From Russia With Love: Paul Horn at Vine St. Bar & Grill

Flutist and composer Paul Horn has an American passport, a Canadian residency (he has lived in Victoria, B.C., since 1970), a Dutch wife and the soul of a vagabond. His wanderlust has taken him from India to Egypt to China to the U.S.S.R. in search of music, peace and global understanding.

He has just returned from his third tour of the Soviet Union, organized, as was his first trip five years ago, through the Canadian government. Unlike Dave Brubeck and Billy Taylor, whose brief, overlapping recent visits to the U.S.S.R. were confined to Moscow and Leningrad, Horn stayed in the U.S.S.R. almost four weeks, playing 20 concerts in four cities, soaking up impressions of perestroika and glasnost along with some starkly negative reactions.

“There’s a lot more happening now that I didn’t find in 1983,” said Horn, whose quartet opens tonight at the Vine St. Bar & Grill. “Jazz is more in evidence above ground; there were jazz clubs in every city we visited--Kiev, where we sold out twice in a fine 4,000-seat theater; Moscow, where we played six evening shows and two matinees, all sold out; Donetsk, a mining town where they have a really big jazz following; and Odessa, where we did five shows.”

Horn, whose second visit to Russia last September was the only one conducted under a U.S.-U.S.S.R exchange (he was in a show with Kris Kristofferson), found the Soviets more open both in words and deeds.

“For the first time we were shown some modern art, and we had the impression that painters are now free to do more abstract things. The Soviet government also is officially permitting rock concerts; they draw 10,000 to 15,000 people a night, and they are saying things in the lyrics that are quite anarchistic.

“It’s ironic--an interpreter told us that there were all kinds of KGB men taking photos of the audience, so on the one hand they’re allowing people to do this, but on the other hand they’re checking out who’s doing it, sort of making them feel paranoid. But the kids don’t give a damn; they’ll sing about not wanting to fight, about getting out of Afghanistan and looking for peace--sort of like our Vietnam situation--and the government is actually funding these concerts!”

From the practical standpoint, the Horn tour was an unprecedented hassle. “We took our own sound system along, our own transformer; previously we’ve played straight jazz, but now I wanted to do some fusion things involving electronic equipment, and logistically it was a big problem, because we had to deal with the bureaucracy as well as play our music. That never happened before, and this time it was partly because of a shortage of good interpreters, due to the Reagan-Gorbachev summit.

“All the best interpreters were busy, and we were stuck with some who were really incompetent. And Gosconcert, the Soviet concert agency, a big bureaucracy itself, was grappling with all these other visitors: the New York Philharmonic, a road company of ‘Cats,’ the Dance Theatre of Harlem, the BBC Symphony--so it was a battle every step of the way.

“There were no rooms vacant in the best hotels, and they have lesser hotels that are really falling apart, with dirty bathrooms. You realize what a basically poor country this is, not what you’d expect a major superpower to be; and you notice that people are not very kind to each other in the work place.

“A couple of my musicians had studied Russian, which helped a little, but you could still go to a restaurant and see 15 waiters standing around, not giving a damn, serving you when they’re good and ready. If you want to take a taxi to the gig, the driver may or may not feel like taking you there; he gets paid either way. There’s just no incentive, and somehow I was exposed to that sort of thing more this time than in the past.”

Despite all the frustrations, there was consolation in the reaction to Horn’s quintet, which included his 28-year-old son Robin Horn on drums (he will be at Vine St. tonight) and three Canadian musicians. “The enthusiasm, the adulation for us as jazz artists, in Kiev and Odessa was really heartwarming. On our final night in Moscow, everyone rushed down the aisles and stood in front of the stage as they did in the old big-band days. I hate to use the expression, but they made us feel like rock stars.”

Horn sensed a dichotomy between the attitudes of two Soviet generations. “The older people, who are in the majority, don’t want change because they’re lazy; they don’t care to work too hard, they just want to get paid. But the young people are really eager for change and they refuse to hold on to the old values.”

There was a delicious irony in Horn’s second Canadian-backed tour. “In 1983, all of us had U.S. passports, but because there was so much tension between America and the U.S.S.R. we were announced as a Canadian group. This time, although Robin and I were the only ones who had American passports, we were promoted as a U.S. band. The Cold War must really be melting, and it’s nice to feel that thaw.”