This musical post will be quite a bit more personal than usual. For a rather simple reason, really – there are a lot of bands and artists that had profound impact on my life and appreciation of variety of music, but Tequilajazzz might have affected me most. They’re not a band I can call “my favorite”, hell I wasn’t even listening to it when the impact was made and many years since than. But… Well, I’ll explain later.
It’s one of the earliest bands in post-soviet countries that I know of that had a very distinct post-hardcore, post-punk, experimental rock sound during their early days, yet were very well and not some underground band that only got to be appreciated years later *cough* Дубовый Гаайъ *cough*. But even more interesting is how they changed and evolved with time, slowly going from aggressive and harsh hardcore sound to more melodic alternative rock, which at times incorporates influences from jazz, funk or other more “easy listening” genres, while still sticking to the high energy performance. They’re a blast live. Speaking of which…
Let’s cover that personal bit in two paragraphs. I was 13 – a shy, mostly “goody two shoes” boy, relaxing in a summer camp as part of a choir I spent 6 years of my life with (despite being called a choir, we didn’t sing just classical choir music but also some folk and pop stuff with some additional dancing involved). I had a lot of music influences by then from my parents, who were into some good hard rock, psychedelic rock, jazz and a bunch of other “classy” genres and I grew up loving Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, Queen, Led Zeppelin, alongside some tunes of Miles Davis or a capella bands like Take 6. But I also was 13 and those were the late 90s, so what I actually often listened to at that time was some pop, crap eurodance trash and whatever else could be popular, with some rare exceptions where I would allow myself to like something more “alternative”, like a song by Blur or what not. I was almost genuinely scared of liking some “devil music” (my parents aren’t religious, so it was more of a tongue and cheek name me and my friends used), that was more aggressive like, say, Nirvana. But I wanted to.
And so, in that summer camp near Odessa a 13 year old me learns about a band called Tequilajazzz playing for free on the stage on the camp territory. And I get excited, because I heard one of their songs and liked it! What I did not realize, however, was that what I heard was a very chill remix of one of their songs. I grab my friend (with similar music background) and we go to the show. The show opens with this amazing track. That ain’t chill! That ain’t no Captain Jack or Vacuum! Neither it sounds like Queen, huh. As me and my friend, completely floored with the energy of the show, look at each other and around we see people pogo dancing under the stage, while moms with carriages sit near us in the audience on that open stage. My friend only asks me one thing – Are you sure this is the band you think it is? I say yes, but I’m unsure if I want to stay. We did. We sat through the entire show, fighting hard not to start jumping to the music ourselves. And I didn’t become a fan of the band, neither have a switched to some more “alternative” music right away. But that was the moment when I realized just how absolutely awesome the music can be if I stop restricting my tastes to “what is right”. Last year I had a chance to see them again, 19 years later and wow, they still kick ass. Which was a bit surprising since, as seems to be often with me posting about bands, they did disband in the past, only to get back together again.
So… Where should you start? That would depend on if you prefer the music to be more aggressive or more melodic. Their very first record (both the very first one, and the one that was somewhat of a re-recording of it) didn’t age well, but nonetheless has a few good songs, like an unexpectedly acoustic Бай-бай-бай. The second record is where things are coming together really nicely and I’d suggest listening to the entirety of the record if you like music like this or this. But if you want to hear the “quintessential Tequilajazzz” go directly for their third record. It almost completely ditches the more dark post-soviet themes of the first two records and switches to something that, even when sounding aggressive, is much more beautiful. This song remains my absolute favorite track they’ve ever recorded. But more fitting to the season we are, and more surprising to hear, was this beautiful simple summer song:
And things tend to get more positive and beautiful from here. Even when touching upon more melancholic or dark subjects (and you don’t really need to understand the lyrics most of the time, as Tequilajazzz is often more about the melody, rather than the lyrics), the songs became more melodic, incorporating more and more interesting ideas and concepts from different genres and, really, just not caring about trying to “fit” some expectation and just being “good music”. The band disbanded after releasing a really good final (at the time) LP, which was released for free for a while, and this slow mo music video to one of their newer songs. A project by the lead singer and songwriter Eugeniy Fedorov called Zorge appeared almost immediately afterwards, picking up some of the b-sides from the last record of the band as new Zorge tracks. Yet, a few years later the band decided to get back together (with some lineup changes) and are currently doing live shows. They even recorded a new record, though it’s mostly acoustic arrangements of older tracks.
So, here’s hoping I got you interested in checking them out. I’ll finish with their usual last song from the live shows to sell the deal: