Karina Kozhevnikova & Krugly Band - Polyphonic Circle (2025) [Hi-Res]

It is a great honor for me to implement the Polyphonic Circle project and release the album on Leo Records. We created this program with the best Russian jazz singer, one of the leaders of the vocal Russian school, Karina Kozhevnikova. The idea of the program is to create the polyphonic sound based on the music of iconic jazzmen and composers, who played at the intersection of melody and improvisation, made references to the Third Stream, searched for the unity between jazz in its different polystylistic spaces and academic music, moved many art directions towards each other. In each composition, we took a certain key element and developed it in a conceptual way, sometimes bringing it to the limit, to the point of absurdity, trying to embody the original images where well-known melodies acquire new colors and meanings.

We recorded this album with my big friends in the Krugly Band, amazing musicians — a bass player Nikolay Zatolochny and a drummer Petr Ivshin. They developed the ideas of our arrangements with Karina diversifying them with their own decisions where each composition turned out to be a special story, and the whole dramaturgy of the double album lined up very harmoniously. Each of them brought to the project their own vision, something unique, so that the album is like a metaphorical circle that absorbed all the diversity of jazz and our imagination and an assumption about the direction in which jazz music could be going.

We are grateful to Igor Fleyshman for supporting the recording and creation of this album! Igor continues the path of the great Russian patrons of the 19th and 20th centuries. Thanks to such incredible people, art in Russia continues to live, being filled with new ideas! Big thanks to the great Australian singer Michelle Nicolle for allowing us to use the text of her sister Tamara in Ornette Coleman's The Blessing! Also a big thank to Renat Gataulin for the great photo we used in the design!

Karina Kozhevnikova — vocal
Krugly Band:
Alexey Kruglov — alto saxophone
Nikolay Zatolochny — double bass
Petr Ivshin — drums