Sometimes talent emerges late. Svetlana Marinchenko, for example, who grew up in Moscow, only started playing the piano at 17, curiously enough, after hearing John Coltrane’s saxophone milestone “A Love Supreme”. Previously a pop and rock listener, she now devoted herself to jazz, and after just three years she was so good that she was accepted by Andrey Kondakov at the famous Mussorgsky Conservatory in St. Petersburg. There – Russia’s relationship with the West was still hopeful at the time – she was even able to take part in a master class by Herbie Hancock.
During her first year of study, she discovered her passion for composing and founded her first band Svetamuzika, with which she even made it onto Russian television and presented her debut album “Present Simple” (on the French label ArtBeat) in 2015. Then it was time to move on. That’s how she ended up at the Jazz Institute of the Munich University of Music, where she studied with Tizian Jost from 2016. Here too, it didn’t take long for Marinchenko to get noticed. In the same year she won the Steinway Jazz Prize, and in 2019 she won the Kurt Maas Jazz Award.
She also caused a stir under the current band name SVM3 released album “Letters To My Little Girl” and her performances in the Unterfahrt or in Studio 2 of the BR, because she already had an unmistakable style of her own: a sparkling, finely structured fusion jazz that carefully expanded the piano electronically, exciting stories had to tell and yet at the same time was grounded in a melancholic side of her “Russian soul”.
Stylistically, Marinchenko’s new SVM3 album “Between The Times” follows on from this. You can find elements of the Esbjörn Svensson school, motifs of neo-romanticism, patterns of postmodern jazz. But everything has become even more complex, more cosmopolitan, and also a little angrier. Because of course the war in Ukraine casts a shadow, in the wildly undulating title track and the subsequent pathos anthem “Ne Vzdyhai”, where Marinchenko processes a prophetic nightmare, a sign of the “turning point”.
And it certainly also plays a role that Marinchenko – a real loss, as one has to say from a local perspective – moved on from Munich to Berlin some time ago. Not only because the album starts with a “Berlin Moment”, a very metropolitan, electronically swirling climax, but also because their companions are now audibly representatives of the wild, young Berlin scene. On the album it’s Tobias Backhaus and Niklas Lukassen on bass and drums, at the CD presentation in the Unterfahrt it will be Tom Berkmann and Mathis Grossmann. In any case, this return to the old place of work will result in one of the most exciting concerts of the young year.
SVM3: “Between The Times” (Bauer Studios/Neuklang Records); live on Friday, January 12th, 8:30 p.m., Unterfahrt, Einsteinstr. 42, www.unterfahrt.de