Rare USSR modern джаз: Valery Mysovsky Trio - Stompin´at the Savoy, Leningrad 1980

Melodia S60-14135 (1980 compilation Джаз-ансамбли Ленинграда = Leningrad Jazz Bands)
Personnel: Valery Mysovsky, drums; Vladimir Lytkin, piano; Edvard Moskalyov, bass.
From the 1950s onward, the drummer Valery Mysovsky was a central figure in the Leningrad jazz scene, musically as well as intellectually. After helping push the city´s first jazz club "D-58" into existence against massive bureaucratic opposition, he wrote and got published the USSR´s first small fact book on jazz in 1960. In 1973 a much more extensive second one followed, called "Blues for our own". The granted edition size was a joke - 100 copies altogether - but amongst Soviet jazz musicians the book became so important that it was soon privately copied and proliferated in the samisdat book underground.
When Benny Goodman came to tour in the Soviet Union in 1962 - one of the seminal moments in the history of Soviet jazz - and was scheduled to arrive with his Big Band at Leningrad airport, there wasn´t a translator at hand. So they called Mysovsky, who was known to speak a bit English, and asked him to please quickly join the delegation already in waiting position at the airport.
The story that unfolds now amuses me so much that I can´t help but bring it here, as told by Mysovsky in his own words:
"So here we are - me, Kandat, Golshtein and Weinstein - standing at the gangway over which all the jazzmen and B.G. himself are floating down to us... We greet each other, we hand out flowers, and I introduce everyone. But then, when I finally say my own name in the end, there comes an unexpected reaction: suddenly grabbing both my hands in his paws, B.G. starts to enthusiastically shake and hug me while shouting lots of totally incomprehensible gibberish that I can´t make any sense of...
So we bring them all to the Astoria where they are supposed to stay, and there, taking me aside for a moment, B.G. whispers confidentially to me: "Say, could you arrange for me to be accommodated somewhere separately from the others, and - you, you, you know what I mean - well, everything just really top-notch for me?"
"What does this have to do with me? I am just meeting you" I reply.
"But... aren't you the, ah, composer - ahem, the, that famous, ahem, Soviet composer? No? - Oh, well then..."
And suddenly it all becomes crystal clear to me.
- Myaskovsky!"
It seems that Benny, confusing their simlarly-sounding names, had thought that the (barely 31 year old) speaker of the welcome delegation was nobody else but Nikolai Myaskovsky, a legendary Classical composer born in 1881 (and already dead since 1950), author not only of 27 (!) symphonies, but also 13 string quartets, two big concertos and many more other works, and that as such a revered artist he might have the influence to "organise" some special privileges exclusively for Benny, ...amongst "equals", so to say.
Benny being Benny...
Enjoy!