SIMPLY A BAKUVIAN WOMAN...

It was impossible not to notice this beautiful, upbeat woman! There is so much life, so much healthy young energy and fiery enthusiasm in her that it seemed that that energy could set on fire the whole Philharmonia concert hall, the venue of the Golden Fall jazz festival one year ago. After that, people sought her for a very long time. It seems that all Bakuvians noticed her back then! And everywhere people talked about her; they would immediately recollect, after they had described how she looked: "Yes, it was the woman who sang jazz better than that Englishman." They meant Clive Brown, gospel style singer. And because his repertoire was quite diverse, our protagonist had no problem continuing any of his songs. However, the same thing happened with groups from Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Georgia and Latvia! A beautiful, strong voice, her movement and all-round expressiveness were bound to amaze and enthral!  I do not know about others, but when I go to the gala evenings of jazz which the PRO-CENT production group revived in Baku, I look precisely for her, a Bakuvian lady who sings jazz. And if for some reason I cannot find her, I get very upset: it seems to me that without her happy and enthusiastic take on the event, my joy will be incomplete.

Like life

The time taken to find the heroine of this story became a period of "invention" of the image. Everything was interesting:  who she is, what she does, what her family is like, where she works, who her friends are and so on. Of course, what came to mind was a nice story in the spirit of Hollywood Christmas fairy tales with a no less wholesome and romantic finale.  Looking at her, you begin to think that she probably came to Baku during the thaw of the 1960s, after falling in love with some Bakuvian (it does not matter at this point who exactly he was and what she liked in him!) And, of course, she is a singer who gave up her future as a star for a great love. Then my imagination span out the following story: she lives in Baku, loves this city, loves her husband and family, but in her dreams she still returns to the past, when the footlights gave her the joy of freedom which could not be compared to anything. Freedom from everything, even the physical body! The spirit soared! And that flight exceeded even rapture on the scale of sensation! So attending concerts of this sort is for her a way to remember what she really is - what she has not been for a long time, after laying everything - her brilliant and prosperous future, career, popularity, the pleasure of singing for the people - on the altar of love. But, as it would not be hard to surmise, things are different between life and the movies. And things are very different between real life and imagined stories. They are usually harsher, simpler, more prosaic - and sadder.

We met by accident. In the centre of the city. We were both in a hurry. But nonetheless, we chatted, remembered concerts and discussed the cultural life of the city. Then we agreed to meet for a cup of tea one of these days and parted. And again for a long time. Routine exhausts us - with its necessary but not always interesting chores. But still we met. It snowed and the city looked fine and even a little kitsch. As in those Hollywood Christmas movies.

The story of Tunzala Qahraman - a genuine Bakuvian Azerbaijani - is very similar to the history of our country and the stories of her peers. A child of the Soviet era, she was brought up according to the same ideological postulates which were normal in that period and, as it turns out, not that bad. Because the entire code of the young builder of communism fitted into those very Ten Commandments (adjusted, of course, for the atheist world outlook!) which everyone knows today. Back then they were banned, because the country was atheist! However, her family was atheist too.

Her mother was a beauty from Samaxi, her father originally from Qabala. The story of their encounter and love still seems to Tunzala xanim to be a manifestation of divine providence. Imagine, there was war, the year was 1943. A young, handsome medical service major (Enver went to war with the first round of conscripts in 1941), who arrived after medical treatment in Tbilisi to visit his parents in Baku for three days, met at his brother's home a beautiful but very young girl who sang very well and played piano. It was a wonderful, romantic evening, full of poetic atmosphere, music and song. That evening, she sang many pieces by Strauss. And she sang so well that the major, sitting in his chair, decided to himself: "If I survive, I will come back and marry this girl!" Judging by how their relationship unfolded, the heart of the young beauty also throbbed, and she wished with all her heart that the brave major be spared by the bullets. Perhaps her wish was very strong, and her Enver survived. When his regiment reached Vienna, he picked a leaf from a tree in a forest, dried it and brought it home to the woman whose singing he liked so much and in whom the young man discerned the spirit which made it possible for the couple to start a long, happy family life and raise happy children.

Swimming against the current

Tunzala always sang. From her early childhood. Ever since she herself can remember. However, in their family this was the norm. And no one attached any importance to the fact that the girl sang. Everyone sang, brothers and sisters, not to mention the mother and all her brothers. Only in the post-Soviet period did Tunzala xanim find out that her mother's family tree in Samaxi was rooted in the distant and prosperous past of an ancient wealthy house which counted educators among its members. In other words, they were part of the nation's intelligentsia. This is why, despite the family's change of fortune, it was customary to give children a well-rounded education. If a child had at least some talent and a desire to sing, it was normal to sing. In general, it was customary in their family to do everything well. For the parents, this was a matter of course. When Tunzala's father was about to graduate from medical school, the Bakinskiy Rabochiy newspaper published an article entitled "Study like Enver does." That newspaper, together with the dry leaf from a Vienna forest, is kept in the family archive as a memento. And singing was nothing but a form of entertainment at home, a pleasant way to spend time during family soirees. And Tunzala herself never thought about singing as something she could do professionally. In childhood, she dreamed about becoming a ballerina. She saw pointes and ballerina dresses in her dreams. But Tunzala was young and she could not go to the 133rd Secondary School alone. Mom and dad worked, which is why grandpa used to take her there. Mother's father, a former White Russian officer.  He was old, and soon he could not take his granddaughter to the 133rd School any longer. So the girl was transferred to the 160th School, which was nearby and which she hated right away and forever. The grandfather, every inch a nobleman, was very polite and amiable. When they used to come to the school gate and a noisy crowd of kids and parents would start breaking through, pushing one another and stepping on one another's feet, the grandfather would take off his hat and let everyone pass. He was simply unable to push his way in - anywhere, including in his life. Which was why, in the Soviet period, he worked as a warehouseman. It was a very prosaic and quiet job. It enabled him to avert the public nightmare of moral and ideological non-conformity. And he tried not to demonstrate his non-conformity. He had children and grandchildren, and he had to protect them from Soviet troubles. But Tunzala was young. She loved him, but she did not understand him. That was why she stood and cried with shame and resentment. For herself, she felt very keen to rush into that crowd, push her way through it and make it to her classroom and her desk. However, she was different from her classmates too. Apparently, the genetic protest which her predecessors had demonstrated for decades was manifest in her too. That was why she was a black sheep of sorts at school. She was different. And this always irritates others. People like this are called strange, sometimes they are called odd. However, there are even more dramatic and ruder names. In short, they are not liked. They are not forgiven their inherent rebelliousness and desire to be themselves, the way the Almighty has created them.

