SPT
Tequilajazzz reincarnated
Yevgeny Fyodorov prepares to showcase his new group, Zorge, with a local concert.
By Sergey Chernov
Staff Writer
Published: February 2, 2011 (Issue # 1641)
Maxim Zurabiani
Fyodorov (r) with Zorge’s drummer, St. Petersburg-based German Marc-Olivier Lauber.
Musician Yevgeny Fyodorov, who disbanded his celebrated local rock band Tequilajazzz last year, returns with a new band, which he says is not unlike his former one, despite a new name and new members.
Called Zorge, the new band’s core is Fyodorov, who sings and plays bass, and St. Petersburg-based German drummer Marc-Oliver Lauber. Formed in September as a duo, it has since been expanded to feature Vadim Sergeyev, the guitarist with Morekorabli, Splean and Optimystica Orchestra, and guitarist Dmitry Zilpert of the Moscow indie-rock band Tinavie.
Fyodorov announced the split of Tequilajazzz on the band’s web site in July, amid work on the new album. The news came as a shock to fans, who have grown used to the band being one of the staples on the St. Petersburg indie-rock scene since it first performed at TaMtAm, the city’s 1990s seminal local underground rock club, in September 1993.
“It was a proper, well thought-through decision, and everybody within the band, I think, was expecting it - but we managed to keep things so that nobody outside suspected it,” Fyodorov said.
“You know, it’s like when you live with a girlfriend for a long time. You don’t love her, and she doesn’t love you. You are forced to go and visit parents together, pretend to be a happy family, and so on. We were very good at pretending.”
The aborted album’s working material remained on hard disks until September, when Fyodorov took two new unheard Tequilajazzz songs and recorded them with Lauber and a couple of local musicians. The tracks, “Crimea” and “9999,” were released as a free Internet single on Sept. 4, intended as a gift for fans on Tequilajazzz’s 17th anniversary.
The recordings were the first joint project between Fyodorov and Lauber, who had not yet come up with the name Zorge at that time.
“I told audiences from the start: You are free to call the band whatever you wish,” Fyodorov said. “As far as I know, most preferred to call it Tequilajazzz.”
Fyodorov first met Lauber some ten years ago in Cologne, when the drummer played with the German version of the psychobilly band The Meantraitors, whose St. Petersburg frontman Stas Bogorad lived in Germany from 1999 to 2008. Lauber moved to St. Petersburg two-and-a-half years ago.
“I knew him, but didn’t know he had been living in Russia for some time,” Fyodorov said.
“It turned out that he lives here, and we found each other in a miraculous way, and launched a band with him as a duo in September. We didn’t plan to expand for some time, but wrote a lot of songs straight away, and now we have material for a full album.”
The new band’s name is reminiscent of that of the Soviet spy Richard Sorge, who operated in Japan during WWII under the cover of being a journalist.
“Firstly, espionage is this season’s hottest trend,” Fyodorov said, referring most likely to last year’s spy scandal, when a Russian spy ring was uncovered in the U.S. After a dramatic exchange of alleged spies from both countries, the deported Russians were promptly given an audience with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who is reported to have sung a patriotic song with them. The most famous of the spies, tabloid favorite Anna Chapman, joined the United Russia party’s youth wing in December and in January got a job on Russian television.
“But in fact, it’s a reference to adventure literature, to movies, whatever. It doesn’t have anything to do with any historic characters, it’s just a great word,” he said.
“I like books about spies - John le Carre, for instance - and I like spy movies a lot. Whatever political force they work for. The life of a spy- a person immersed in an environment that is foreign to him - is the most extreme expression of loneliness on this planet.”
Musically, the band’s material sounds not unlike Tequilajazzz (“Rough rhythmic structures, intricate jazz harmonies and the evident influence of modern and classical academic music,” Fyodorov wrote in Zorge’s press release), but is perhaps more complex and sophisticated.
“This is modern guitar music that has been seriously influenced by all the music that has existed in the world before it, including punk rock and new wave and art rock,” Fyodorov said.
