Rhythm, Improvisation and Community with Piotr Orlov

Dori talks with writer and music storyteller Piotr Orlov, exploring themes of identity, the immigrant experience, and the transformative power of community. Piotr, whose grandmother was a classical musicologist and father, a prominent, American basketball-loving sportswriter, came here from Leningrad to New York at 7-3/4 years old, fully bought into the American Dream story. He shares how his cultural background shapes his perspective and how that lens has changed over time. His first, indelible (and timely!) New York City memory proves how the truth we see isn't always THE truth. The discussion delves into the significance of community in music, the challenges of building new institutions when the ones that formed us are no longer sustainable...or relevant, and the legacy we leave through our stories.

Piotr's writing has appeared in New York Times, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and the Village Voice. He was director of special projects at AFROPUNK, senior editor at NPR Music, and editorial director at MTV.

He helped produce the Red Bull Music Academy in New York. He is an adjunct teacher of writing and history at NYU's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music and at Columbia University. Peter is also the founder of Dada Strain, a platform grounded in rhythm, improvisation, and community.


Subscribe to Dada Strain to get Piotr's weekly, mostly independent, mostly jazz,  electronic and house music event picks in the NYC area -- with a heavy Brooklyn focus.

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Instagram: @dorifern
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Email me: lifechangingwithdorifern@gmail.com

Visit https://dorifern.com for more about Dori's coaching services and to sign up for a complimentary call.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Dori Fern: I have nothing to say here. I have no hot takes. Needless to say, my side lost. I was behind my podcasting schedule before election day and I know I'm really behind. I hope I did not disappoint you. I've had a lot going on. I'm building new things. Nothing anyone is waiting for yet. Nothing anyone is paying me for yet.

[00:00:27] Dori Fern: I'll tell you more about it soon.

[00:00:33] Dori Fern: The pull to drown in not caring is strong. Maybe you can relate. But I'm not gonna fall for it. For one, I do care. A lot. And there is much to do. Definitely moving slow though, which, for now, just have to be okay. Bye.

[00:00:59] Dori Fern: [00:01:00] Welcome to Life Changing with Dori Fern, a podcast about who we are, where we're going, and what connects us. It's a show for people in progress at any stage. A 

[00:01:16] Piotr Orlov: lot of the work that I do is I try to tell people that New York is Oz, but there ain't no wizard. You're the wizard. 

[00:01:25] Dori Fern: You're the wizard. Today's guest is writer, editor, and immigrant, Peter Orlov.

[00:01:34] Dori Fern: Peter has been a music storyteller all his life. or musiker, a term he defines later in our talk, for over three decades. His writing has appeared in New York Times, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and The Village Voice. He was director of special projects at Afropunk, senior editor at NPR Music, and editorial director at MTV.

[00:01:57] Dori Fern: He helped produce the Red Bull [00:02:00] Music Academy in New York. He is a musician. an adjunct teacher of writing and history at NYU's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music and at Columbia's School of the Arts, Columbia University that is. Peter is also the founder of DadaStrain, a platform grounded in rhythm, improvisation, and community.

[00:02:22] Dori Fern: His substack of the same name has become my go to resource for what's happening in New York's mostly independent jazz and electronic dance music scene. Without further ado, here is my conversation with Peter Orlov. Hello, Peter Orloff. Hello, Dori Fern. How did I do pronouncing your name? You did pretty well.

[00:02:45] Dori Fern: You did pretty well. Okay. Yeah listeners I am used to calling him Peter Orloff, but that is not his name. It is my name. It is my name Okay, 

[00:02:55] Piotr Orlov: I come from a generation where Americanizing my name was a norm. [00:03:00] How old were you when you came here? I arrived here about A month and a half shy of my eighth birthday.

[00:03:07] Dori Fern: Oh, that's such a pivotal age. 

[00:03:09] Piotr Orlov: Yeah, yeah. 

[00:03:11] Dori Fern: And you came here from what was then Leningrad? Yeah, 

[00:03:14] Piotr Orlov: I was born in Leningrad, later St. Petersburg. When I ended up visiting it a couple of times later in my life, it was St. Petersburg. That's how I got my name. It's one half of how I got my name. The other half of my name comes from my paternal grandmother who was a classical musicologist.

