MUSIC SURVIVES A TERRORIST ACT

A good jazz musician is one who can get up, go out during a jam session (a concert), have a smoke break, return to the band and get right back into the rhythm where he left off. Jazz cannot be played without inspiration; it cannot be played by anyone who does not have a particular inner freedom, whose way of life is not like improvisation. The jazz musician is sure to achieve what he's aiming for.

A few years ago, the daughter of the remarkable composer and jazz pianist Rafiq Babayev, Farizi, and the musicologist Rauf Farhadov wrote the splendid book "Rafiq Babayev: From Theme to Improvisation". Everything about this book is amazing. It is not solely about the musician, but about his time, the traditions and the way of life of the Baku residents who had created such splendid and free-minded people as Rafiq Babayev and Vaqif Mustafazada. This book is about the ease and beauty of life in the jazz style, as well as about jazz music itself.

Only a person with an original way of thinking like Rafiq Babayev could "manage to perform", without having any vocal gifts, that famous song by Emin Sabitoglu "Alvida" ["Fare-well"], which we now call a classic, whispering his way through it. This performance rings amazingly true, as if Rafiq is singing about himself. So, it is not surprising that many fans of the song from the film "Tahmina and Zaur" thought that Babayev himself had written both the words and the music to it, because it sounded so wonderful.

Rafiq Babayev was a member of the [Azerbaijan] Union of Composers and the Union of Cinematographers. Starting in 1969 he wrote scores for 25 documentary, feature and cartoon films over 20 years. His splendid compositions "Jazz Monologue" and "Reflections" are also well known and loved by jazz aficionados. From 1967 he was the leader of the jazz quartet "Bayati Kurd", with whom he won the International Jazz Festival Prize in [the Estonian capital] Tallinn in that same year. In 1984 he became the artistic director and chief conductor of the variety and symphony orchestra of Azerbaijan Radio and Television. He coached young musicians right up until the end of his life.

A jazz person

When talking about Rafiq Babayev, one cannot help quoting a few excerpts from the book about him, which allow us to get a better idea of the essence of this personality and the time, in which he lived.

 "Sometimes, when you are listening to the music of Vaqif and Rafiq, you catch yourself indulging in a strange fantasy that, thanks to Mustafazada and Babayev, the idea of jazz was able to become a common Azerbaijani idea." In actual fact, both individuals have become equally significant to us, as they created the face of Azerbaijani jazz. "In our time, we have become accustomed to readily take advantage of the latest scientific developments and technological achievements, without even thinking about the intellectual input of the different discoveries. So we have become accustomed to making use of music nowadays without even asking ourselves what its true aim is and what in-depth meaning it is conveying."   

The latter is truer than ever today, when we have got used to listening to music when we are on the move, on the underground train, on the buses, and at best sitting in front of the computer. "At the present time, this is what the situation is like, or perhaps the world has changed so much that when you sing these songs at a concert, you are frequently not heard," Elxan Calabiyev, a performer of old Baku variety songs, among them those that Babayev used to sing, says in a conversation with us. "People often come to a concert just to be seen there, to show that they are involved, but do not enjoy it. In those times, everything was quite different."

These words correlate splendidly with those of the musicologist Rauf Farhadov: 

We are glad that festivals have become a tradition, that the number of participants in them is growing and that the venues are packed. But another thing is rather sad, namely that people no longer know how to listen. You see, you can still remember the outbursts of enthusiastic applause when a shaggy-haired guitarist appeared on the stage and the mistrust with which the performances of real musicians were met. Tastes need to be inculcated, so perhaps we are to blame that the spectator is not  really in touch with jazz…"

A legend

Today Rafiq Babayev's persona has practically become a legend, to such an extent that stories are being invented about him that never actually happened, but which could well have happened.

A few years ago, the poet and musicologist Rovsan Sananoglu, who passed away prematurely, conducted a kind of investigation. In the Jazz Dunyasi magazine, among the numerous items, including those devoted to the 70th birth anniversary of Rafiq Babayev, he read an interesting fact. At his graduation examination at the college of music in 1954 Rafiq had purportedly performed one of the songs by the great [American] lyrical jazz song writer Bill Evans.

As a jazz expert, Sananoglu knew that hardly anyone knew of Bill Evans in 1954, even in the USA, the homeland of jazz and that the musician had only just moved from his hometown of Chicago to New York in that year and had only started performing independently two years later. At that time, another leading light in the jazz world, Salman Gambarov, told him that stories like this were a kind of visiting card for many legendary personalities, which were appearing without their knowledge. There are legends like this about [3rd century Greek mathematician and physicist] Archimedes and his bath, about [17th-century English mathematician and physicist] Sir Isaac Newton and his apple and in relation to many other people, who have left their own quite considerable mark on history.

Two schools

"In actual fact, Vagif Mustafazadeh and Rafiq Babayev represent two different schools in music," Salman Gambarov told Regionplus. "Starting with the 1930s, many outstanding people consistently contributed their mite to the development of Azerbaijani music and jazz; there were Maestro Niyazi, Uzeyir Hacibayov, and Tofiq Quliyev." "Mustafazada and Babayev were among the first in the 1960s to start playing with small bands rather than big ones. In this sense, we were behind the 

USA where this tradition had already existed since the 1940s," the musician says.

Later on, the musicians' careers went in different directions. Right up until the end of his life Vaqif [1940-1979] played with a small band, giving concerts, while Rafiq transferred his talents to the  "Qaya" vocal quartet and the Rasid Behbudov collective, to television and then to the film studio. Every decade he introduced his own arrangements into already existing projects and applied his own experience to them."

Salman Gambarov notes that, when speaking about Rafiq Babayev, one cannot help but mention his great pedagogical talent: "Rafiq left in his wake a whole Pleiad of musicians who are working in different styles today, not necessarily in jazz.  Camil Amirov, his close companion and pupil is a jazz musician [on keyboard instruments], while Siyavus Karimi [playing the oud and keyboard instruments] chose a different style." His colleague recounts that Babayev also left his mark on the careers of those working with him such as Tofiq Cabbarov [percussion instruments' player] and Rauf Sultanov [bass guitar player].

It is well known that the career and life of this stupendous person was prematurely ended at the age of 57 years, when he was on that ill-fated train at "20th January" metro [underground] station and became one of the victims of Armenian terrorism. 

The composer, conductor and pianist Rafiq Babayev was born on 31 March 1936, but his life was abruptly ended by an act of terrorism on 19 March 1994. This year Rafiq Babayev would have been 79 years old.