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by Peter Newall

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Mihail, Ruslan and I decided to put a jazz group together; we were sure there was a market for it in Odesa. We found a rehearsal room in the old vodka factory behind the railway station, and started working up a set of standards to suit a jazz audience. 

It came together well from the start. Ruslan wasn’t a great bass player technically, but he kept a clean simple line and had a good feel. Mihail was a perfectionist and probably the best drummer with brushes I ever played with. We settled into a conventional piano trio. And we might have remained exactly that, if it weren’t for the old vodka factory. 

The factory was half derelict. They’d stopped making vodka there twenty years before, and now you could rent rooms and make as much noise as you liked. It was central and convenient. 

 The vodka factory, however, had an oppressive, almost threatening, atmosphere. A high wall, with broken bottles cemented along the top, enclosed a sprawling maze of decaying brick and concrete buildings, all connected by narrow metal walkways five metres above the ground. Wherever you looked, there were rusting gantries, boarded up windows, abandoned trucks stripped of their engines, seized-up windlasses, and fading tin signs bearing crude drawings of skulls and lightning bolts, warning of high voltage. 

At some time it must have been used as a recycling depot, too, because big bales of newspapers were stacked up, three or four metres high, against the back wall. They were slowly rotting away, tilting like the tower of Pisa as they subsided. 

And it was full of cats. Somebody must have fed them, because they were always around. I paid tribute to the chief of them—a big orange tom with a rough, square head—by occasionally bringing him a piece of cheap sausage, which he accepted haughtily. Others stalked across the oily, muddy ground or fought snarlingly for space on the roof. There was constant feline movement in the corner of your eye, cats darting and jumping and slinking everywhere. 

But the dark, forbidding feeling that permeated the place came not just from its general dereliction and decay, but, I was certain, because it had been a vodka factory. Not a tractor factory or a cement factory or a munitions factory, but a vodka factory. It had distilled hundreds of thousands of litres of spirit. It had been the heart that pumped vodka, like blood, through the circulatory system of Odesa. The devil’s blood, you might say; it had destroyed as many lives in this city as it had inspired and consoled. And even though vodka wasn’t distilled there anymore, there was still a pervasive sense of alcohol everywhere, like a bad hangover seeping out of your skin. 

To get to rehearsals, I had to cut through the railway station, stalls selling greasy piroshki and instant coffee in Styrofoam cups, waiting rooms full of people dozing on rickety chairs, and swarthy men smoking beside piles of big, chequered plastic bags. And the police, who were always around the railway station. They had the power to give you grief—ranging from a bribe disguised as a fine, to arrest and a beating—if they didn’t like the look of you. The police guarded the vodka factory, too, in some unidentifiable way. Sometimes, they occupied what used to be the watchman’s hut, lolling about with their feet on the table, chewing sunflower seeds and spitting the husks on the floor. I always avoided eye contact with them, but even so, their presence made the atmosphere darker still. 

  So it was in the old vodka factory that we worked up our repertoire, and the feeling of abandonment and decay, and some resonance of drunken irrationality and violence, came to colour our music, the songs we wrote, and even how we played well-known tunes. We developed a sound much darker and more aggressive than the usual jazz trio. We often used minor keys, there were abrupt, jagged, changes, and I switched from piano to organ for some songs, which contributed to that feel. I persuaded my wife to come to a rehearsal one winter afternoon with her Leica. She took some black and white photos of us standing amongst the rusting machinery, which I used for our early posters and flyers.

We called ourselves The Black Sea Trio. 

Our sound, and perhaps the attitude we’d picked up from the vodka factory, brought in not only the jazz crowd, but also a string of young guys in heavy metal T-shirts, who you’d think would be contemptuous of jazz. They filed into the small smoky clubs where we played, and drank sullenly, listening in silence. They weren’t the type to come up afterwards and shake your hand and tell you how great you were. But I was glad to see them; it meant we were doing something different, beyond the usual boundaries. 

