Tovmasyan, Andrei Egiazarovich

Andrei Yegiazarovich Tovmasyan ( December 1, 1942 ^[1] - December 31, 2014 ) - Soviet jazz trumpeter, the main figure in USSR jazz in the 60s. He was a supporter of traditional American jazz. In the game, Tovmasyan assimilated the manner of the American trumpeters Clifford Brown and Lee Morgan ^[2] .

Andrey Tovmasyan
basic information
Full name	Andrey Egiazarovich Tovmasyan
Date of Birth	December 1, 1942 ( 1942-12-01 )
Place of Birth	Kirov , USSR
Date of death	December 31, 2014 ( 2014-12-31 ) (72 years old)
Place of death
A country	USSR → Russia
Professions	composer trumpeter
Instruments	trumpet
Genres	jazz , swing , bebop
Collectives	Vadim Sakun sextet, Boris Frumkin quintet, Oleg Lundstrem Orchestra

Mother - Stepanova Elizaveta Mikhailovna. Father - Tovmasyan Yeghiazar Abramovich, originally from Van, fled from Turkey in 1915 during the genocide . At one time he worked as the director of the “Armenia” store on the corner of Pushkinskaya Square , in Moscow ^[3] .

Andrei Tovmasyan, with his composition “Mr. Veliky Novgorod,” won first places as a trumpeter, as an improviser and as a composer, at the Jazz-62 festival. Participant of the Jazz Jamboree 62 festival, consisting of Vadim Sakun, Nikolai Gromin, Alexei Kozlov , Igor Berukshtis, Valery Bulanov, Anatoly Kashcheev and accompanying members of the delegation: Arno Babadzhanyan , Nina Zavadskaya, Alexander Medvedev and Pasha Plastilin ^[4

“Tovmasyan is perhaps one of the best trumpeters in Europe.” Don Ellis ^[3]

“Andrei Tovmasyan is one of the greatest jazz artists. The youth’s name already says almost nothing, but thirty years ago it was a real breakthrough. We, musicians and forerunners of jazz, ourselves did not understand this. When in the beginning of the 60s the star Tovmasyan rapidly ascended in our black jazz sky. He was not twenty and he was unusually talented.

Andrey became a sensation of festivals in Tartu, Leningrad and Moscow. He was in the first Soviet handful of jazz, shyly taken to Warsaw (abroad!), And immediately personified a new generation that had broken through the Stalinist asphalt. His “Mr. Veliky Novgorod” with bell rings at the beginning and at the end became a trump card in the defense of jazz, the glory of this really picturesque thing, perhaps even overshadowed the author himself. It happens.

Andrey composed other plays. But the main thing - the purest branded American jazz beat from its pipe with a fountain, and it was not clear where it came from. We still could not imagine that somewhere outside of America a jazz personality could be born, equal to the luminaries there, the only inhabitants of our jazz pantheon. ” Alexey Batashev ^[4]

In the game, Tovmasyan assimilated the manner of the American trumpeters Clifford Brown and Lee Morgan. He brilliantly mastered off-beat phrasing, and jazz techniques (such as “tal-da-da,” “swallowed sounds,” “touch-stroke,” “take-offs” according to the natural scale, etc.). Tovmasyan seemed to be "talking" on the pipe. In addition, his phenomenal harmonic and melodic thinking delighted jazz fans.

All of Moscow, as it were, split into two camps of supporters of American, traditional jazz, whose banner was Tovmasyan, and fans of innovations and experiments of domestic jazz, headed by German Lukyanov . On the stock exchange, the dispute between the supporters of Tovmasyan and Lukyanov reached such a stir that once a fight broke out between them. Now it’s hard to imagine such a passion around jazz. Oleg Stepurko

In addition to music, AE Tovmasyan was engaged in poetry ^{[5] [6]} and prose ^[7] . He wrote an autobiographical essay “Memoirs” ^[8] . Poems A.E .; Tovmasyan was published in the anthologies Samizdat Century and Russian Poems 1950-2000.

Discography

• Mr. Veliky Novgorod (2007).
• Festival albums: ^[9]
• Jazz-66 (Boris Frumkin quintet), Jazz-67, Jazz-68, Jazz-84.
• The remaining entries are in private collections.

Many of Tovmasyan’s ideas are in Oleg Stepurko’s books:

• Trumpeter in jazz. - M. , 1989.
• Blues, Jazz, Rock - a universal method of improvisation. - M. , 1995.