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Russian band's bluegrass roots
NEW YORK (AP) -- They're classically trained Russian musicians steeped in Tchaikovsky and now playing Scruggs. The six young Russians who make up the group Bering Strait are children of scientists and engineers from a once-closed Soviet nuclear city. Now, they've played the Grand Ole Opry, released their first CD, been the subject of a music documentary and been nominated for a Grammy. Bluegrass and country are "our roots, just the same way classical music is," says lap steel guitarist Sasha Ostrovsky. Bering Strait is rising faster than a Bill Monroe mandolin riff. Nearly five years after they came to Nashville's Music Row, the sudden flurry of attention is dizzying, and most welcome, group members say. "We've been waiting and hanging together for such a long time and we've been through a lot. Now it is time for something to happen," says banjo player Ilya Toshinsky. For many Russians, bluegrass is the same thing as country music. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, both were about as easy to find as Western newspapers -- not very. That was especially true in Obninsk, a city 60 miles southwest of Moscow that was left off Soviet-era maps because of its top-secret research institutes. Adding to classical training
But with a classical guitar teacher's encouragement, 11-year-old Toshinsky discovered the flying fingers on Earl Scruggs' banjo classic "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" in 1988 and began playing the instrument. Ostrovsky picked up the dobro, and a bluegrass band was formed. "It's a nice addition to classical training -- it definitely improves your skills, though it takes a long time to learn," says Natasha Borzilova, now 24, who joined the group when she was 11. Borzilova, who now has just a trace of an accent, remembers struggling with the lyrics to "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain." As teenagers, the three musicians -- calling themselves "Cheerful Diligence" and wearing cowboy hats and boots _ developed technical expertise playing in clubs and on local television. In 1992, Toshinsky attended the Tennessee Banjo Institute, and over the next several years, the group -- now expanded to six members -- traveled to Tennessee for performances. They became avid listeners of George Strait, Garth Brooks and other country music stars. An American art dealer, Ray Johnson, saw the group perform in a Moscow restaurant and helped them move to Nashville in 1998. They gradually moved from bluegrass toward more popular country, and signed with Arista Records in 1999. But they ran into a string of difficulties while recording tracks for an album. The Arista deal fell through, as did a succession of talks with other labels. The apartment building where three band members lived caught fire, and they escaped with just their instruments. None could work second jobs because of visa restrictions. Their fiddler quit, and another was hired. "Going through all those labels and deals was difficult. There was a point where some people said, 'I don't know if I can stay any longer,"' Toshinsky recalls. Most of the band members ended up living in the home of their manager, Mike Kinammon, but with no money coming in, he lost his recording studio. 'The Russian kids'Now, Bering Strait's music, and luck, has picked up. Known in Nashville as "the Russian kids," they have developed an enthusiastic local following. They have opened for country star Trisha Yearwood, performed at the Grand Ole Opry five times and appeared recently at New York's B.B. King's Blues Club and Grill. Their self-titled CD was finally released last month on the Universal South label, a division of Universal Records. In February, the documentary "The Ballad of Bering Strait" screened in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, and will be shown on Country Music Television in March. Filmmaker Nina Gilden Seavey says that when she started shooting in 1999, the story of classically trained Russians playing country was novel enough. But as the band trudged through one failure after another, the project took on new angles. "What I had imagined as a 'cultural fusion' film had become a 'coming of age in America' film," says Seavey, who heads the Documentary Center at George Washington University. In one scene, Toshinsky performs "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" for an exam before stoic professors at a Moscow music conservatory in November 1999. As he tickles the banjo into raucous bluegrass laughter, the professors look unimpressed, then smile. "It's so incredibly important to sell this band on the integrity of the musicianship and the quality of the music that they make," says Tim DuBois, the record executive who signed the group to their initial Arista contract and now co-owns Universal South. "The story of them surviving so much over all the years is ... the icing on the cake -- that they've come so far and that they've stuck with it as long as they have." Nearly all the songs on the "Bering Strait" CD are written by Nashville songwriters, and they can sound like a lot of other country music on the radio today. Some critics have called the group's performance flat. "Technically speaking it's flawless -- it has range and it's smooth as glass. But it lacks passion. There's no Tanya grit, no Loretta twang, no Wynonna gusto; just careful, meticulous enunciation of each word," wrote Richard McVey in the Nashville magazine Music Row last month. Two songs that have received the most positive attention are "Bering Strait" and "Porushka-Paranya." The first -- a bluegrass instrumental -- was nominated for a Grammy for country instrumental performance. The second -- an upbeat retooling of a traditional Russian folk song -- jerks audiences out of their seats with a whirlwind of music and Russian lyrics. Can the Russians forge their own identity on the country music scene? "That's the ultimate question," Seavey says. "Will country music allow them to be who they're meant to be?" Copyright 2003 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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