A CHAT WITH LEO FEIGIN, FOUNDER OF LEO RECORDS with now an incredible number of releases : From SUN RA to ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO, HAN BENNINCK, IVO PERELMAN, DOMINIQUE DUVAL, WILLIAM PARKER, JOELLE LEANDRE, RAMON LOPEZ... the ideas & the openmindedness of LEO FEIGIN will astonish all people interested in music !
INTERVIEW LEO FEIGIN
1. - a lot of questions in one : Your age, from which social condition you come... Can you talk about the way you created LEO RECORDS... can you talk about the idea behind the title or about the music you listened to as a child & the way you listen to it nowadays...
I am 64, I come from the former communist country Soviet Union. Communism is the most brutal form of oppression. When I was young I had to listen to a lot of music which was officially approved by communists because this kind of music was everywhere. In my youth I started listening to the short wave radio, mostly during the night and very quietly so that my neighbours could not report me to the KGB for listening to the Western radio stations. I listened to a lot of jazz music and my God was Willice Conover who was broadcasting jazz music with the Voice of America.
IWhat was the first release on Leo Records?
In 1979, I had been in the West for five years already. I had been working with the Russian service of the BBC and I was broadcasting, producing programs, and I was doing a jazz program, a weekly jazz show. In 1979, a friend of mine sent me a tape with a western tourist. The tape was smuggled out of the Soviet Union. It was a tape of the Ganelin Trio concert in East Berlin. And when I listened to it, I couldn't believe my ears. I tried to get interest from several record companies including ECM, but nobody believed that this Soviet trio can play like this and play this kind of music. So ultimately, I was left with this tape and I realized that if I don't release it, nobody will. Basically, that was the start of the label. I released first, not the Ganelin Trio, but two other recordings. Since nobody believed, I thought that in order to give some probablity to the label, I recorded Amina Claudine Myers and I recorded Keshavan Maslak. That was the first release and the third one was the Ganelin Trio. When I released the Ganelin Trio, of course nobody believed, but at least the label had already been in existence.
Recommending titles from Leo Records is a frustrating task. Where does one begin? I don't think I am going out on a limb here when I state that there are no bad releases on Leo. It is understandable when you meet the man behind the label that carries his name. Leo Feigin loves jazz. His absolute reverence for the art form is blatantly obvious with each and every Leo title. I spoke with Feigin from his home on the other side of the Atlantic and I bring it to you, a conversation with a true jazz fan, unedited and in his own words.
2 - STNT is usually influenced with "rock" & so on... and people who will read this interview will be certainly influenced by Noisy Guitare etc ... How could you describe LEO & convince them to hear stuffs on LEO ?
I don't want to convince anyone to listen to my CDs. Leo Records should be discovered, but once discovered these CDs and this music become a revelation.
3. how does this tie in to your opinion of improvised and composed music ? What does 'free music' mean to you? - What degree does improvisation play in your life ?
I think that the highest achievement of any musician is the perfect blend of composition and improvisation, when the two merge to the extent that one cannot separate the two. "Free Jazz" for me is the highest form of discipline on the part of a musician who is prepared to completely abandon his ego for the sake of creating something totally original. More than anything else I value originality in music, and this is what I am looking for while choosing future projects or musicians for my label. How do I meet and choose the musicians? The only sensible answer is "fate", or "fortune" or God's will.
4. What do I want to tell French people?
I want to tell them that they were given the best country in the world, and I absolutely love France. My daughter lives in the south of France in Langadoc area. I know those parts very well, and at one point my wife and myself wanted to move there. We even bought a small plot of land to build the house, but eventually we had to sell it because we found it very difficult to run the label, to bring up our two children and to build a house. So, we gave up, and we shall probably live in England for the rest of my life dreaming about France.
Best wishes.
Leo