“It’s difficult for me to say before the concert - I haven’t had feedback from listeners yet - but it seems to us that the group could be called the same name as before. We haven’t used it so far, because there were no key members of the previous band, in particular our remarkable drummer [Alexander ‘Duser’ Voronov].
“That’s why we came up with a new name, but the vectors for development have been kept, and in fact it’s a logical development of everything we did before. It’s just a new name. And new musicians.”
Fyodorov said he was no longer afraid of using the term “art rock” in regard to his work.
“We take pleasure in using certain things that were relevant for 1970s art-rock bands; it seems that their time has returned - but without knights in cloaks or any Tolkien nonsense,” he said.
“We’re about music and a normal balance between various musical trends. You should not get fixed on rock and roll just because you play the electric guitar. The electric guitar has many more possibilities than people usually think.
“What we’re doing now is much more experimental than what my previous band had been doing for the past few years - and much closer to what it started with in its TaMtAm days.
“Without noise terror, but with very serious experimenting with rhythmic and harmonic structures. Here we’re talking not so much about radicalism of music as such, but about serious reconsidering of traditional forms of music-playing within the rock idiom. And this is pop music, for us.”
At Thursday’s concert, Zorge will perform 11 new songs written since September, plus eight Tequilajazzz songs, according to Fyodorov.
“I am the author of 100 percent of Tequilajazzz songs, except for a cover of a song written by my older brother. That gives me the full right to use them in our future concerts,” he said.
“We will perform Tequilajazzz songs that we deem appropriate for our new set - the ones that fit the aesthetics that we have chosen.”
Fyodorov did not reveal what the new songs’ lyrics are like, but he is prepared to say what they are not.
“Their persona will almost never be the same as the author, I have sung enough about my experiences and feelings from the first person - enough of that,” he said.
“It’s just some made-up stories sung from the perspective of certain characters. Nothing personal. No soul-searching, disrobing in public or anything like that. You can see it as musical theater.”
After the first concerts in St. Petersburg this week and in Moscow (at Sixteen Tons on February 18), the band will take to the studio to record its debut album.
“We will showcase our full album at the concerts, that is, we are doing it the old way, which is completely wrong from a showbiz point of view,” Fyodorov said.
“We’re a band without a demo, a band without a record; we go straight to playing concerts, and our material can only be heard live at concerts for the time being.”
In December, Fyodorov signed a letter from a group of rock musicians to President Dmitry Medvedev in defense of imprisoned businessman and Putin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who nevertheless was given a lengthy new prison sentence in his second fraud trial, which is widely viewed as politically motivated.
Fyodorov said he had done so after been called by Akvarium’s Boris Grebenshchikov, who read him a letter originally written by Vladimir Shakhrin of the group Chaif.
“It was not published, because it was a personal letter, but I can say it was written in a very informal way,” Fyodorov said.
His personal views do not spill over into Zorge’s music, however.
“We play pop music, even if it’s complex - nothing radical or revolutionary,” he said.
“Under the current conditions, one should simply play beautiful music, and do so with dignity. It’s the only thing we can do in this country now. The same applies to everyone - they should just do something good in their own way and place.”
“I’ve forbidden myself to think about politics so far in this period, we’ll see how I’ll feel about it in the summer.”
On Thursday, Zorge will perform as a trio, as the fourth member, Zilpert, will be on tour in Germany with his band Tinavie.
“But it will be an absolutely fully-fledged event, because we had been rehearsing the whole set as a three-piece band; the fourth member didn’t join until very recently - like two weeks ago,” Fyodorov said.
But Zorge is planning more local concerts in its full lineup in the near future, as well as an international tour after the album is completed.
“It will be the same Tequilajazzz route,” he said.
“We just put it on hold, because we didn’t have a band. Now we have the band and the promoters are waiting for the recording. For sure, many think that I’ve gone mad and will start playing ballads with an acoustic guitar now, maybe.
“We must reassert our musical credibility, the fact that we’re qualified heirs to Tequilajazzz. But now everyone will see that it is so - we’re Tequilajazzz, only better.”
Zorge will play at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 3 at Zoccolo, 2/3 3aya Sovietskaya Ulitsa. Metro: Ploshchad Vosstaniya. Tel. + 274 9467.
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