- Почему отказались от роли Маяковского в кино?
- Чем вызваны смены настроения в последних песнях?
- На кого бы еще хотели быть похожим?
- Как-то вы упомянули, что будете работать в стиле «христианский рок». Это была ирония?
- Не хотели предложить придумать обложку фанатам?
- Какие впечатления от озвучивания мультфильма «Принцесса и лягушка»?
- Правда, что как-то купили сразу четыре бюста композитора?
-  Вас с Боярским еще не сравнивают?

- У вас есть комплексы?

It was a clandestine operation. Kids gathering, and ducking the authorities as they conducted their bootlegging work. Nirvana tapes, roughly ripped from one stereo system to another. "A cassette is 45 minutes long, so it would take 45 minutes to copy such a tape," recalls Vadim Novik. "If you had such a cassette, you would listen to it 100 times, until it was dead."

Novik, one of those conspirators, was 12, maybe 13 years old at the time. As a music-hungry kid, he'd started with whatever was available. "Because I grew up in Soviet times, everything from the West, it was forbidden," he says, speaking in English, but with Russian-driven grammar. Italian pop music crept in at first, then The Beatles. "I used to like the hard-rock side, 'Helter Skelter,' 'I Want You (She's So Heavy),'" he says. Then heavy metal, with Metallica and Sepultura.
But at that moment, 1991, the Soviet Union was falling apart, and the city where Novik grew up, Leningrad, had reclaimed its historic Russian name, St. Petersburg. Soon, the West was no longer forbidden. And Russians longed for it. Russian record stores now carry U.S. music. It became readily available on the Internet. "We have capitalism right now," Novik says. "Not that good capitalism that you have in the United States...."
But they're working on it.
"America," Novik says, "is the mother of rock and roll."
Meet the bastard sons. It is probably safe to predict that, after Billy's Band's much-talked about appearance two years ago at the Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival, the return engagement Friday and Saturday of Vadim "Billy" Novik's group will be one of the hottest tickets in town.
These guys are no Red Squares: They're four poorly shaven men from Russia singing Tom Waits' edge-of-jazz ballads. And their own desperate tunes, done in early-period Waits. Novik has the maestro's mannerisms down to an eerie exactness. And the voice ranging from gruff to falsetto, hushed mumble, or a wolf howl of angst.
"I was tired of that hard sound," Novik says of his metal days. "Then I came to jazz. In jazz music, I don't understand. I think, 'How they are doing that, what's the clue? How do I imitate jazz? After three or four years of listening to jazz, I found Tom Waits. A special time, that sounds mostly jazzy, the Foreign Affairs record. I think it was that golden needle between understandable jazz and that jazz I don't understand."
Billy's Band is theater, for sure. They're finger-snapping tramps who'd been sleeping under a bridge, wearing old wrinkled coats and reciting hipster poetry. "It's kind of a provoking image," Novik says. "It all started once when we were playing underground, in an underpass in St. Petersburg, in 2001. We were playing and I realized why people come and listen. There was a thought: maybe they enjoy music so much, seeing us, they understand there is somebody who has an even lower way of life. Comparing to us, they feel about themselves even better."
The 34-year-old Novik has played music most of his life, but spent four years as a pathologist in a St. Petersburg children's hospital. There's no joy in doing an autopsy on someone's dead child, and the work seems to have gnawed at Novik's soul. "I used to treat myself as a person who is not lucky," he says. "Everyone around me reached something, but not me. I got a feeling that nothing is going right with me. Only when I quit medicine, I started to make loser's music, then people came to me and shake my hand, and tell me, 'I think what you are singing about really touched me.'"
Loser's music, he calls it. "I'm not lucky, and then I'm looking at these things with a self-ironic wit," he says. "I don't know, sounds good. So I'm a loser with a self-ironic touch.
"Even if you are a big-time loser, you can make a business out of it."
He has. Russian musicians have blossomed with the demise of the Soviet Union. "It's getting better because right now a young generation has a very good school," Novik says. "America is 40 years forward compared to Russia. Listen to the best pop singer in Russia, and compare to just a regular pop singer in the United States, you see a great difference. In vocal. Christina Aguilera or Whitney Houston or Michael Jackson, the difference is amazing. You Americans have got a great school, because Afro-Americans, I think they are the best in vocals, in general, around the world. The young generation has got a good example how that is supposed to be done.
"America's sort of music is an art in general, and art is supposed to make people better. So, that means, at that point, Russia is also getting better."

http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20100610/ENT0501/6100302/-1/jazz/Billy-s-Band--These-guys-are-no-Red-Squares