In summer 1982, in issue 1 of upstart music mag The Wire, Andrew Turner interviewed Russian émigré Leo Feigin about his label, Leo Records. “I am trying to penetrate an ‘Iron Curtain’ of ignorance,” says Feigin. “Two years ago no one wanted to know about Soviet jazz. Now I feel that people are beginning to sit up and take notice.” Turner asks how come The Ganelin Trio is allowed to leave Russia and perform in the West so frequently, and Leo produces what must be the best gag in the whole magazine: “I am convinced that the trio gets the chance because the Soviet leaders are great fans of improvised music. For them The Ganelin Trio is a commodity they can say, ‘Look we also have improvised music in Russia.’”

40 years later, it’s July 2022, and I'm visiting Feigin at his modest house in Kingskerswell, Devon. He is handily placed for access to Totnes and the Dart Valley (scenic), or Newton Abbot (not so much). “You see, it’s a hole,” he says as he collects me from the brutalist concrete of the town’s bus station. He moved here because his wife favoured the Rudolf Steiner school for their son. “My wife – hang on to your hat – is from Kazakhstan!”

Leo Records is famous for pioneering Soviet free jazz in the West, but today their 1000-album catalogue stretches from Sun Ra and Marilyn Crispell, via Evan Parker, to Eugene Chadbourne and Cecil Taylor. They celebrated their 40th anniversary in 2019 with a Russian tour featuring British pianist Carolyn Hume and drummer Paul May, with interviews, workshops and concerts where the Brits engaged with Russian musicians like the prolific saxophonist Alexey Kruglov. This September Hume has organised a Leo Records weekender at Ashburton Arts Centre in Devon – Trevor Watts and Veryan Weston will play, and Hume originally hoped to invite musicians from Russia. But in 2022, as in 1982, cultural relations with Russia are fraught.

In 1978 a tape of The Ganelin Trio was smuggled out of the USSR and sent to Leo, with a note saying, “Phenomenal”. “I put the tape on the machine,” he recalls. “I couldn't believe my ears. At the same time you hear three saxophones, you hear a dulcimer, you hear the electric cello or something. You had this incredible amount of sound that all made sense.” He took the tape to the Moers Jazz Festival, where he played it to writer Steve Lake, and Hans Wendl from the ECM label. “We were in a big Volvo, listening to the tape, and they froze. When it stopped they both said it's impossible: it’s not a trio and it's not Russian. Later Steve Lake wrote, ‘I was at Moers and the only thing I remember is sitting in a car listening to a tape of The Ganelin Trio’.”

However, every label turned him down. “Nobody believed,” he goes on, “so eventually it dawned on me that I have to start a label, I have to do it myself.” It seems strange, I remark, that no one jumped at the chance. “Well, first of all Soviet Russia was a taboo name.” Like now, I say. “Yes, exactly. It’s very much like now. At that time there was the Iron Curtain. Now it's a little bit freer but more dangerous.”

In 1973 Feigin left Russia for Israel, “with the help of the KGB”, as he puts it. “It was probably the most important thing in my life. For the KGB I was considered to be a dissident – I had a minder in Leningrad. At the last meeting he said, ‘Listen, if you want to leave Russia there will be no obstacles. But if you prefer to stay, our meeting will be very different. You will have to go in the opposite direction: to Siberia.’ He was very polite. Putin’s type, they are all fairly polite.”

Arriving in Israel with his wife and daughter, he was swept up by Russian friends, who drove them through deserted streets (it was a Saturday) to a boozy party. “A friend of mine, he gave me a page from an Israeli newspaper and there was a small advertisement there: the Russian Service of the BBC needs employees. So while everybody was completely pissed and under the table I sat down and wrote a short letter saying that I’m a listener, and ‘It would be a great pleasure to work with so and so’ so they knew I knew what I was talking about. So they invited me for a test. Mind you,” he grins, “I had a full set of teeth then, not like now.

“For three months there was nothing,” he continues. “Then a letter from the British embassy: please come over for an interview. They offered me a job as presenter and translator. I knew nothing about England. I was completely America-oriented – American books, American jazz, blah blah. So it was a very nice surprise. I started working for the Russian Service and those were very good years. Fantastic years, because first of all I was drunk with freedom and I didn’t care about anything.”