[00:03:33] Piotr Orlov: She was a higher up at the Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky archive. She wrote a couple of books about him. And so the hometown, my grandmother's studies, Those combined into how I got my name. But the moment I got to the United States, I wanted to be American. From age 7 and 3 quarters to age 26, 27, [00:04:00] 28, I was Peter.

[00:04:02] Piotr Orlov: P E T E R. How I went back to using my Russian name involves me going back to St. Petersburg for the first time. After we were allowed to come back, Cause we were political refugees. What does that mean? That means you get your passport taken away. So like there's immigration of like, Oh, you want to go live legally somewhere else.

[00:04:22] Piotr Orlov: And then there's immigration where you're essentially either being kicked out or running away from a place. And that's what happened to us. My father always wanted to leave the Soviet Union. He was very anti communist. Um, it's complicated, but we left. Yeah. We had our passports taken away, and so we were essentially personas non gratas in the Soviet Union.

[00:04:48] Piotr Orlov: Then 1989, the wall falls, all the changes in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union goes back to being Russia. Americans [00:05:00] and, uh, political refugees start being able to go back to Russia. And so my sister who was born here had never been, I had an American girlfriend, my mother was like, everybody should go. And I had this experience that is, you know, We're on a podcast called Life Changing.

[00:05:19] Piotr Orlov: So this was a life changing experience. It just definitely changed the headspace that I was in. That it's the summer of 1997. It's June in St. Petersburg. It's five or six years after the Soviet Union falls. There's a lot more Western tourism. English is the lingua franca of the world. Tourism at that moment.

[00:05:39] Piotr Orlov: So myself and my sister who is very Americanized and my American girlfriend are walking down Nevsky Prospect, which is the Broadway of St. Petersburg, major thoroughfare through a very touristy part of town. And I made sure to wear clothes that did not [00:06:00] have Western symbolism. Usually when I go into areas where I feel like I'm a tourist, I want to blend in.

[00:06:08] Piotr Orlov: I don't want any of the clothes that I am wearing to give away who I am. And we get stopped by this touristy couple, definitely Northern European, he's blonde, big, so Scandinavian, German, something like that. And they start speaking English to me, asking me directions. And I answer them naturally in English.

[00:06:32] Piotr Orlov: And then we keep walking down Nevsky Prospekt. It's a beautiful sunny June day, it was overly warm. I have a very, very clear memory of this moment in time. And about two blocks later, There's an old Russian lady, the kind that you call a babushka, which actually means grandmother in Russian. And she turns to me and starts speaking Russian to me, which I had prided myself in New York City [00:07:00] as somebody who, even when I went to Brighton Beach, was not being recognized as Russian.

[00:07:07] Piotr Orlov: Maybe they could. You know, I have very Slavic features, but I pass for American pretty easily. Or I thought I did. And then this Russian grandmother without any hesitation started speaking Russian to me. So within two blocks I had Western Europeans recognize me as somebody who was essentially one of them.

[00:07:29] Piotr Orlov: And two blocks later, an old grandmother recognized me as essentially somebody who is kin to her. And. It blew my motherfucking mind. 

[00:07:42] Dori Fern: When you say it blew your fucking mind, Yeah. Like, what were you feeling at that moment? 

[00:07:47] Piotr Orlov: In that moment, I was feeling surprised at being seen in different ways. 

[00:07:56] Dori Fern: You 

[00:07:58] Piotr Orlov: know, I have a recognition [00:08:00] that we regard ourselves in a different way than people regard us from the outside.

[00:08:06] Piotr Orlov: It's natural. Hopefully everybody understands that, but I didn't realize how many different ways people can regard us. How do they make you 

[00:08:18] Dori Fern: feel? 

[00:08:20] Piotr Orlov: Well, in that moment, very surprised. And I had to have this conversation with my girlfriend, because, you know, she was in a completely foreign place. Here was a woman who was raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, who is in Russia with her Russian boyfriend, who she always regarded as an American.

[00:08:38] Piotr Orlov: And I'm like tour guide to a place on the other side of the world, because leaving at seven, I remembered the city really well. And she was like, What just happened? And I was like, I can't actually tell you, except that I'm home here. And so when I came back to New [00:09:00] York, I was like, I have to recognize this.

