Grigory Fine

Grigory Anisimovich Fine, born on July 22, 1949 in Gorky, is a Soviet and Russian jazz musician, pianist, arranger, composer, teacher, and producer. He is a representative of the bebop jazz style and a follower of the pianistic style of Oscar Peterson. Since 2001 he has been a member of the Union of Composers of Russia, in its Samara organization.

He studied at Music School No. 8 in Gorky, then at the Gorky Music College in the class of Valery Ostrovsky, and graduated in 1974 from the Gnesin Musical-Pedagogical Institute, where he studied with Theodor Gutman and Maria Grinberg. As a student, he won first prize at the Dmitry Kabalevsky competition in Kuibyshev in 1967 for the best performance of the competition work, Recitative and Rondo.

From 1974 he lived and worked in Kuibyshev, later Samara, while also performing regularly at festivals and in solo concerts in Moscow and other cities of the USSR, and touring in Europe, including Sweden, Belgium, Great Britain, and Canada. In 1997 he and his trio took part in the Du Maurier Festival International de Jazz in Montreal.

From 1974 to 1989 Fine was a soloist of the Kuibyshev Philharmonic, where he was assigned after graduating from higher education. In 1977 he worked in the orchestra of Oleg Lundstrem and later in the orchestra conducted by Polad Bulbuloglu. During his years at the philharmonic he also led his own jazz combo Olymp, the show ensemble Divotsvet, and the women's vocal ensemble Volzhanochki. After obtaining the right to give a solo concert with his own trio, he worked mainly in that format. His trio had the classic jazz lineup of piano, double bass, and drums, and over the years included musicians from Samara, Moscow, and other cities. He also performed and recorded with a number of foreign musicians from the United States, Australia, Belgium, Great Britain, Italy, and Canada.

As a concert organizer, from 1980 to 1989 he was personally responsible for organizing and running the all-Union Kuibyshev jazz festival Spring, which had been founded in 1962 by members of the City Youth Club under the leadership of Samara jazz musicians Lev Bekasov and Igor Voshchinin. After finishing his work with the philharmonic, he handed the festival leadership back to them. Since 1989 he has worked as an independent artist; among the ensembles with which he has performed is the family group Fine Family Show.

Fine also created the philharmonic subscription series Grigory Fine and His Friends, later also presented in the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow, where dozens of well-known jazz musicians from Russia and abroad appeared. In 2002 he presented the series Solo, in Duet and with Trio at the Glinka State Museum in Moscow, and in 2005 he presented the series The Alphabet of Jazz for Children and Adults and Grigory Fine's Musical Fairy-Tale Improvisations at the Moscow International House of Music. The subscription series Grigory Fine Jazz Trio was held in the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. His work and artistic personality have also become the subject of conference papers and scholarly research on Samara jazz, Russian jazz pianists, and his own compositional output.

As a composer, since 1976 he has written works in a variety of genres: scores for solo jazz piano, pieces for jazz ensembles of different formats including trio and orchestra, songs including settings to his own words, academic works in small and large forms such as piano sonatas and piano concertos, and crossover works at the intersection of jazz and classical music for jazz ensemble, string or symphony orchestra, chorus, and other forces. His bossa nova Spring Wind received a prize at the Kuibyshev Spring jazz festival in 1976.

He is also the author of a series of musical fairy-tale improvisations performed on philharmonic stages, including Little Red Riding Hood in the Style of Blues, It Is Good to Be a Cat, Cinderella Hurries to the Ball, The Ugly Duckling Strives for Flight, The Snow Queen Dances the Samba, and Puss in Boots Rescues Friends. Fine prepared arrangements for symphony orchestra that were issued in music collections such as World of Hits and Melodies of Hollywood and performed by many Russian ensembles, including the symphony orchestras of the Samara, Nizhny Novgorod, Kaliningrad, Barnaul, Omsk, Novosibirsk, and Krasnoyarsk philharmonics, the Symphony Orchestra of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, the Russian Philharmonia Symphony Orchestra, the Symphony Orchestra of Russia under Veronika Dudarova, and the Russian National Orchestra under Mikhail Pletnev.

As a teacher, Fine teaches at the Moscow Conservatory, where he gives the special course The Art of Jazz Improvisation. He has also published teaching and music editions, including The Art of Jazz Improvisation, Jazz Album: Piano Scores, Sonata-Improvisation No. 1, collections of songs in jazz style, and printed versions of his musical fairy-tale improvisations.

Connections

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