Sixty-two-year-old Mikhail Heybudin considers himself lucky. Employed full time as a handyman at the Hed College of Contemporary Music in Tel Aviv, the former Ukrainian has an aversion for romanticizing the past, when he too made music – back when he was somewhat of a star.

Heybudin was not always a handyman. A lifetime ago he was a gifted trombonist, rising in the ranks of the Ukrainian Army’s marching band to ultimately conduct it. After the army, he studied at a prestigious music academy and graduated with two degrees in musicology, taking up a teaching position there. He played in several orchestras in the Ukraine and became assistant manager of one of them. But in the past several years Heybudin did something very few musicians from the former Soviet Union ever dreamed they would get to do: he made aliya and played the bass trombone in an Israeli big band jazz ensemble.

“There was some jazz in the USSR, especially in the big cities,” says Heybudin, but mostly “we had to listen to it in secret.”

Heybudin, together with three dozen other musicians, mostly from the FSU, comprised the members of what was, until just a few weeks ago, Israel’s longest-running big band jazz ensemble: the Hed Big Band. Since its inception in 1991 the band was a miniimmigrant absorption ministry for Russian musicians. The band even had a reputation in the FSU. One of its members is said to have gone straight to a rehearsal after landing at Ben-Gurion Airport as a new immigrant. Continue reading →