Tenor saxophonist, bandleader and businessman Igor Butman is no stranger to Mumbai, for the musician who occupies a unique place in Russian jazz circles, has visited the country over half a dozen times in the past.

On 6^th December 2023 Igor performed at the Rang Mandir, Bandra., Mumbai.

Verus Ferreira spoke to the saxophonist after his show to know why he loves India so much, his music and his latest work.

This is not the first time you are visiting India. How has it been and what does it feel like to be back in the country, after your last visit in 2018?

Yes, this is not our first time, of course. Every visit to India is very exciting for me. Wonderful hospitality, beautiful people, sightseeing and colorful history of India. And there are many great Indian musicians that I know, not only jazz, but also national music players and classical. So it's been too long that I haven't been in India, and after 5 years we are ready to come again and perform for Indian jazz lovers. We played some new music that we have been performing throughout this year, some new songs that are written by our great musicians, the winner of the Herbie Hengak Institute of Jazz jazz competition guitarist, Evgeny Pobozhiy, some tunes from my album ‘Magic Land’ that I recorded with the great jazz giants like Chick Correa. Our incredible piano player, Oleg Akkuratov joined us with the Quintet and he sang in English, Russian and Hindi. Our new bass player Nikolai Zatolichniy added so much quality to the algorithm section, I’m very happy with this new guy who just joined the band. We also played some Russian music, some Indian music and of course original music.

Who was with you this year on stage at the show and what pieces you played?

Adding to the musicians I already mentioned the Quintet features the drummer Eduard Zizak who has been with my Quintet and the Moscow Jazz Orchestra for over 25 years. He's just getting better and better every time he surprises me with his knowledge of music with his technique that is getting unbelievable. Our new bass player Nikolai Zatolochniy who is very solid, plays very original solos, but is also very steady in the background. His rhythm is incredible, and he has a beautiful sound. The piano player of the Quintet is Oleg Akkuratov, a blind genius who can do any kind of music adding to classical jazz. We also have our guitarist Evgeny Pobozhiy, the winner of the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz Guitar Competition in 2019. He's one of the best young guitarists in in the world. By the way Oleg Akkuratov is also among the winners of the Sarah Vaughn Vocal Competition in New York. So I have a great band which is very versatile and can play any kind of music that we are going to make music lovers in India very happy.

Have you done in the past or do you plan on doing any collaborations with any Indian jazz artists?

Yes, for the first Moscow Jazz Festival in 2022 (the biggest Russian jazz festival held by my Foundation with 250k spectators annually) we invited a great professor, a great jazz and music star, Dr L. Subramaniam, who we had an incredible time performing together already two times. And definitely we agreed upon doing something together in the future. I didn't see some of my music pals from Delhi and Mumbai for unfortunately many years after last time I was there. So I hope to meet them and some new musicians this time and talk about their visits to Russia, their visits to our festivals - we have 15 festivals throughout Russia, including Sakhalin Island and Sochi and Moscow and St. Petersburg. So I hope we can do something together very soon.

How would you summarize your reasons for leaving Russia and the experience you had in the U.S.?

I left Soviet Union in 1987. It was a different country. Russia is a free and democratic country now. There's no communist ideology, which I couldn’t tolerate for some many reasons. And so I lived in the United States for almost nine years. Of course I got great experience in one of the best kinds of music for me, best music school, Berkley School of Music, where I met and studied with beautiful musicians and great stars who are now very important in jazz industry in the United States and in the world. I learned a lot and so these connections gave me many opportunities to bring these wonderful musicians to Russia. Yes, I was thinking that I'm going to live in the Soviet Union forever, but when it changed, when Soviet Union collapsed and Russian Federation was born, and there was definitely much more horizons for me as a musician and organizer and the music propagandist of music. It gave me more chances to really give jazz a new life in Russia because there's so many music lovers in our country. So I went back and using all my American experience I brought many great new features to Russia as our country didn't have that kind of experience before - many jazz stars came to Moscow and other cities for the first time since my return to Russia. I'm very happy that we now have two jazz Igor Butman Jazz Clubs in Moscow and St Petersburg that are very successful. We have a lot of programs in schools for the jazz music and Jazz Academies that are working hard and musicians that are really getting a lot of recognition in the world. So I'm very happy - and these are the results of what Boston and New York Experience gave me.

You are a leading figure in the Russian jazz scene and also run the State-supported Moscow Jazz Orchestra, your own Moscow jazz club, a record label, the annual Triumph of Jazz festival, and the country’s first jazz industry conference, Jazz Across Borders. How do you manage to take care of these projects and what is the feedback you receive?