[00:09:04] Piotr Orlov: And the most natural way that I could was to readapt my Russian legal name. It was actually really funny. I was taking a break from writing for a few years right then too. So my very early bylines are P E T E R, Orlov. And then starting around 98, 99, when I started writing again and kind of restarted a career that has never stopped since, it's been P I O T R.

[00:09:34] Dori Fern: It brings to mind a question about seven and three quarter year old you. How did you feel about coming to the U. S.? 

[00:09:43] Piotr Orlov: Well, you know, um, this is where I'm going to interject with what you had asked me to think about. which was a quintessential New York memory, which it's hard for us, New Yorkers to have a New York memory because they're all New York memory.

[00:09:58] Piotr Orlov: So seven and three quarters [00:10:00] me, I wrote about this and I wrote a story in New York magazine vulture about the meaning of the world trade center, the meaning of America that the world trade center brought to me. So we landed in JFK airport on March 30th, 1977. It's like one of the big dates in my life.

[00:10:21] Piotr Orlov: And the way the immigration process works or worked for Eastern Europeans. We found a sponsor in Vienna. They said, okay, we're paying your way. Where are you going? My father always wanted to come to the States. My father was a sports writer specializing in basketball. We had pictures of like, Lou Alcindor before he was Kareem Abdul Jabbar on the walls of our apartment, Will Chamberlain.

[00:10:44] Dori Fern: He was a sports writer in Russia writing about American basketball? Not about 

[00:10:49] Piotr Orlov: American basketball. He was writing about Russian basketball, and he was a pretty prominent sports writer, but he idolized American basketball. And he and my [00:11:00] mother idolized, I heard Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald's voice when I was like three years old, you know, so classical musicologist grandmother.

[00:11:09] Piotr Orlov: So I'm getting dragged to the opera and the ballet and the symphony all the freaking time. But at home, I'm hearing Benny Goodman. Louie and Ella. Like, I'm hearing Western music, which obviously seeps so deeply into what I do now. And so, there was no question that if we were to leave the Soviet Union, where were we going?

[00:11:33] Piotr Orlov: We were always going to the U. S. And, in answer to your question, how did I feel about coming to the U. S., I was coming to the land of milk and honey. I was coming to the dream. I was coming to freedom. I was coming to the sound of scatting voices, to the place of big cars, to the place of cowboys, to the place of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, who I discovered in comic books [00:12:00] in Italy where we lived for three months while awaiting our visa.

[00:12:03] Piotr Orlov: I was coming to the place that was the good place and we left the bad place, right? And We get out of the Alitalia terminal at JFK, and I see a car the size of which I've never seen before in my life. And we get on a bus that is going to take us to a hotel where we're going to sleep in Manhattan. And in 1977, just as in 2024, the traffic from JFK to Manhattan.

[00:12:44] Piotr Orlov: Sucks . See, not everything changes. Exactly. It's a crawl. It's a crawl. And this is where the idea of how I first saw the Twin Towers is slightly different because I published this piece and I was [00:13:00] like, we went down the belt Parkway. And after you pass under the Verrazano bridge, 

[00:13:05] Dori Fern: I'm trying to understand how, if you were coming from JFK, were you under the Verrazano bridge or is this 

[00:13:10] Piotr Orlov: a different, here's the thing.

[00:13:11] Piotr Orlov: No, no, it's the same story. Okay. I remembered it as we got on the belt parkway and went underneath the Verrazano bridge. 

[00:13:20] Dori Fern: So, so might've been on the belt parkway, but 

[00:13:23] Piotr Orlov: yeah, exactly. Right. from JFK. I've taken that route to JFK many times since then. 

[00:13:29] Dori Fern: I probably am going to have to leave this part in just because we're arguing about directions.

[00:13:34] Dori Fern: Exactly. And by the way, I have the worst sense of direction. 

[00:13:36] Piotr Orlov: Go ahead. All right. So when you're going from Queens into Brooklyn on the Bell Parkway, you make this turn down at Bay Ridge past the Verrazano and all of a sudden Downtown Manhattan comes into view and when the Twin Towers were there and this was at night, you see these enormous buildings front and center in downtown Manhattan [00:14:00] and you're like, whoa.

