Mikhail Alperin

Mikhail Alperin was born in the Ukraine in 1956 and grew up in a rural area of Bessarabia, the eastern part of Moldavia. Until 1976 he studied classical piano at music schools and academies in the Ukraine and Moldavia. Since 1977 he has worked as a free-lance arranger, composer and practicing musician. In 1980, along with Simon Shirman, Alperin founded the first Moldavian jazz quartet by developing his idea of linking jazz and folk.
Like most of the world's musicians, Alperin was obliged to earn his living with dance and party music. For the young musician, however, this music embodied things old and past. The future and freedom were to be found in music influenced by the West, music like rock and jazz. It was not until he had played in Moscow jazz circles for several years that he discovered the musical sounds of his native country for his own work. In Moscow he found other musicians also interested in integrating the musical traditions of their countries into jazz as an element of equal value, and in drawing from the rich tradition of the music of the peoples of the immense Soviet Union. It was during this period that he made the acquaintance of the brilliant hornist Arkady Shilkloper, a member of the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra who nevertheless also belonged to the circle of jazz musicians.
In the CD production Prayer Alperin & Shilkloper have expanded their jazz explorations eastward. They not only integrate a genuine singer of traditional Russian music, Sergei Starostin, in their duo, but also risk a spectacular encounter of two very different cultures: that of Mongolia / Southern Siberia, with origins in Buddhism, represented by vocalists from Kyzyl, the capital of small Siberian autonomy Tuva, and the Russian choir tradition. The result is amazing. Our Eurocentric perception is immediately transported into other remote times and spaces. Thanks to Alperin's sense of composition, one cannot help but feel that here jazz meets the Middle Ages.
Alperin's contribution to contemporary music is not only the unbiased integration of the most various peoples' musical traditions and the crossing of stylistic boundaries: Free of care, he also fuses music of the past with contemporary elements.
In 1989, in a duo with Arkady Shilkloper, Alperin recorded the much-admired CD "Waves of Sorrow" for ECM; then his new production "North Story", recorded with Tore Brumborg, Jon Christensen, Terje Gevelt and Arkady Shilkloper, appeared there in the spring of 1996. With these musicians Alperin has also recorded works of Paul Hindemith and other composers of Classical Modernism.
In 1993 Alperin moved to Oslo in order to take on a position as professor of piano at the music academy there.
In the late autumn of 1995, Mikhail Alperin had the musical direction of an unusual project uniting two previously unacquainted musical cultures in Sofia, Bulgaria: the women's choir Angelite with its quite uncommon singing techniques and the four-man ensemble Huun Huur Tu from the Southern Siberian region of Tuva, bordering on Mongolia. The latter group, for its part, cultivates a form of overtone and undertone singing which is also quite foreign for the Western ear. A third independent vocal style is added to the production by the Russian singer Sergei Starostin. Alperin, who has composed works for children's choirs, chamber orchestras, and jazz ballet as well as a concert for flugelhorn, piano and symphony orchestra, wrote the arrangements for all of the pieces in this production.