Igor Berukshtis

Born: 1933 in Moscow, USSR (now Russia)
Died: November 10, 2020 in Munich, Germany

Igor Berukshtis was one of the first double bassists of the Moscow jazz scene during the 50s.
In the summer of 1964, along with saxophonist Boris Midney, he went on tour to Japan as an accompanist for the pop vocal quartet Советская Песня. Once arrived in Tokyo,the two Soviet musicians came to the American embassy and asked for political asylum. After arriving in New York, around Berukshtis and Midney was formed an ensemble, The Russian Jazz Quartet, which released just one album in 1965, which was not particularly successful. Igor Berukshtis spent about 10 more years in the United States, whose citizenship he finally received only in 1972. In the mid-1970s, he lived in the Hawaiian Islands. In the same years, the academic pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy, who had also emigrated from the USSR, toured there. On his initiative and with his help, Berukshtis moved to Europe - initially to Sweden, then to the West Germany. For eighteen years, Igor Berukshtis hosted weekly programs on jazz and pop music in the Munich studio of Radio Liberty under the pseudonym Pavel Sergeev. In the late 1990s, he retired and stayed in Munich.