The Russian Invasion

If there were a handbook on “How to Create an American Country Music Sensation,” you can be sure there would not be a chapter in it on recruiting musicians from Russia. It seems obvious: if you want to harvest kiwis, go to New Zealand, not Norway; if you want to find country musicians, go to Nashville, not Russia.

Thankfully, there are people who ignore the obvious.

Like Ray Johnson.

Even so, Johnson was not looking to make a country music sensation. An international art dealer from Minneapolis, he was just looking for a quiet dinner in Moscow after a long day of meetings.

But we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves.

Our story actually begins in Obninsk, a town of 100,000 in Kaluzhskaya region, 74 km northeast of Kaluga and some three hours by commuter train from Moscow. You won’t find this town in travel guides and there isn’t much to recommend it as a tourist destination. Founded in 1946, Obninsk has the distinction of being the site of the world’s first nuclear power station (opened in 1954).

The city (closed to foreigners until the 1990s) may also have Russia’s highest per capita density of scientists. Today, Obninsk is home to the Institute of Physics and Energy, the Research Institute of Medical Radiology and the Continuing Studies Institute for Nuclear Industry Workers. The local “Buran” enterprise manufactures Russia’s S-300 air-defense systems. Recently dubbed a “City of Science” (Naukograd), Obninsk boasts 10 academicians, 200 doctors and 1,200 PhDs.

Among Russia’s “technical intelligentsia” like these in Obninsk, great value is placed on education and the arts. Which is how several children of Obninsk scientists ended up meeting at the city’s secondary school for music. Today, they call themselves Bering Strait. But initially, they were drawn together by their love of The Beatles and country music. And by their teacher, Alexei Gvozdev, who had a passion for bluegrass and decided to build a group from scratch, training his students hard from a very young age.

“Gvozdev taught us classical guitar first, but he also thought we could play some other types of music, in order to develop our technique,” said Ilya Toshinsky, 21, the group’s founder and lead guitarist.

The group first came together in 1990, under the name “Vesyoly Dilizhans” (“Merry Stagecoach”). They were soon good enough to make it onto the national TV program Shire Krug (“Widen the Circle”). “We were real TV stars back then,” Toshinsky recalled. “By now we have been everything: kids, TV stars, now country musicians.”

Certainly country music was not new to Russia with the kids from Obninsk. Starting in 1989, there were annual “Farmer Festivals” where about 30 Russian bands would gather to play country music. But the authenticity of their music left something to be desired. “They thought they played bluegrass,” chuckled Lidia Salnikova, the group’s keyboardist. “But they just put some Russian folk music and maybe some jazz together with some banjo. It wasn’t really country, but it was exotic enough to make people think it was country music.”

In 1990, the group began playing their music on Moscow’s Arbat. They were each able to earn about R500-1000 a week. This was good money at that time. In fact, it was several times the salary of their nuclear scientist and engineer parents. And it helped the kids through their post-secondary educations in Moscow. Toshinsky is now in the 3rd level of the Jazz Faculty of the Gnesin Academy of Music. Salnikova studied law for two years, and lead singer Natasha Borzilova, 21, along with the four other members of the group (Alexander Ostrovsky, 19—dobro and steel-guitar, Andrei Missikhin, 22—bass and contrabass, Sergei Pasov, 18—mandolin and violin and Alexei Arzamastsev, 26—drums), studied at the Jazz College of the Institute of Modern Art.

By January 1994, the group, now Bering Strait, had found a better gig than the grueling work of street minstrels. They began playing their bluegrass at La Cantina, a Mexican restaurant in the heart of Moscow. The pocket money was good: “My first guitar came from La Cantina,” Toshinsky recalls nostalgically.

La Cantina, located in the heart of Moscow, would alter the group’s fate. In the spring of 1997, American art dealer Ray Johnson walked into the restaurant for dinner. “I remember being very tired,” he recalled, “and I was just looking for a quiet place to have dinner, where there would not be some band playing acid rock.” He chose to eat at La Cantina because it appeared that there would be no live music during dinner. But he was wrong, and soon a group of young kids (they were 13-17 at the time) got up on the stage and started playing country music. Johnson was awestruck. “They were just so incredibly good,” he recalled. Johnson met with the group after their show and, finding they had someone representing their interests in the US, offered to contact that person and find out if he could help.

