Pianist Simon Nabatov hails from Moscow, spent the 1980s in New York, and now makes his home in Cologne. His previous disc for Leo, Nature Morte, was a setting of Joseph Brodsky’s poem which called on the vocal talents of Phil Minton; this new recording is a two-CD suite of music based upon Mikhail Bulgakov’s celebrated novel The Master and Margarita. Nabatov helpfully provides track-by-track plot summaries in the liner notes, but in any case the music stands perfectly convincingly on its own.

The album begins with a kind of prelude or prayer, stated by violin and trumpet (Mark Feldman and Herb Robertson) over Mark Helias’s bass drone. It functions rather like an otherworldly commentary before the main action begins with a plunge into the satirical fantasy-world of Bulgakov's novel. (The novel combines an account of Satan's visit to Stalinist Moscow, a subversive revision of the story of Pontius Pilate, and the story of the love between Margarita and the persecuted novelist only identified as “the Master.”) The album’s soundworld is a blend of grotesquerie, brittle irony and sometimes violence. Nabatov draws together mordant takeoffs on 19th-century salon music, with the violin tilting dizzily over faux-naive piano; eerie chromatic tinklings; sardonic free playing; and, throughout, some wonderfully swinging jazz. The closing section of “Don’t Talk to Strangers” finds the rhythm section locking into a bruisingly unstoppable groove (the corresponding scene has a character beheaded by a streetcar); while on “One of Four” Pontius Pilate is rendered with a sardonic blues stroll with Mingus’s fingerprints all over it. To my ears, the album noticeably centres itself near the end of disc one, when the Master himself first appears in the associated narrative. At this point the album’s predominantly satirical and fantastic tone begins to expand its reach, stretching out towards tragedy and beauty. Disc two is absolutely enthralling, from the opening “The Show,” where the band grab hold of the looselimbed 7/4 groove and don’t let go, to the final cathartic resolution in “Back Home,” where the romanticism hinted and grasped at throughout the album (as on the melancholy but strangely serene “The Last Days” – about Christ’s execution – or the lovely “Margarita”) is finally free to flower openly. It’s a profoundly moving conclusion. For my money, The Master and Margarita is one of the most fully satisfying jazz discs of 2001: miss it at your peril.

Nate Dorward

Coda, May/June 2002