Being a musician: Ivan Rebroff: Kalinka

We - a quartet by the name of "Balalaika Ensemble Druschba", with Prima-Balalaika, Guitar, Accordion and me playing the Contrabass Balalaika - had already performed with Ivan Rebroff for several years and were asked to record this very track in a recording studio near Frankfurt in 1983.

When we arrived there, the sound engineer in charge told us that the maestro won´t be showing up, because he had his vocals recorded the day before and - go figure - even without any sort of "guide" track. This might seem surprising to you, but Ivan Rebroff was blessed with the very rare "perfect pitch" ability, and whenever he sang a tune "a cappella" (solely or mainly without instrumental accompaniment) he`d either grab a tuning fork or have our accordion guy play an "A" note to obtain a reference tone that helped him getting his vocal cords adjusted properly.

What was even more surprising to us, was the fact that we happened to just need one take to get our stuff on tape correctly.

As any fellow musician who has ever been tasked with contributing his stuff under such unconventional circumstances will confirm, adding instrumental tracks to an existing vocal track and without the singer being present for providing some clues or even guide you through the whole recording process will normally turn out to be a nightmare, because particularly with a tune such as "Kalinka", that isn`t bound to any 120 beats-per-minute kind of fixed tempo, but instead consists of various parts with a variety of different "tempi" plus some "ritardandi" (in layman`s terms: when the music gets gradually slower, the opposite is BTW called "accelerando").

The bottom line is: under such circumstances there´s usually no way you`re able to guess what the singer will be doing next ... unless you have already been playing with him/her for quite some time and know his/her "habits" inside out, and that`s what we luckily did, and that`s why we happened to nail our stuff in just one take.

Production trivia

• As I`ve been playing the bass balalaika on this track, I`m of course pretty happy about the fact that the producers decided to not just feature Ivan Rebroff`s vocals in the final mix, but my stuff as well. The louder you play "Kalinka" the better you can hear me adding some low-end "gravitas" to it and - towards the end - play some counter-melodies with the vocals, which is something I love to do when performing with vocalists.
• Honestly said, if I had the opportunity to re-record my bass track these days, there`s one tiny thing I`d love to change: "Kalinka" is in D-Minor, and the very last note that I`m playing would now be a big fat "dropped D" note that simply goes BOOOM ☺