We were three very different men. Ruslan, tall and gangling, shaven-headed, always laughing, friends all over the city, liked to drink and smoke; Mihail, short, intense, with a fair moustache and goatee, hadn’t touched alcohol in five years. I was somewhere in between those extremes. We didn’t socialise offstage, but on stage we developed a wired-in triangular understanding, maybe a quick hand gesture, an eyebrow raised to call a change or sometimes no sign at all; we communicated with each other through the music. We became a regular working band, playing original, occasionally powerful, improvised music. Then, everything changed; we got Elena.

It started when a friend of Ruslan’s turned up to a rehearsal with a girl in tow. They sat for an hour listening, and then the guy and Ruslan got in a huddle. Ruslan approached me and asked if the girl could do a number or two with us, so her boyfriend could hear her sing. I didn’t like wasting rehearsal time on this, and I told Ruslan so. He grinned apologetically and mumbled something about the guy having contacts in music clubs in Kyiv. I suspected Ruslan had eyes for the girl himself. Anyway, I agreed. I thought we’d carry her, yelling off-key, through a tune so she could please her boyfriend. Then they’d leave and we could get on with our rehearsal. 

So I asked her what she wanted to sing, and she said, “‘Just Friends,’” which I thought nobody should sing except Chet Baker. Doubly irritated, I counted it in fast, and gave her just a four-bar piano intro, to catch her out.

But she hit the first line faultlessly and took it away. She had a low, husky voice for a girl, pitched a bit like Chet’s, actually. She ran off the first two verses, then, when I was about to take a solo, she scatted a third verse, so fluid and quick off the mark that I couldn’t cut in. It was impressive; swinging, beautifully phrased and paced, really good. When she tailed it off I did take a solo, then she picked up the lyric again and saw the song out, cool and smooth. After the last chord I caught Mihail’s eye; he was grinning, which he did about once every six weeks. 

We hardly had to discuss it: Elena was in. And I have to say, once she started singing with us, the crowds at our gigs trebled. Word got around about her. She wasn’t perhaps beautiful, she had a sharp pointy face and she was skinny then, almost bony. She didn’t wear much makeup, or dress revealingly, but the combination of her throaty voice, the white, almost transparent, skin above the neckline of her black dress, the cigarette in the hand holding the mike, all gave her a louche sort of presence that people crowded up close to see. 

But most of all, she really could sing. She had natural timing, and she had a trick of dropping an octave to hit a low note that was arresting. And her voice, I’ve said throaty, but that doesn’t convey it. It had all the heartache in the world, yet she could make it sneering or cynical or just funky when she wanted to. It was a really special instrument, her voice. 

Her boyfriend disappeared after a couple of weeks, and as far as I knew, she was alone in Odesa. I didn’t ask her anything about herself; I was married then, and had no interest in some stray chain-smoking jazz-singing waif. 

We rehearsed maybe ten songs with her. At first, at Black Sea Trio gigs, we’d play an instrumental set and then she’d come on for the second bracket, but it was soon obvious everyone was sitting through our first set just waiting to hear her, so we worked up a whole gig’s worth with Elena. We did “Bye Bye Blackbird” and “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” with our own quite different, quite dark, arrangements, but also some numbers closer to rhythm and blues. One day she told me she had some lyrics; could I work up a theme, maybe in a minor key, to go with them? I read her words, handwritten on a page torn out of an exercise book. They were moody and bleak, but phrased well. I came up with a rhythmic bluesy theme, and that became a song called “Rubies on a Chain,” which got a lot of applause at gigs. 

After that, she and I would meet regularly at the rehearsal room and work her lyrics into songs. In three months we had a whole repertoire of original tunes, a sort of jazz and soul crossover, rhythmic and full of raw emotion from Elena’s voice. 

We moved from odd Tuesdays and Thursdays at small places, to a regular Friday at the Mandarin and a regular Saturday at the Drive By club. From being happy to see twenty people when we walked on, we went to being crowded out every night, with people paying to come in and stand at the back. Good musicians from out of town asked to sit in. We got paid reasonable money for some gigs. And the music was good, I have to say, it was good.

