This Sunday, June 23, Moscow’s Izmailovskiy Park welcomed the Central Band of the Border Guard Service
of the Federal Security Service of Russia under the lead of Colonel Andrey Kapralov, Honored Artist
of Russia. It was the first time that these well-known military musicians took part
in the Military Bands in the City Parks, a project carried out by the Directorate of the
Spasskaya Tower International Military Music Festival with the support of the Russian Ministry of Defense
and Moscow Department of Culture.
The band presented a program featuring a plethora of genres — jazz, rock, pop, funk, mambo,
bolero and traditional song. Thus, musicians performed several classical jazz compositions of Latin American
origin — Tiger Rag (music by La Rocca), Perfidia (a song written by Alberto
Domínguez and played in Casablanca while the characters Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund are ballroom dancing),
Sway, a bolero-mambo by Pablo Beltrán Ruiz, and Historia de un amor,
a Cuban bolero by Carlos Almaran. Besides, the program included a number of popular American
music pieces of different times, such as Give Up The Funk by The Parliament band, It’s Only
a Paper Moon by Garold Arlen, When the Saints Go Marching In, a popular American song. The
concert didn’t lack European music pieces as well, the Chez Foxtrot by Gustav Brom Big Band, Forever
and Ever by Demis Roussous, Ding a Dong by Teach-In, a popular Dutch band
of the 90s, as well as the song Can You Feel the Love Tonight, soundtrack to the Lion King movie
by Elton John. The band also performed a few Russian music pieces, featuring among others a potpourri
of songs about Moscow.
