The new album by Capella Dixie is, in fact, a collection of recordings made by different lineups over a number of years.
The most intimate, chamber-like part consists of two tracks, recorded in trio: Lebedev on clarinet, Alexander Papazoglu on guitar and Boris Nazarevsky on acoustic bass. The latter played with Capella Dixie for nearly 40 years; his bass can be heard on Capella Dixie's track on the Jazz'84 live 1984 Moscow Jazz Festival compilation by Melodiya. The guitar player (who also played banjo in other tracks) belongs to a later generation of Muscovite jazz musicians, who started to play professionally in early 1990s. In a band this small, Lebedev's clarinet sound especially fine and mellow: Lev is in total command of all expressive means on his instrument, but it is the trio setting that shows beautifully the deep and dark tone of his instrument, when he is improvising in lower register—a quality not every trad jazz clarinetist can master.
Lebedev's trademark tune, Richard Rogers' You Took Advantage of Me, opens the album; it is the only quintet recording on the track list, made by the veterans' lineup of pianist Sergei Eksuzian, who played on the earliest Capella Dixie sessions in 1982, Nazarevsky on bass, and Boris Novikov on drums, who debuted in the 1960s with top-notch Moscow modern jazz performers such as Vladimir Kull, Edouard Uteshev (currently called Eddie Bronson on the Australian jazz scene where he resides since 1970s) or the late Vadim Sakun. An interesting solo on this track belongs to guitarist Andrei Yumatov.
Most other tracks were recorded with different lineups of the traditional sextet setting: the classic three voices of trad jazz (clarinet, trumpet, and trombone) plus rhythm section: drums, bass (acoustic or electric) and guitar (or banjo.) In two tunes, not counting the opening quintet track, a piano is used instead of a stringed instrument. These versatile lineups sometime feature soloists from outside of the trad jazz community: on three tracks, the late Nikolai Golovnya, the jazz guitar teacher at several Moscow-based music schools, recorded guitar parts; on eight tracks, the trombone parts and solos are brilliantly performed by Vadim Akhmetgareyev, who played with the modern jazz and fusion bands in the past, and worked in the Oleg Lundstrem Jazz Orchestra—although he also played Dixieland jazz in the New Moscow Jazz Band led by trumpet player Aleksander Bannykh in early 1990s. Trombone solos in two tracks were performed by Maxim Piganov, one of Russia's most versatile bone players. Other performers who worked on this album included drummers David Tkebuchava, Oleg Fedorovich, Sergei Starostenko, Mikhail Borychev; trombonist Vyacheslav Keizerov, bassists Pavel Korchagin and Valery Serkov, banjoist Vladimir Kvachov, and pianist Dmitry Zakora. On most tracks, the trumpet part is played by Roman Ivanov, who is one of the steadiest members of Capella Dixie during the last decade. He has a great feel of trad jazz style where the trumpet always was the leading instrumental voice, and he also sings in a few numbers.
However, the principal star of Capella Dixie is undoubtedly the bandleader. The album contains a few curious moments when he expertly delivers the piece's main theme on tenor saxophone, but that's not more than an additional aural color when compared with the regally vast music continuum that his clarinet is offering.
Lev Lebedev is not just a huge connoisseur of the trad jazz repertoire who flawlessly mastered both the authentic 1920s and 30s style and the 1950s and 60s Dixieland Revival manner. He meticulously studied the individual styles of multiple legendary jazz clarinet masters: from the straight-ahead, New Orleans roots sound of Johnny Dodds in Louis Armstrong's early studio bands and the deep dark timbre of Barney Bigard in Duke Ellington's recordings, to the sophisticated European of the next generations, such as Peter Schilperoort in the Dutch Swing College Band or the Brit trad stars: Acker Bilk, or Kenny Ball & His Jazzmen's Dave Jones. But what Lebedev does is not emulation, and not imitation: the clarinet that we hear in this recording, in all its stylistic and timbre versatility, in all its lyricism, smoothness and energetic resilience, is Lev Lebedev's clarinet, and nobody else's.
This writer was always fascinated by Lebedev's ability to be authentic. The artist who grew up in Russia and mastered jazz performance in the decades when this type of music was still not included in the music education system curriculum, so that everybody was learning in his or her own, was nevertheless able not just to study the vocabulary and phraseology of the traditional jazz language, but to reach the jazz authenticity.
There's many examples of that in Russian jazz history. There were trumpet players who channeled Clifford Brown or Lee Morgan through themselves; there were trombonists who literally summoned the spirit of J. J. Johnson in their solos; there were saxophonists who emulated the manners of Gerry Mulligan, or John Coltrane, or even Ornette Coleman. But very few instrumentalists not just mastered the whole array of their American forbears' different styles, but melted them into their own sound where everything is balanced: the knowledge of style, the technical proficiency on the instrument, and the originality within their chosen style. One of those few is, undoubtedly, Lev Lebedev. There were (and are) other brilliant jazz clarinetists in Russia, but the one as wise and versatile as Lebedev remains only Lebedev.