The legend of Russian chanson with Brighton Beach Willy Tokarev died

Willy Tokarev passed away on August 4, just three months before his 85-year anniversary.

Screenshot of the video program “Visiting Dmitry Gordon”

Willy Tokarev, a popular composer and performer of Russian chanson, has died. This was reported by the Interfax agency with reference to Anton Tokarev, the son of the deceased.

Russian singer and composer died due to cancer, reports REN TV. Last month he was in a Moscow clinic where he was hospitalized on July 2.

Coming from the Adygei Kuban Cossacks, Willy Tokarev from childhood rushed to adventure - and it was one big adventure that turned out to be his career and destiny. In 14 years, he went as a stoker to circumnavigate the globe, Tokarev a few years later, at the beginning of 50, moved to Leningrad, where he entered a music school at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory, writes Lenta.ru report.

Even in his Kuban childhood, having discovered a talent for playing folk instruments and for composing simple melodies, he subsequently became a popular double bass player in many jazz orchestras of the USSR, and even wrote some successful songs - for example, the thoughtful dance ballad "Rain" from the repertoire of Edita Pieha. However, Tokarev did not manage to build a significant musical career within the system of official Soviet jazz (for many reasons, for reasons not having his own talents - even in the early seventies the attitude of the system to jazz and its performers remained critical). In 1973, he went to Murmansk to work as a taxi driver and songwriter in restaurants - and here he will earn the first, albeit local, popularity: he will be made a favorite of the Kola Peninsula by such songs as “Murmanchanochka” and “Apatity - Zapolyarny” town".

However, Tokarev does not want to stop at the status of a regional-scale star, and will emigrate to the USA a year later. It was in the USA, where, having changed his native name Vilen to Willy, which was more euphonious, Tokarev was able to fully begin his own performing career, he gained his fame - first within the emigrant community in Brighton Beach, then - throughout the Russian-speaking world. His album 1981 of the Year “In a Noisy Balakan” is one of the key recordings in the history of modern chanson, the material for which Tokarev had spent years playing at Russian restaurants in New York, having achieved in the end an almost perfect combination of romantic and humorous, thieves and authorial compositions.

His main hit, Skyscrapers, turned out to be a song about a little man trying to find himself and his way within the framework of a ruthless machine.

Tokarev knew what he was singing about: “Willie did what he did at the beginning of his New York life: washing windows, cleaning apartments, sorting out the library from some millionaire, cleaning the Brighton bakery, getting only fresh bread and some money. At one time he was a nurse's assistant, served as a courier on Wall Street, from where he was banished for not knowing English. When the host after the “exam” unceremoniously pointed out the door for him, Willy was so shocked that, seeing nothing in front of him, he walked — from bottom to top — all of Manhattan from Wall Street to 180 Street, which is about twenty kilometers. Went out in the morning, got to the house in the evening. It was the day of the two greatest lessons: first, Vilya once and for all understood that there was no longer a place for shocks in his life, that everything must be treated philosophically. Secondly, Wil understood that without a good language in this country there is nothing to do ..., ”wrote his biographer Alfred Tulchinsky about the artist’s first American impressions.

Perhaps that is why Tokarev never fully felt “his” in America - and, having made several extremely successful tours throughout the Union during Perestroika, he finally moved to Russia after the collapse of the USSR, where by that time he was a real star and could to devote himself to creativity to the full: the fame and popularity of the artist who had been looking for his place for decades was such that not only did he assume appearances on all the significant 90's pop shows, but also allowed him complete freedom of expression without Lada both at the momentary fashion trends, and even at the narrow framework of the chanson as a genre - in the post-Soviet Tokarev records, sometimes there are striking and unexpected experiments with the concept, role, intonation.

The last few decades of his life, the singer continued to perform, but turned mainly into a television celebrity: he was always ready to defuse the atmosphere of any television show in his exalted way and impressive ability to tell stories - even about his emigrant adventures, which he invariably served in an ironic manner, and, for example, about the complex fate of real prototypes of their songs. And even realizing that the public expects first of all showmanship from him, he invariably retained nobility, wisdom and an enviable will to live. “A person can live up to 150 years. I still have to nurse my grandchildren from my children. So it should be, and everything will be so. And you don't need to think about death, you need to think about life. And every day you need to thank God for giving you one more day, and you can continue to live on "- говорил He is in an interview.

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