“These kids were just such amazing musicians,” Johnson said, “I couldn’t get them out of my mind.” He contacted their representative in the US and found that little was being done to promote them, so he undertook to help unravel that sticky situation over the next few years and has since provided a great deal of financial support for the group.

“I deal exclusively in Soviet era art,” Johnson said, “and if I want to help Russian artists, I really can’t do that by helping them create more Soviet art. So I see this as a way I can help contemporary Russian artists.”

Johnson organized a trip for the group to the US, complete with jam sessions with Toshinsky’s music idol, Béla Fleck. In 1997, a development deal was signed with Sony and four songs were written, but Sony opted not to exercise their option. At that point, Tim Dubois, president of Arista records, stepped in and signed the group to a multi-album deal. Early this year, Arista closed its Nashville operations and Dubois moved over to media giant Gaylord, which picked up Bering Strait’s contract.

“Gaylord has a lot of wherewithal,” Johnson noted. “They are not going to put out a group and have it fail. They are going to pull out all the stops and make them a success, not only in the US, but internationally as well.”

The group’s manager, Mike Kinnamon, is equally optimistic. “Everybody in the industry is predicting that this will be the group that changes the way music comes out of Nashville,” Kinnamon said. “They are so intelligent musically that they add a flavor that is unlike anything that has come before.”

Bering Strait now spends much of its time in Nashville, writing, rehearsing and recording in a beautifully converted barn on Kinnamon’s property. Of course, living and working in Nashville has made finishing studies in Moscow difficult. Toshinsky missed his school’s summer exam session last year, but he was able to travel to Moscow last fall to make up the exams.

“Béla what?” asked Jazz Faculty Dean Igor Brill. Toshinsky had named the composer of the banjo piece he was playing for his exam. But even Brill, a legend in Russian jazz, had not heard of the US banjo star.

“The Jazz Chair has existed [at the Gnesin Academy] for 15 years,” Brill said, “but this is our first experiment with the banjo. We never had the banjo as an instrument in our faculty, just the guitar. Yet, Ilya managed to persuade us it is worth trying.”

“We have known Ilya for two years,” Toshinsky’s teacher Konstantin Serov said. “He has very fine technique, and can play both the guitar and banjo. It is amazing that he can play Béla Fleck, the only banjoist who plays non-traditional country music.”

Toshinsky played “Nachos Trace” and “Blue Bob” and the famous banjo compositions, “Black Berry Blossom” and “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” accompanied by Bering Strait’s bassist Missikhin and drummer Arzamantsev.

The performance completed, Toshinsky’s zachyotka (notebook for exam scores) received a big “otlichno”  (“excellent”) mark, signed by Brill.

There was hardly anyone happier for Ilya than Nina Seavey, an award-winning documentarian who is making a film about Bering Strait, tracing their development from their origins in Obninsk through their US tour (tentatively scheduled for spring 2001). Seavey and her crew followed Toshinsky and the group around Russia for five days last fall. She has become a believer that these kids have what it takes.

“If they succeed, I’ll make a film. If they fail, I’ll make a film anyway,” she said. “There is a rocket ship under these kids and the engines are steaming. Think about it: these kids have had songwriting sessions with the leading US banjo musicians. Ilya Toshinsky, the lead-guitarist, is playing with guys like Bela Fleck. In short, they’re in it up to their eyeballs.”

Seavey traveled with the musicians to Obninsk and has visited them in Nashville. She observed that “they come to Russia for nourishment. It’s hard on them to be in America. They need to stay in touch with their homeland, to replenish their spiritual resources. Because living in Nashville, this typical Southern town, is hard on a Russian.”

“It would be impossible for me to live in the US,” Borzilova said. “Because Russia is my country. I would be able to go there only to work.”