To make it all happen, to make my festivals, my jazz clubs, my label, my companywork, the first of all I got a very good team, people that are really dedicated to music and to the business. It took us a while to really do something large to impress government agencies and private supporters of jazz – sponsors and donors. Now we just play music, first of all,it’s a proof that we are on the right way, our delivery of the songs that we are playing. It doesn't matter what song, American song, Russian song, French song or Indian song, we just had to do it the best way it's possible. Then we brought a lot of attention to the music by inviting a lot of great big stars making great festivals. And then Jazz Across Borders, the idea that came to me that we have to introduce Russian jazz, genius Russian jazz talentsto the world by inviting very famous, very influential people in music business and jazz business, directors of jazz festivals, directors and owners of jazz clubs, booking agents. So we can introduce musicians first of all from Russia but we also are very happy to give chance to musicians from all over the world, also have this opportunity to perform at our international meeting called Jazz Across Borders. It's definitely music that - across borders - we play without any charts, any music paper, any music notes we can read and we can just get together and say let's play that, let's play that, we have common songs that everybody knows and then we can improvise and share our talent and our emotions and spirit.

So the first of all, as I said, is the team, I have Roman Khristyuk, my right hand in any jazz activity such as festivals, clubs and tours, I have Pavel Ovchinnikov who is a great trombonist and also the chief of our student educational program. I have my great manager Marat Garipov who is helping me with the Orchestra. We have our head of PR Alina Kretova who is doing all the publicity work and they have also people that work with them, they know what to do and that's very important, they have a good team who trusts in what we are doing first of all, trusts me and they trust each other, they work as a team together. And we believe in music and music pays us back.

You’re a favorite with ex president of the US Bill Clinton who loved your music. You are also a good friend of Russian president Vladimir Putin and his political party. Your comments on being politically associated with these leading political leaders.

It's a great honor to be friend and being supported by very important people such as President Vladimir Putin and Bill Clinton. They are the most powerful people in the world. A lot of people, countries depend on the decisions made by these people. It's very important for me too, when I play for them, when I talk to them, just give them good impressions, give them inspiration to find the best solution for all the countries, all the people. As I told Wynton Marsalis once, that if something's going on, something not very good, not very good things going on in the world, such as war and conflicts, I said, it means that we're not playing good enough at the moment. So we have to play better. We have to be, we have to show people how beautiful life is, how beautiful these emotions are. I'm not happy that our countries still have many, many differences and opinions, but I guess it will take some time and a lot of our work to make it better. So I'm very optimistic for the world and just let's keep going.

And one thing also that I want to mention about the Indian jazz people, I'd like to thank the late Pradeep Bhatia and Apurva Agarwal who brought us to Indiafor the first time with the JusJazz Festival.

In 2022, you released a new album, ‘Only Now’. Tell us something about the album.

I released the album which we recorded with many great artists and my sound engineer James Farber. This is one of my best of all my albums. I wanted to record albums with two of my great associates in my band, Evgeniy Pobozhiy, the guitarist and the piano player, Oleg Akkuratov, so I brought them to the United States, invited a great drummer Antonio Sanchez that I met many years ago in Boston and then he became a permanent drummer for Pat Metheny Group - Pat is one of my favorite musicians, guitarist, my friend - and we had on two different dates - Eddie Gomez, a legendary bass player (we did a few albums together in the past as well), - and Matt Brewer, another great bass player. So we did some of my original songs that I wrote during all these years, some new and some old. One of them was Egyptian Nights that I wrote in Egypt, but as I wrote it in daytime, but the night in Egypt was so beautiful, so I decided to call it Egyptian Nights. I played one of my first songs that I wrote, it's called Only Now, so that's the main title of the album.

It was great two days of recording and then a few days of mixing the album and I'm very happy with the result. Also it was on a long list for nomination for Grammy, but the political issues didn't let this album get at least on a short list.

But I really like that album, but we're working on a few new recordings with the big band, with the quartet, with some music by Russian composers like Borodin, who hasa big suite and we also have the Pictures at theExhibition by Mussorgsky, we also have that album that we're just going to finish soon,also an album by my Quartet with Eddie Gomez and AndreyKondakov is on the way. We have two recordings with this band, AndreyKondakov, Lenny White and Eddie Gomez and myself, but for this one, for the latest, we have Eduard Zizak on the drums, Lenny couldn't make the recording, he was on tour.

They say, America is home to jazz music, in your opinion, what is the jazz scene back home in Russia?