[00:14:02] Piotr Orlov: So that's the way I remembered it and that's the way I wrote it in the piece in New York Magazine Vulture. My mother reads this piece and my mother goes, You're wrong. And I'm like, how am I wrong? She's like, we didn't take the Bell Park. We took the, what I now understand to be the Van Wick to the LIE.

[00:14:26] Piotr Orlov: Right. Okay. And the vision is different. It's just a different view because you get over that hill coming off the LIE right before you get into the Midtown Tunnel. And all of a sudden, the panorama of Manhattan. unfolds. My New York memory is my first memory of the city unfolding. And I got to tell you, I didn't know anything about the Wizard of Oz, but two years later, the Wiz comes out and this idea of New York [00:15:00] unfolds in front of me as a panorama.

[00:15:03] Piotr Orlov: It's Oz. Oz. Yeah. It's Oz. It's Oz. It's the place of dreams, right? The Wizard ain't quite who he says he is. A lot of the work that I do. In a particular kind of symbolic way is I try to tell people that New York is Oz, but there ain't no wizard. You're the wizard. 

[00:15:24] Dori Fern: You're the wizard. It's 

[00:15:27] Piotr Orlov: this, this idea that we all make the magic in the city.

[00:15:31] Dori Fern: Right. We all have the power to do that. 

[00:15:33] Piotr Orlov: Yeah. And some of us make it by creating something and some of us make it by Because we're there to experience the creation. You are the person who hears the music happen and goes, yo, that shit is good. And you know what? The creators need to hear stuff like that because that's them and their creativity being acknowledged.

[00:15:57] Dori Fern: As I told you when I asked you to be on the episode, I [00:16:00] said there were two things that I wanted to talk to you about. One is the fact that we are both New Yorkers in our friend group because the only people that get to call themselves native to this city other than people who were born here are immigrants who come as children.

[00:16:16] Dori Fern: That is my view. And, uh, and also there's just this unspoken language that we have about the city and our experience in it that other people don't share. And so even though there are details about you and your life that I did not know until this moment, and I'm sure there are things about me you don't know, but there's that.

[00:16:37] Dori Fern: But then I was thinking about, I went on a first date. a few days ago. No, we're going to get back to the story. And how'd it go? Well, it was good, but at the end of it, the guy asks me if I want to see him again, adding immediately after, you're a hard read. And when he [00:17:00] said that, for one, I felt like this incredibly touched feeling of like, oh, I, I don't know, like it may seem odd to feel touched by somebody saying you're not really being open with me in a sense, but then I was thinking about it in the context of being a New Yorker.

[00:17:18] Dori Fern: And one thing that I was realizing is that You know, we're very unfiltered as New Yorkers. That's our reputation. We're very unfiltered, that very cliched authenticity that people associate with us. But then on the other hand, we do adopt this self protectiveness, I think. I think it's very common, you know, that not to give Too much.

[00:17:45] Piotr Orlov: I don't have that 

[00:17:46] Dori Fern: You don't have that. You, you really don't have that, do you? Yeah. 

[00:17:49] Piotr Orlov: No. I'm, I'm, but this is where before I'm a New Yorker. I'm an immigrant. 

[00:17:53] Dori Fern: Yeah. 

[00:17:54] Piotr Orlov: And the immigrant in me wants to be accepted. 

[00:17:58] Dori Fern: Okay. 

[00:17:59] Piotr Orlov: And [00:18:00] so I am unfiltered. Sometimes that, that opens me quicker to experience, I used to say that, like, what I like about how I approach criticism of music, which is what I did for a very long time, and to some degree what I still do, is that if I don't understand it, I say yes before I say no, because I go, wait, what is that?

[00:18:21] Piotr Orlov: I need to understand more rather than, wait, what is that? I don't get it. 

[00:18:27] Dori Fern: which goes to that second reason I brought you on here, which is something that I am exploring in this podcast in my own kind of way is community. And obviously community it's on your about page of your data strain newsletter. It is on the merch I wear and it is, wait, hold on.

