Guides

Valery Syutkin & Light Jazz is not “another solo card for the Moscow dandy,” but a separate chamber project: tenor Valery Miladovich Syutkin and a jazz ensemble he had long wanted beside the rock-and-roll band. He was born on 22 March 1958 in the very center of Moscow, where the Yauza and Pokrovsky boulevards meet Obukha Street. His father, Milad Alexandrovich, came from Perm, taught at a military engineering academy, specialized in underground structures, worked at Baikonur and in Vietnam; his mother, Bronislava Andreyevna Brzhezitskaya, was a Muscovite. The parents met in a dance circle and divorced when the boy was thirteen. Before the stage he was a cook’s apprentice at the Ukraina, a bartender, a loader at Belorussky Station and a conductor on international trains; in the army in the Far East he served as an aviation mechanic and sang with the Polyot ensemble, once covering for a sick soloist — and stayed a frontman.

Khavtan called him into Bravo in 1990: «Вася», «Я — то, что надо», «Московский бит», «Дорога в облака», the orange tie and stilyagi slang. In 1995 he left, tired of the conveyor, formed Syutkin & Co, and gave the country «7000 над землёй» and «Радио ночных дорог». The jazz branch took longer: he had carried the idea of “Moscow jazz, not American jazz” since 2003 and released it only when the people lined up. In 2015 came «Москвич 2015» — covers of 1950s–60s estrada “by the laws of delicate accompaniment”: «Я шагаю по Москве», «Московские окна», «А снег идёт», «Подмосковные вечера», «Дорогие мои москвичи», and the rarer «Ребята семидесятой широты» and «Песенка моего друга». Alexey Kuznetsov on guitar, Alexander Martirosov on accordion, Andrey Nikonov on drums; the players found time unpaid, recording “with sit-downs, not in commercial mode.” After the last track Syutkin tosses the band a line: “That is the amount of truth the people need, no more” — the irony of a Soviet-style conferencier and an honest admission of lightness at once.

His private life is not a postcard of the eternal bachelor from a video. Since 1993 the Riga-born Viola (sixteen years younger) has been beside him; from the first marriage, daughter Elena, an economist, and granddaughter Vasilisa; from the second, son Maxim, a geographer in tourism; with Viola, daughter Viola, a theatre historian, Paris and the Sorbonne, a producer of the Cherry Forest festival and a company manager at the Malaya Bronnaya theatre; in 2020, already past sixty, son Lev was born. His mother died in September 2024. The character is an intellectual with a hard streak: Honored Artist, professor of pop vocal, honorary figure of Moscow arts — and a man who went to court to have a crude internet meme of his face taken down. Politics, he says, spoils an artist; even so there were campaign concerts, a ban on entering Ukraine, and a one-off swap of Kyiv for Sochi in «Московский бит». For this card the point is elsewhere: he refuses to pretend that American jazz played by Russians is needed — he needs the Moscow of a childhood on Pokrovka.

A year after «Москвич» came «Олимпийка»: Pakhmutova and Dobronravov, «Трус не играет в хоккей», «Герои спорта», «До свидания, Москва» — a gesture toward athletes amid doping scandals before Rio. In September 2026, «Атмосфера»: «Песенка о хорошем настроении», «Голубые города», «Город влюблённых людей», «Работаю волшебником», «Грустить не надо»; Igor Kondur on double bass and Igor Tertychny on clarinet joined the lineup, with Paul Wickliffe mixing again. The storefront hit of the project is «Я шагаю по Москве». Do not confuse it with Syutkin’s solo pop-rock-and-roll, with Khavtan’s Bravo, with Syutkin & Co or the Rock&Roll Band: Light Jazz is a separate chamber shelf, where the same voice walks Moscow no longer in a dandy’s tie but in a jazz suit. Genre jazz, country Russia, sign Aries.