Yes, America is a home of jazz. America is a home of a great jazz musician from Louis Armstrong to John Coltrane, Michael and Randy Breckers, Miles Davis, and others. But I in the meantime Russia has a hundred years of history of jazz in our country. Jazz went through a lot of different times, good times, bad times. There was a State Jazz Orchestra in 1936, and the whole orchestra went to fight against Nazis in WWII, and all of the jazz musicians from that band perished in a battle. And then there was time of so called “saxophone bending”, and some people were against jazz music.

Yes, jazz was born in the US: the street music was everywhere, many musicians, many influences of the Egyptian music, Jewish music, English music, French music, which were captivated by jazz, and this unique blues feeling that came from the slaves of the United States, of the black people from Africa gave birth to this phenomenon. But it got so quickly popular and impressively massive in Russia that one of the Russian jazz and pop Soviet stars was saying that the jazz had been born in Odessa, which was a Russian city for many years. Odessa is also an international city with many people from different countries. There's a big harbour where many sailors were coming, dancing, singing, and it was very international.

We have now the great jazz scene in our country. We have 50 or 60 festivals in Russia. We have many cities that have jazz clubs. We have a state jazz club in Siberia, in Novokuznetsk. Soon we'll be opening the jazz club in Sakhalin Island. We have jazz clubs in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan. We have jazz clubs in St. Petersburg, and not only one, it's around seven jazz clubs in St. Petersburg. Different sizes, but still. Moscow has about ten jazz clubs plus festivals. Then we have many jazz concerts, performance, at the huge and very famous concert halls, such as the Conservatory Hall, the Tchaikovsky Hall, Zaryadye Hall, Philharmonic 2 concert hall, and the Kremlin concert hall. They all have big jazz concerts, which include Russian musicians. For the festival we have some musicians from the West and East. We have a big Moscow Jazz Festival. This year we'll launch St. Petersburg International Jazz Festival, that will last for a week, we have an international jazz festival in Sochi that also lasts for a week.

We have a great big band that has been active for already more than 90 years, the Oleg Lundstrem big band. It was established in the 1930 in China, when a bunch of Russian guys, Russian immigrants, or Russian people who worked in China, put together a great orchestra, and then after the World War II they came back to the Soviet Union and still were playing at highest level. We have some very talented young musicians such as Oleg Akkuratov, Evgeniy Pobozhiy, Anton Chekurov, Ilya Morozov, Dmitry Semenov. We have great piano players such as Yakov Okun, Andrey Kondakov, Valery Stepanov. We just discovered a new great vocalist Varvara Ubel, who I think isone of the best young jazz vocalists in the world. So the jazz scene is boiling in Russia,boasting with new talents and really growing!We work on that and we have also government support, not only federal government support but also the support of governments of different regions. There's a festival in Chita, at Sakhalin Island, in Vladivostok, Irkutsk, all these governments are really supporting new festivals because they see the interest of the musicians and interest of the public and the public getting younger and younger. So I'm very optimistic about our jazz scene.

Name a few jazz artists that have changed your life over the years?

Musicians who changed my life eh, I will start from the beginning. First of all, my teacher, saxophone teacher, the best saxophonist in the Soviet Union, Gennady Goldstein. He's my teacher, he's my idol, he was recording withthe Oleg Lundstrem Orchestra, recordings by his quintet, I think, areone of the best in the world, top class. Also he gave me the recordings of saxophonists which I still really enjoy and I can't stop listening to them, it's CannonballAdderly and Charlie Parker. Then I heard Michael Breaker and the great tenor players, like John Coltraneand Sonny Rollins. And I’ve heard music of Miles Davis. So these musicians just started changing my mind and they still make me feel excited about when I listen to them.

My dad was a drummer, my brother is a drummer, so I'm a big fan of drums as well. My favorite drummersare Philly Joe Jones, Jimmy Cobb, Tony Williams, Elvin Jones, Jack DeJohnette, Billy Cobham, and all others, from Dave Weckl to Steve Gadd and many, many, many more. These musicians changed my life and I became a jazz musician because of them.

How do you spend your free time?

I like to play hockey, it's my other passion, it's my favorite sport that makes me feel happy, I like to watch hockey, I like to play hockey, I like to talk about hockey and something that I guess now I will never will be disappointed in this great game.

We like to spend time with my wife together, traveling, going for some sightseeing tours, excursions and we like to discover new places and I'm coming with my wife to India - she has never been in India so she's very excited to come.

Interviewed by Verus Ferreira