So she lived despite them all. She listened to the vinyl records she liked. She read the books she liked. She was very fond of poetry and, like all young ladies, read poems about love, not about the Communist party and builders of communism, which was customary back then. So her classmates (90% of them were ethnic Armenians) mocked her mercilessly. She preferred intellectual movies and still loves Italian neo-realism to this day. She sang the songs she picked from her vinyls - in Italian, English and French. With her unique ear, she had no problem memorizing the words. But she was mocked by her "upright" classmates even for that. Once, at a school concert of Russian romance songs, Tunzala sang Dragomyzhskiy's "I am sad because I love you." She was accused of immorality. At a "foreign tunes" concert at school, she sang and danced the twist. The school director summoned her parents and told them that their daughter was "very susceptible to bourgeois influence." And so on, until she graduated from secondary school. It was a prestigious school, but she did not like it. Then her life became freer and she decided to live by and inhale whatever she liked. And she started to listen to Rakhmaninov and Caruso. And she listened to Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis and jazz rock on the banned radio stations! She was lucky enough to meet amazing people - playwright Leonid Leonov, Yevgeniy Yengibarov, Tofiq Ah-madov, Muslum Maqomayev, Igor Brill, Leonid Chizhik, Rafiq Babayev, B.B. King and many others who told her that her future as a jazz singer would be brilliant. Today, Tunzala Qahraman asks herself: why did it happen that their predictions never came true? There is no answer, at least one that satisfies her. Looking from the outside, the situation seems quite explicable. Her parents endured many of the fears of the Soviet ideological tenets, including the repression of many of their family. They did not want their daughter, with her freedom-loving character, to become popular. She could thereby bring on herself and her loved ones what many of them had already been through. Her father survived by a miracle. Maybe because he lived and worked in a provincial town. He returned to Baku only in 1956, when Stalin was no more, and the Khrushchev-era thaw was in the air. But fear did not allow anyone to remain calm. Dad kept saying: "Come on, jazz?  It is not at all Soviet?!" He was worried about his daughter. Explaining things to her also meant putting her in danger, so her parents limited themselves to simple family rules. Preserving her life, they were destroying her career. But everything took off so staggeringly fast!

Jazz solo

Baku, 1969!  Sayin Agayev created an orchestra at the university. Tunzala was a soloist in that orchestra. And her participation in the First Baku Singing Festival Golden Autumn earned them the gold medal. On the jury were Vaqif Mustafa-zada, Rafiq Babayev, Makashev and others. They awarded her first place unanimously. The silver medal went to Irina Allegrova. Their group was called Express, and they rehearsed at the Central Department Store. It was increasingly difficult to keep her participation in singing competitions secret, so she never agreed to sing for the cameras, to avoid appearing on TV. But it happened nonetheless, and dad came to the festival. He, a devoted Mark Bernes fan, said that he liked his daughter's singing. But he did not see anything exceptional about her talent or the need to start concert tours. Mom was terse and said only: "It is a dirty scene." And father thought for a while and decided that to distract his daughter from her fancies, she had to marry. Culture Minister Rauf Haciyev, Rasid Behbudov, Vaqif Mustafa-zada, Lenya Vaynshteyn - everyone asked her dad to change his decision and stop hindering his daughter from pursuing her career. Alas, she married her husband despite the fact that there was no love between the young people. And only her dearly loved daughter, the apple of her eye, remains of that marriage. However, life gave her another chance to return to the scene as a singer. In the late 1970s, Sayin Agayev and she again organized a group called RAST at the Academy of Sciences. Participation in the all-Azerbaijan singing competition again earned them a gold medal and the Komsomol City Committee sent the group to the all-Union singing festival. The Mziuri group from Georgia won the gold medal and RAST came second. After that, the Bakuvian group went on tour to Czechoslovakia and northern cities of the Soviet Union. Back then, Tunzala's repertoire already included songs by Shirley Bassey, a jazz singer who was little known in the Eastern Bloc because of the information curtain. Her success was colossal. But her daughter was growing fast, and her parents did not like what she did for a living, so she decided to give in and again abandoned the stage, although by then she was the winner of many festivals. She even won on the "Youth Stage" TV show. She tried to enrol in the Moscow Theatre Institute but... It all ended with her enrolment in the Foreign Languages Institute. And now Tunzala Enver qizi is simply a Bakuvian lady whose story is very much like the stories of many of her peers. And their stories are the story of the era. Their era - and ours too.

And from the Christmas fairy tale I invented when under the impression of Azerbaijan's best jazz singer Tunzala Enver qizi Qahraman, only one thing came true. Visiting concerts like these enables her to go back to a youth which was so promising and to have the great experience which good music still is for her...