime. I don't remember where they were playing regularly before that. But their contract fell through or something. He had a big band. I think six people.

He came and said, "Let's play at your place on Wednesdays. For a little money." Because we had to rehearse anyway, and I needed to develop the program, test it out, work through all the details.

Basically, I decided that we have nothing to lose anyway. Let's do it. Besides, we have the core in place — four working days at the club.

That story went away too. Some time passed—I honestly can't remember how long now, maybe half a year or a year. Then we look: Wednesday is up and running.

Vova Rusinov says, let's do "Jumping Tuesdays." Well, Jumping Cats and Jumping Tuesdays. The approach is roughly the same: not much money, we play, we invite guests.

So it's not like they were testing out their program in some obvious way—maybe they were, but you couldn't tell from the outside. They invited different musicians to join them to expand their sound and, you know, brighten up their musical palette. Volodya Kozhekin was with them, Anya Korolyova... And a lot of other musicians.

It wasn't like some jam session. But they would invite one, sometimes two people as special guests to their concerts. In advance. They'd discuss what songs would be played. That story went somewhere too.

Then Monday remained.

First of all, I didn't understand who could actually promote Mondays so that it wouldn't just be an empty room, but so that people would actually come.

Second, I had maybe a somewhat cowardly feeling, maybe selfish. But damn it, now I'm here six days without fail. If I have even one free evening, and if we do Monday, I'll just be living here round the clock every single day.

But the music won out. Dima Veteran came along. He says, let's do an acoustic set with me and Dima Kazantsev on Mondays. Same principle—just the two of us, plus we invite either some known guest ahead of time, or just come on down, guys. But acoustic. No drums, nothing. And that took off pretty quickly too.

It seems like 2006 had arrived. Fedya recommended the Norwegians to me, but I had serious doubts.

There was also this group from Vladimir, called Blackmailers back then, and I really liked them — a strong group, real power to them. And I think they introduced us to Svet from Svet Boogie Band. At first it was confusing because, you know, I was going in blind, but I trusted the people I was talking to.

And then Svet appeared, and of course it was something special, a real bomb as they say, it's a shame he wasn't as well-known as he should have been.

Magic

In 2006, this person Omar Itkowitz appeared on our scene, and it turned out that Omar personally knew a lot of American musicians, I mean North American ones, Chicago blues musicians, Black bluesmen. And he came and said, listen, let's do this, I'll bring someone over. But the road was completely unpaved back then. I don't remember who came first, but there were a lot 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 it was easy for us, but there was such a thrill—like you were some kind of explorer-discoverer, and something unfamiliar was happening for the first time.

I always understood, whenever we made arrangements with Omar, that this project wasn't commercial in the sense of making money. I knew what the expenses would be, and I prepared for it in advance. I was ready to put money into it and not worry about whether we'd make anything back or not.

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

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

And that was quite a strange story for me, I was cautious about it, and they're telling me he's cool, and I'm saying, what's cool about it: the old man's got dark skin, yeah, something on the bass going boom-boom-boom, his voice isn't that strong, are you sure everything will be okay?

And so, the concert begins, and I'm sitting there with this feeling of caution, thinking, maybe I've made a mistake getting caught up in all this. Ten, fifteen minutes pass, and it's not just my own impression—it's something else, it's some kind of voodoo magic, I can't explain it any other way. There's this grandfather sitting on a high barstool, doing this boom-boom-boom-boom, and he's making everyone in the hall sway like that.

I don't understand what this is, it's impossible to explain, it's some kind of mysticism, magic. And this turns 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 people's faces when they visit, the place is packed, and this girl is shouting into her phone "come quick, get over here, it's so cool!"

You look at all this and you understand what's happening, it's just—damn it—it's real magic, there are plenty of cases like this, when the moment comes and you understand that life turned out right, well it was just that kind of life, you know, the kind that just flows and flows.

Approach

I never looked at, how you put it, projects—whether they would "take off" or not. Why? I'll say it again: I wanted what was happening to be what I liked. Second, 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 10-15 don't take off... There are so many, many unclear things that influence whether people will come to concerts or not. Not just the day of the week, the weather, atmospheric pressure, whether it's a holiday or not, and everything else.

You'd schedule a concert thinking, well, this ought to work out fine, and then it doesn't—or the opposite, you're thinking, God, I hope it at least draws somebody, and then, damn, there's no room to stand. It's completely impossible to predict with any kind of certainty—even fifty percent certainty—what's going to work and what won't.

That's why from a commercial standpoint it was important to get results averaged over a month, because people come in, and if they dig it, that's what matters—it doesn't mean there will suddenly be a lot of them right away. Well, okay, so everything's happening right, it just means you need more time for more people to show up who are into it.

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

It's probably just a generational thing, because Petrovich is one thing entirely and Vova Rusinov is quite another. And musically, I won't say I was completely thrilled by what they performed or how they performed it, but I saw the fire of emotion in it, in all of it—both in them and in the people who came to that concert. And so, everything was done right, that's all.

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

And besides, it was the people and the audience who decided it was a blues club, not me. And then they themselves made complaints about it.

Relocation

It all ended simply. We were renting the space, you see. And the manager of the office where we rented it—he was the type of person from the nineties, behaviorally speaking.

When we started there, and this went on for seven years, it was a two-story building, a little house like that, and they owned the first floor. Somehow they bought the second floor too and made rooms there. And so he put his wife in charge of managing those rooms.

Well, that's how it started. And then for our guests, this and that, tensions began, confrontations. And in the end, he decided to show who was really in charge. They doubled our rent. Just like that, doubled it. Even though it was already substantial.

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

There were people who liked the changes. There were people who said everything was dead now and everything had become so 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.