Ruslan, as I suspected, was crazy about Elena, and couldn’t hide it. I thought at first she was going along with him, but it became apparent she wasn’t. He got increasingly irritable, and his playing went downhill. I heard them arguing a couple of times during breaks. Around this time, we started being billed as Elena Kovaceva with the Black Sea Trio. Soon her name was written in the bigger print. 

Then, one February night Elena turned up to rehearsal with Mihail. She arrived with him in his car, and walked into the room with him in a way that made their togetherness unmistakable. It struck me for the first time that they looked similar: fair-haired, sharp-featured, and slight. I was flabbergasted. Ruslan got it as soon as he saw them. He flushed a very dark red, opened his mouth and closed it again without saying anything. Then he packed up his bass, zipped it into its bag, shrugged its harness over his shoulders, and walked out, leaving the door open behind him to let in the snowy night. 

I dragged Mihail aside and hissed at him through my teeth, “What did you do that for? You’ve busted up the band.” He just spread his arms, palms upward, as if to say “How could I help it?”   

We carried on, of course. We got Leonid Kushnig in on bass. He was older than Ruslan, and quite different, a short round man, entirely professional, only there to play and get paid. He’d arrive sober for the gigs, play well, imaginatively and without mistakes, and only afterward get drunk, sitting at the bar putting away fifty grams after fifty grams of vodka. We were getting better and better bookings, and we quickly forgot Ruslan. 

I could talk about everything that happened after that, the CD we recorded at Maxim Studios in Kyiv and how we got ripped off for the money from it, the documentary on Polish TV, the tours of Crimea, the gig in Warsaw when Piotr Wojtasik got up and blew trumpet in the last set, so beautifully it still gives me a chill to remember it. I could talk about how Mihail and Elena started fighting, and how Mihail began drinking, which I’d never seen before. I could talk about how, even before I was aware I was sick of the group, I’d started playing solo in another club on Tuesday nights. But it would be boring, because it was so predictable. Elena Kovaceva and the Black Sea Trio, of course, came apart. 

Mihail went back to Donetsk. I don’t know what he’s doing now. I don’t know what you could do in Donetsk if you weren’t working down a mine. I hope he’s playing; he was a really good drummer, a natural. Leonid wasn’t too concerned. He’d played in a couple of other groups all along, and he had plenty of session work, so he just shrugged and got on with it.

Elena got married, and became Elena Markova. Yes, that Elena Markova. You’ve seen the posters for her concerts plastered everywhere, her videos on MTV, the pictures in the papers from when she sang at Nestorovich’s birthday. I never hear from her now, of course.  

As for me, I’ve been perfectly happy playing solo at the Masterskaya Café here in Odesa. Some nights there’s only ten people in, but I can play whatever I like and I don’t have to pay for my drinks. Since my wife and I separated I don’t need so much money, anyway. I still play some of the tunes we played back then, although I don’t play the songs I wrote with Elena.

I’m well aware this is a conventional musician’s story; change the names and it could be a hundred other bands. I wouldn’t even bother setting it down, if it were not for one incident which was entirely bizarre. Of course, it involved the old vodka factory.

 It was at the very end of the band’s life, after our second tour of Poland. I’d forgotten my house keys in the rehearsal room, so I had to go back to the vodka factory after hours. The factory was locked at night, and it meant climbing over a high metal gate to get in. And after dark, the place was even more gloomy and threatening. 

It was a black rainy night, not quite cold enough to turn the slush underfoot into ice. I got over the gate alright, and made my way warily across the slippery yard to the darkened rehearsal rooms. I found the door unlocked. I didn’t like that at all, because I remembered locking it when I’d left. I opened the door gently. It squeaked, of course; I hadn’t noticed that it squeaked before. 

“Don’t worry, Pyotr, it’s me.” It was Elena’s voice. She must have been able to see me outlined against the night sky; it was black as pitch in the room, and I couldn’t see her at all. 