Only Toshinsky, who Seavey called “the most politically astute” member of the group, has adapted somewhat to American life. Indeed, Toshinsky is careful to ponder his answers well when asked about the group’s record deal. “We have a very good contract,” Ilya said. “For now, the royalties are on paper. If it works, it works. We use session musicians they give us. They cover the costs of travel, living and some pocket money.”

Borzilova, is less cagey. The group, she notes, plays by the rules. When recording their CD (the album should be released in November; the band was working on the last song in August), the musicians wrote about half the songs themselves and picked out some other songs by US composers to make up the balance. But, Borzilova said, either way the recording company needs to give its OK, telling them what songs will work and which won’t. “I will definitely start my own career later,” Borzilova mused, longing for when she will have enough money to make her own music and “not be dependent on what the company is telling us to do.”

If you didn’t know their last names or their story, and you heard them play, you would not know this was a foreign-born country group. Their sound is American, but, Borzilova said, they “try to put something Russian into it as well.” What exactly that “distinctively Russian” element is can be hard to put a finger on.

“They are a band that happens to be from Russia,” said Fletcher Foster, a former senior vice president of marketing at Arista who is closely familiar with the group. “They are not a Russian band.” The point is important: “So much is going to be about people looking at them and accepting their music and not having a preconceived notion that ‘Oh, my God, they’re from Russia, they can’t be country artists,’” Foster said.

To Johnson, what is uniquely Russian about these kids is their level of training and dedication. “These kids are incredibly well trained,” he said. “You just don’t see that in this country. I don’t think that very many Americans would have allowed their kids at age 10 to sit for six hours a day with a teacher. They just are so talented and capable with their instruments. It is amazing! They also have this passion for accomplishment. We in the US tend to be a bit more mediocre. We maybe get involved in more things, and we don’t do any one of these things as well as you will find is the case in Russia ...”

In any event, the group’s Russian origins will not be highlighted in their promotion. “If it becomes about them being from Russia,” Kinnamon said, “that makes them a novelty act. And novelty acts have a very short life span.”

“This is not like rock or jazz, which is more universal,” Foster added. “Country music is uniquely American. That’s why you don’t hear about a lot of international country artists.” But Kinnamon said people are going to hear a lot about Bering Strait. An “unprecedented” media blitz is planned to coincide with the group’s November album release. In August, the group made its debut performance at the Grand Old Opry, the iconographic country music stage.

Notably, Bering Strait is not the first Russian country music band to try to make their mark in the US. The first was Kukuruza (“Corn”), a Moscow band that toured the US in 1988 and also played on the Grand Old Opry, releasing a CD in 1991 on Sugar Hill Records. Dan (“Banjo Dan”) Lindner, a famous bluegrass artist, whose band was the first American bluegrass band to visit the USSR, said Kukuruza has “a real Russian flavor,” helped along by the fact that most of their songs are sung in Russian.

This cuts to the heart of the matter. Language is everything in country music, where the song’s story can be more important than its melody. So the ability to offer not only quality music, but comprehensible vocals in English sets Bering Strait apart from any Russian group that has gone before.

There is only an echo of a foreign accent in Borzilova and Salnikova’s vocals ... It is more of a faint, European lilt, actually. And it adds a very intriguing quality to the mesmerizing resonance of Borzilova’s leading voice. When she serenades, “I could be persuaded to give my heart to you...” you can’t help fearing a bit for the home team musicians ...

Whether Bering Strait will find success in America remains to be seen. But they have already come a long way from very unexpected origins. “These kids living in the heartland of Russia were introduced to bluegrass music,” Seavey said, “and it grew into an amazing beauty in this formerly closed nuclear city. It is almost like a flower in a desert.”

“Everything [in the music industry] that is really huge is really different,” Foster offered. “It’s a bigger risk when you take something out of the blue, but the rewards can be very big if it pops!” RL

Russian Life will offer updates and information in the magazine and on the magazine website when Bering Strait’s album is available, and when Nina Seavey’s documentary is released.