As a teenager in communist Russia, composer and pianist Sergei
Novikov broke the top 40 charts, toured the Soviet Union and played
his heart out in front of 50,000 screaming fans at Gorky Park with
his pop band Little Prince. Yet he still packed his bags and headed
off to America in 1990. Why?
“When I left the band was still going and successful, even if
under communism we made no money,” the pianist recently explained.
“But I was looking for a better life. And I was right to leave, I
have a good life.”
Today that life includes extensive touring and recording his
potently eclectic mix of classical, jazz and folk music in his
adopted New England homeland and beyond. Since arriving in America,
Novikov has released an astounding 11 albums in those 10 years on
his own record label, Ultraclassica Records, including a uniquely engaging
Christmas record.
The music bug bit Novikov at such an early age that he can’t
pinpoint the exact moment its teeth sank in, but by the age of six,
he said, the infection was full-blown.
“As a child I was walking around singing all the time,” he
laughed. “At a very early age I had my orientation; I knew what I
wanted to do with the rest of my life. I never struggled with that
dilemma of who or what I was going to be like so many other people
do.”
Novikov’s parents recognized their son’s skill and passion and
worked diligently to get him into the famed Moscow School of
Art.
“It is a very different kind of training than what Americans are
used to,” he explained. “In Russia it was, ‘Do it or else.’ Here it
is more, ‘Do it if you feel like it, no one cares.’ The teachers
are like parents with tough love over there. I’m not necessarily
advocating the old fashioned methods, but that intensity is why if
you look at great classical musicians, so many come from
Russia.”
Even in the midst of studying those classics, however, Novikov
was listening to the American pop music that would eventually lead
him to Little Prince and, then, America.
“Of course, at that time, I kept that diversity to myself at
school and played what I was told to play,” he said. “Anything else
but classical, my teachers had never heard of it. So at school I’d
come prepared with Chopin and Mozart and outside of school I’d
search for new sounds.”
Still, none of that dreaming of American teenage culture
prepared him for what he found when he finally reached these
shores.
“When I first heard jazz in America, it was suddenly a whole new
world,” he said. “It was so exciting to me, I could hardly handle
it.”
Thus, it was not long before Novikov was enrolled at the
University of Maine at Augusta — the city boy going deep into the
deep, silent country to find a school he could actually afford as a
new immigrant — focusing on American jazz studies.
“There everything was left up to the student and, while there
were many excellent players, I think very few worked to their full
capacity, which was fine because that was their choice,” he
said.
But Novikov happily worked to his full potential — and then
pushed even further. It’s sort of Lenin’s worst nightmare: The boy
raised under Soviet communism has become not only a
standard-bearing musician but also an American businessman.
“There are lots of musicians, but very few with business sense,”
Novikov allowed. “It is not the same as other professions. You go
to medical school, you become a doctor. You go to law school, you
become a lawyer. You go to music school and you better develop a
niche. A successful musician needs to be very open-minded and be
ready to fail and go again and again.
“Not so many musicians seem to understand this and that’s where
the idea everybody has of the poor musician comes from,” he
continued. “Well, I don’t want to be poor.”
Try to imagine such a sentiment coming from any one of the
hundreds of thousands of spoiled middle class American arts
students. It would be a rare find indeed. For those inclined to see
that as the triumph of capitalistic avarice over some lost ideal,
it is actually more a pragmatic map to independence.
“I am not rich today, but I am on my way to making sure I can
make my way with music,” he said. “That is what’s important to me.
I never take anything for granted. At my performances, I give
something to people and they give something back to me. It’s called
synergy. That is what I’m searching for.”
“There is more freedom in this economy than the one I grew up
under,” Novikov added. “But the system does not provide success. It
provides the conditions for success or failure. In the end I make
my own success the best I can within those conditions. That is all
I am trying to do.”
Shawn Macomber is a Boston-based freelance writer. He
runs the website www.returnoftheprimitive.com.