[00:18:48] Dori Fern: I'm, it is, Rhythm, 

[00:18:51] Piotr Orlov: Improvisation, Improvisation 

[00:18:52] Dori Fern: and Community. 

[00:18:54] Piotr Orlov: When I started thinking about Dada Strain and Rhythm Improvisation and Community, there [00:19:00] was any number of things in both my life and in my work that led me to this thing. And Musicking by Christopher Small was a very, very major one. Where, when people are like, what do you do?

[00:19:11] Piotr Orlov: Now I say I'm a musiker. I'm a writer, I'm an editor. I produce shows. Increasingly, I'm an educator because I teach writing, but I would say that all of those things are encompassed in the notion of being a muer. 

[00:19:25] Dori Fern: Can you define music muer for people listening? Yeah, so 

[00:19:28] Piotr Orlov: Musicing is a book by the late theorist and philosophy Professor Australian named Christopher Small, and it's a pretty simple idea.

[00:19:39] Piotr Orlov: He said that for music to. You need more than just musicians. You need listeners. Because if musicians play and nobody's listening, then the experience of music does not happen. When you transpose that to the idea of a [00:20:00] community event, That means musikers are also people who invite you to the experience of music.

[00:20:07] Piotr Orlov: People who produce the experience of music, whether that means their ushers who usher you to your seats, or the people who do the sound at a show, or the people who hand out the flyers to the concert. People who are talking about the show, writing about the show, so people who are in the critical realm.

[00:20:30] Piotr Orlov: It, to me, sounded like community. Like, that's how it all comes together. Everyone plays a part. Everyone plays a part, exactly.

[00:20:44] Dori Fern: After the 1987 stock market crash, there were massive corporate layoffs. My father, a long time middle manager at Colgate Pomalev, was one of the casualties of this downsizing. He was in his early 50s at the time. [00:21:00] Back in the 70s, my dad had gotten his master's in computer science, but after a brief stint working in the field, he decided he didn't want to do it.

[00:21:09] Dori Fern: He would rather, he said, be home with his family by dinner time. Though I suspect that the real reason my dad did not want to work in tech at that time was A fear of failure. I tried to convince him to brush up on his computer skills. The new school had a program, but he didn't want to be the old guy in class.

[00:21:33] Dori Fern: Instead, he traveled around the country looking for work for years. He went to L. A., Florida, back to New York, but aside from five years at a small company in L. A., he never really worked much after that. He blamed Colgate, he blamed companies that didn't want to hire him at a much lower salary, or offer him junior roles he said he didn't mind taking.

[00:21:56] Dori Fern: What he never did was see any path for his [00:22:00] own agency to change. Here we are again, in 2024, navigating another huge shift in the way we work. It was clear before the election that the era of mainstream corporate media we've known is over. Trump's election was a huge nail in their coffin of irrelevancy.

[00:22:22] Dori Fern: People like Peter and me are trying to make our place in this new creator economy. It ain't easy. My son, Lev Rosenbusch, he's 24, he's a ceramic designer living in London making artful home goods mostly in collaboration with soccer clubs. He's created this niche basically from nothing. It's remarkable to me.

[00:22:50] Dori Fern: Sure, he's learned a lot from other people along the way, his parents, mentors, his creative entrepreneurial peers, but he's also blessed [00:23:00] with the ignorance of not yet knowing any other way to do things, free to make mistakes he can't yet anticipate, to shift and grow accordingly. It's harder for people to make changes to the way they operate and what they know later in life.

[00:23:18] Dori Fern: There is science behind that. But we do it and often our contributions are all the more extraordinary for what we're able to bring to the table and how we got there. It's too bad that leaders of industry can be so short sighted in seeing the value, our value, speaking of which, We're usually the consumers with more money besides.

[00:23:44] Dori Fern: Makes no good sense. But we're here to change minds and make a difference. Keep all this in mind when someone over 50 you know builds something new and different from whatever they've been doing and the way they've been doing it. [00:24:00] What do you want to change in your life? 

[00:24:03] Piotr Orlov: I mean, the practical answer is my self sustainability.

[00:24:10] Piotr Orlov: I have been commercially successful at other parts of my life, so it's not like, oh, I'm a starving writer, starving thinker. What I want to figure out is a balance that I have not been able to find in about a decade. 

