Oleg Lundstrem

Oleg Lundstrem (1916-2005) ran the earliest (and longest lived) big band in Russia. He was born in Chita in Eastern Russia, but grew up in Harbin in China. After studying classical piano and violin, he became inspired by a Duke Ellington recording to play jazz, and in 1935 organised a group of nine musicians to become the Oleg Lundstrem Orchestra. They set up base in Shanghai, which was experiencing something of a big band boom at the time, with Buck Clayton in the middle of his residency at the Calindrome ballroom. Lundstrem and his band plugged away in various dancehalls, and by 1940 they were playing the prestigious Paramount and dominated the jazz scene, with Clayton having moved back to USA. The now 19-piece jazz orchestra were still performing in Shanghai by the end of the second world war, though Lundstrem had taken the time to study architectural engineering as a precaution.

The rise of Mao Zedong’s Communist party in post-war China caused the band to relocate en masse to Russia. The situation there under Stalin turned out to be almost as restrictive, and the musicians were refused access to Moscow, and ended up in Kazan in the state of Tatar, where Lundstrem enrolled in the conservatoire. With jazz frowned upon as an American bourgeois music, the band managed to stay together by subsuming the jazz content, and arranging and performing Tatar folk music, with the encouragement of the state philharmonic composer, A.S. Klyucharev.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, some of the cultural curtailments were relaxed, and Lundstrem and his orchestra were made an official State Concert Orchestra in 1956. For the next four decades, with occasional encouragement from jazz-loving presidents like Andropov and Brezhnev, Lundstrem led the orchestra in a repertoire that would range from Glen Miller covers to innovative arrangements of work by Russian composers. The band would usually include Russia’s most talented jazz players, including saxophonists Gennady Goldstein and Igor Butman. After the cold war with USA fizzled out in the late 1980s, Lundstrem was able to tour his orchestra more widely, including a performance at the ‘Celebrating Duke Ellington’ convention in Washington DC in 1991. He died at the age of 89 in 2005.

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