“What are you doing here?” I asked into the darkness. 

“Just sitting thinking.” From the direction of the sound, she was perched on one of the broken-down armchairs. “Close the door, please.”

I did. I didn’t want to turn on the light and dazzle her, so I scrabbled around with my fingertips on the tabletop until I touched my keys. I exhaled with relief. Now I could go. Elena could sit in the cold rehearsal room in the dark if she wanted to, I wasn’t going to ask why.

“Do you know how much vodka they made here in this factory?” she asked.

“A lot,” I said.

 “Yeah. A lot. And my dad drank a lot of it.”

I winced. So the secret to her passionate singing, her whole vulnerable, alluring persona, was a drunken abusive father. And I was going to have to hear about it, if I didn’t get out right away.

“Look, my wife is waiting outside our flat. I only came back for my keys.”

She laughed softly.

“You think you’re going to have to listen to how he beat me, or molested me, or something. Don’t worry, it wasn’t like that. He only cared about vodka. Mama left him when I was little. I loved Papa, but Mama took me with her. He ended up living in a communal apartment near here, opposite the Privoz market, with a lot of other drunks. I visited him there once, to give him some money; it was a pigsty.”

I shifted my feet to let her know I was leaving, but her voice ran on, and I couldn’t bring myself to walk out on her in mid-sentence. 

“One New Year’s Eve they ran out of alcohol. So Papa and another guy broke into this factory. Vodka was still stored here in those days. They found it and drank it. They got dead drunk and went to sleep on the ground, outside there in the yard. Papa slept the night in deep snow. Then he got up and walked home and went to bed. But when he woke the next day, he couldn’t get up. He couldn’t feel his legs. The others were all out on a binge. He lay there for three days on his own.” Her voice was quiet, uninflected, as if she’d told this story to herself many times over. 

“He told me he had to drink his own piss, he was so dehydrated. When the others eventually found him they took him to hospital, but the doctors said nothing could be done, it was already gangrene, and they cut off his legs.” 

I couldn’t think of anything to say. 

“So this place, this factory, took Papa’s legs. His life, really; he only lived for another eighteen months after that. I was twelve when he died, and of course I cried. I still miss him.” Her voice was still level, unemotional. “It was horrible, but I’m not saying it scarred me for life, or even that I hate vodka. In fact, I’m waiting to have a drink with Papa. He’ll be here in a minute.”

I decided she must be drunk, although she was speaking perfectly clearly. By now my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and I could just make out the faint glimmer of a bottle and two glasses on the low table between us.

I was still in the middle of the room when the door behind me squeaked again as it opened. A man stood on the step, a dark shape outlined in the faint light from outside. Elena looked past me. “Hi Papa” she said. I didn’t breathe. 

“Hi Lenochka. Have you got a drink there for me?” His voice was slurred, gravelly.

“Of course, Papa,” she said, and poured vodka into the two glasses. The man walked past me and picked up one. “Za zdarovia. For health,” he said, and Elena echoed him. They drank the glasses off.

I backed out of the door, trying not to make a noise, and hurried away across the muddy yard. Halfway to the exit, a cat bounded past me, leapt up onto a windowsill, then sprang to a low roof. I nearly jumped out of my skin with fright. I got over the gate quickly enough, but I cut my hand quite deeply on a twist of wire; odd, because I’m usually very careful of my hands. 

Of course, it couldn’t have been Elena’s father. Her father was dead; she’d told me so. It must have been some guy with whom she’d arranged to play out this scene for her own purposes. People are all much stranger than we know, and I’d never understood Elena from the beginning. 

But whenever I see her on TV, almost unrecognisably made over, but still with that singular, lovely, throaty voice that carried the lyrics of a song like drifting leaf smoke, I remember standing in that tiny, darkened room, watching Elena having a drink with her dead Papa. 

I’ve never gone back to the old vodka factory. To tell the truth, for a couple of years after that, I’d walk three full blocks out of my way to avoid even passing it. 

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