Tom in Chita 2019, No. 5: THE KOLOTILINS, THE JAZZ CONCERT

The day we got back from Petrovsk-Zabaikalsky after visiting the festival there I was bushed. That was June 14th. Two overnight trains two days apart, plus a lot of activities took their toll. And on arrival at 6:30 in the morning, I got about an hour of sleep and then went to work at the English camp at 9am. Fortunately, Elena Anatolievna, our boss, relieved me for the afternoon. She took the group for a tour of the regional library and I went back to the apartment for a big nap. I intended, if I could get the nap in and was up to it, to get to Academia Zdorovie for an exercise session. I’d missed one because of the trip.

So I awoke at 5pm and was just putting on socks and packing my gym bag for the walk down to the minibus into town when the phone rang and I saw it was Natasha Kolotilina. I have to take a call from her, they are so rare, so I picked up and there was her husband Lyosha inviting me to a song concert by their daughter Rita. When? Well, right now! Well, ok then! I changed my plans wondering if I could stay awake for a concert and 30 minutes later, Lyosha was downstairs and we drove into Chita. I guess I’d find out.

We drove to the Restaurant-Club “Grill House” (whose name is actually those English words written in Cyrillic, “????? ????”) after first stopping in at a liquor store for some toasting materials, and then we arrived. It had a small stage and maybe sat 60-80 in booths and a few tables.

So who are the Kolotilins? They were my landlords 24 years ago when I was Siberian Bridges’ first English teacher following its founding in 1993 as “Musical Bridges”. Lyosha and Natasha Kolotilin and their two daughters, 14 year old Rita and 5 year old Masha, lived in a three-bedroom apartment on the 7th floor of a 10-story apartment building of the Brezhnev era located toward the edge of the city center. Brezhnev era apartments were larger, with bigger rooms and higher ceilings, with more stylish architecture (70s style) than the Krushchev era apartments built in the 50s and 60s to try to get people out of the antiquated (though often charming) wooden buildings and houses and into homes with central heating and hot water. As with many of the buildings, the construction was rather rough and seemingly shoddily put together, but they’re all solid. Behind the Kolotilin’s big steel security door on the 7th floor was also a one bedroom apartment, my residence from January to November 1995, the rent paid by my employer, the Pedagogical Institute.

I spent many evenings that year at the Kolotilin’s kitchen table, eating, drinking, trying with more success than any of us expected to communicate with our matched English-Russian dictionaries. Rita was a piano student at the Musical College, Masha was in pre-school. Lyosha helped his wife’s business of running two open kiosks in the big year-round outdoor market at the other end of the city center. I remember the fateful day when a young cousin visiting from Moscow asked Natasha about her business. At the time, Natasha was selling jeans from Turkey, the exact same ones that several other vendors around her were also selling. She said she did the standard 60% markup, just like everyone else. The cousin firmly told her the markup must be 100%. “Maybe you don’t believe this, but try it and see what happens,” she said. Natasha tried it the next day…and sold out her stock by noon. It was a Eureka moment for Natasha, and soon she was making her own buying trip to Turkey for the first time, renting indoor stall space in a large store downtown, and expanding her wares. Five years later she had seven stores in the city and villages and she began to make fur coats and high-end home decorating items (lights, custom drapes, etc) her signature items. Now, in 2019, her two daughters have been educated in Moscow, the family has moved to a small compound in a Moscow suburb consisting of two large beautiful houses and a huuge vegetable garden, she bought a house for her parents, and she has 18 stores in the Zabaikalye region. They keep a large apartment in Chita and commute the six-hour+ overnight flight from Moscow several times a year to work on their stores. The business employs both daughters. Rita is very good at marketing and Masha apparently has her mother’s business head.

Natasha arrived 15 minutes later with outfits for Rita and Rita’s seven year-old daughter and a bunch of flowers to give at the end, and soon after that Rita arrived with her husband Anton and daughter Dasha. Dasha put on a very frilly party dress in pale shades of pink and yellow with the skirt trailing in the back and the front at knee length. Her hair was plaited in a sort of bun in a way I can’t explain and can’t quite call braiding, because I didn’t see any braids per se. Her mother sang the first half in a white jacket over a black lacy skirt. Rita’s bleached blonde messy frizz surrounds her dark features and wide smile, and her signature glasses are black thick-rimmed pointy retro ones. Mother and daughter were a striking pair!

Dinner orders were taken and filled during Rita’s rehearsing and sound check. Friends and restaurant patrons began to arrive. The concert began at 8:30.

Rita’s arrangements were all on a laptop computer on a stand on stage, and the texts for some songs were on an iPad on another stand. Rita controlled the show right there on stage. I don’t get out much I guess, because the efficiency and simplicity (surface simplicity, anyway!) of this electronic and computerized way of presenting music amazed me. A 21st century concert.
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Rita’s first two sets were entirely jazz standards from the US, from Duke Ellington’s Caravan, with Rita’s own Russian lyrics replacing the rarely heard original American ones, to Rodgers’ The Lady is a Tramp. Most of it was in English, too (except the Ellington). At first my American ears were noticing the slight variance of some vowel and consonant sounds from standard American—I missed the tight round ooo of an American “you”, and our more percussive “t”s and “d”s than the lighter milder ones found in Russian, for two examples. But Rita’s English was still very clear and expressive, and as one song passed to the next, my attention to that faded away until I didn’t care anymore. I realized these songs are not American property, they are world property, music for everyone. If it is anything, jazz is a polyglot form, soaking up influences from any interesting source. It has been very popular in Russia since its beginnings, as well as in the rest of the world. And English appears in songs by artists of all nationalities. Only in my limited experience of hearing them from their origin lead me to think that American versions are the extent of their possibilities.

Rita’s second set was all Russian pop and jazz and included her first commercial recording from 15 years before, “The Girl from Chita” (???????? ?? ????) for which her daughter joined her on stage. Her daughter spent a good part of the concert in the little dance floor in front of the stage watching her mother and dancing freely. At one moment she danced with her dad. Several times, restaurant patrons got up to dance to Rita’s lively numbers.

I especially enjoyed Rita’s frequent scat singing, each time different and very creative. She brought on stage two local jazz singers for duets with her. These were clearly unrehearsed, but mostly successful. All three women were skilled, authentic and creative.

You can enjoy Rita at her youtube channel “Rita Solnceva”