[00:24:29] Dori Fern: That world of media that you came up in doesn't really exist in the same way. And so there is a community that has, it's not gone away, but it has definitely changed from what it was.

[00:24:40] Piotr Orlov: There was a moment in time where I was working in a place where I was trying to marry commercial content with some of these ideas that I practice, and I actually had some success with it. Finding brands to pay for [00:25:00] meaningful community building stuff that is still being used. And so when I talk about finding this balance now, finding a community around data strain, I am thinking about people whose work isn't quite for the stage, isn't quite for the sound system, isn't quite for the gallery.

[00:25:18] Dori Fern: And there used to be institutions that would pay you to do that in a self sustaining way, and there are fewer opportunities to do that. Now, 

[00:25:31] Piotr Orlov: this is what I'm talking about building. So in 

[00:25:33] Dori Fern: other words, you want to keep doing what you have kind of always done for your career with the very understandable, uh, institutional 

[00:25:42] Piotr Orlov: backing, 

[00:25:43] Dori Fern: backing to be able to do it and, you know, feed your family and, but it 

[00:25:48] Piotr Orlov: has become increasingly clear, and this is why I'm talking about new institutions, that we need a renewal of institutions because institutions [00:26:00] inherently begin to At some point, emphasize the survival of the institution rather than the mission of the institution was initially on.

[00:26:11] Piotr Orlov: I am trying to build an institution, not because I believe in institutions, but we need, we need new mouthpieces and I want the institution that I'm building to reflect the values that I am trying to put forward and I hope that the values that I try to put forward are community building values, not.

[00:26:32] Piotr Orlov: United around profit or, you know, something nefarious, but around things that they're trying to build an institution around living in the moment, you know, I mean, how much more hippie dippy can I get, but I also believe in this stuff and the funny thing about this is pure ego talking when I've really believed in stuff.

[00:26:55] Piotr Orlov: it has tended to be right far more often than not. 

[00:26:59] Dori Fern: That's [00:27:00] intuition. That's gut. 

[00:27:01] Piotr Orlov: Yeah. That 

[00:27:01] Dori Fern: ego is in the head. And as your friend, and this is where you were talking about my podcast voice, this is my coach voice here. That you have a good gut. You know, your intuition is strong because of all of the experiences you have because of who you are.

[00:27:21] Dori Fern: It is not egotistical. that your gut is worth trusting and correct for you. 

[00:27:30] Piotr Orlov: No, you're, you're, you're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. You know, my gut, my gut tells me, and the fact that like, you know, data stream keeps growing little by little, sometimes by a lot. People are interested. in this, they're interested about like discovering what the local is in New York City that I talk about, but I think that they're also interested in a different way of [00:28:00] looking.

[00:28:00] Piotr Orlov: This is like, again, options, options, that the options that they have are not enough. And I'm hoping that the options that I provide are more than just, you know, what to do on a Friday night, but to think about the world a little bit differently. 

[00:28:19] Dori Fern: And I do think about the world differently with you in it.

[00:28:22] Dori Fern: So thank you, Peter. Oh, Peter. My one last question is this idea that when we're gone, the only thing that's left of us is our stories and the stories people tell about us. What do you want your stories to be? What do you want people to say about you?

[00:28:47] Piotr Orlov: That I was honest, that I cared, that I was a good dancer.

[00:28:55] Piotr Orlov: I truly said, like, what stories do you want to be remembered by? Um, [00:29:00] I think that I have had an incredibly, incredibly successful life at the thing that I find really dearest, which is that I've elevated and helped broadcast people's great stories. 

[00:29:17] Dori Fern: Thank you so much for your time. 

[00:29:19] Piotr Orlov: Thank you for the conversation.

[00:29:20] Piotr Orlov: Thank you for letting me spew.

[00:29:27] Piotr Orlov: Thank you, Dori. 

[00:29:29] Dori Fern: Life Changing with Dori Fern is produced and edited by Ann Pope. Music is cool jazzy bass and vibraphone and orange blues by M33 Project. Thank you for listening. I'll be back in a couple of weeks with another life changing conversation.