So began his 30 odd years at the BBC Russian Service, headed by Mary Seton-Watson. Feigin can be seen in a clip from a 2007 documentary about the BBC World Service. “I had my own programme,” he explains. “But I was part of another radio show in Russian which was incredibly popular in Russia. From the end of the 1970s, all through the 90s.” This was Seva Novgorodsev’s rigorously honest chat show Sevaoborot – the name a pun on the Russian for crop rotation – with an estimated audience during the 1980s of over 20 million within Russia. Mixing chat and humour with Stevie Wonder and David Bowie, Novgorodsev was later profiled by a BBC in-house mag under the teasing headline, “The DJ who ‘brought down the USSR’”.

“I was part of it,” Feigin chuckles. “Though I was there mainly as part of the furniture. The show was on Saturday at 7pm, and it was totally revolutionary because it was completely live! A round table, six people – four permanent and two guests – it was totally spontaneous. Two bottles of wine is a must and the BBC was buying. At the end of the show of course we would go out, Saturday, I remember, especially in summer, we would go to a restaurant in the centre of London. Wonderful!

“So one day this Mary Seton-Watson – she was very good but totally disorganised," he continues, “every day was creative chaos. By 10pm there are six to eight people there and you have to cover the network, who does this, who does the press review, this interview. So almost every day there were gaps, that someone should fill in. One day I went to a concert – it was Weather Report – and I bought an LP. The next day I went to the BBC with the LP, to listen to it on good equipment. During the programme there was a gap of 18 minutes, and Mary Seton-Watson was looking at us, expecting someone to do something! I said, maybe I shall try, yesterday I bought an LP. So I ran down to the studio and two minutes later I was on the air. Mary Seton-Watson said, ‘Leonid, thank you very much!’ So this was the beginning of Jazz Programme which ran for 26 years.”

And could you play Russian jazz, I ask. “I could. But I never did. Because in Russia no one would be interested in that. I tried to get them interested in people like Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor. And very soon the letters started. At that time from Russia you couldn’t write a letter abroad, because you would immediately be in trouble. To write a letter to the BBC you had to give it to a foreigner, who would take it out of Russia and post it abroad. Letters started arriving from Japan, etc – they were Russian guys who found a tourist, who would not be afraid to take a letter abroad and post it. And later on we were doing the same with tapes.”

So Feigin added DJ to his roles. He continued this BBC programme until 1999, when he relocated to Devon. “Jazz and talking,” he recalls, “somewhere on the border between jazz and avant garde, and it was very successful. The programme was on air for 26 years, and nobody in the BBC told me what to play and what not to play. One moment I remember clearly – I played a piece by [Alexander von Schlippenbach’s] Globe Unity Orchestra, and the next morning I entered the building and there is Mary Seton-Watson. She runs to me, her eyes popping out, and she shouts, ‘Destroy this tape!’ But fair enough, she didn't sack me. To some people it was a loud cacophony.”

For years rumours flew around that Feigin might be on the KGB's payroll, churning out Soviet propaganda in the somewhat offbeat form of avant garde jazz. Or what about MI6, there might be an angle? With his cultural connections, his gentlemanly demeanour and all-round sociability, surely Leo Feigin would make a fine character in a John Le Carré novel. “The mind boggles,” agrees Leo. “How does he do it? The answer was very simple: I did it and I didn’t ask anybody for anything. Money? My BBC salary, and a lot of moonlighting. Because at that time there were only 40 Russian people in London and people needed a lot of translation.”

One odd job was for the British computer company ICL, who were shooting a promotional film with the aim of selling computers to Russia. Feigin popped in, made some suggestions and spoke the film's narration. A few months later he was summoned to ICL’s vast HQ in Putney, where the champagne was flowing and a top exec was giving a speech. He warms to his theme: “The guy said, ’Listen, there was one person who helped us tremendously.’ When they were showing the film in Russia, the Russian boss asked, ‘Where did you make this film? In Moscow or in Leningrad?’ Because it was so authentic. After this huge party the English boss gave me a brown package. I take it home, I wonder what's inside? It was full of cash, something like three thousand pounds. That was the beginning of the label.”

So far I've been happily drinking Leo's coffee, but now, to accompany a light lunch, he produces a fearsome bottle labelled Rachmaninoff. Inside a large dill plant swims in vodka, propped up by eight or nine garlic cloves. If the smell is overwhelming, the taste is unforgettable. One sip reminds me that alcohol-wise, I’m a wuss. Carolyn Hume on the other hand is an old pal and drinking buddy of Feigin, who accompanied her and Paul May on their 2019 trip to Moscow. ”In that environment he gets a lot of attention,” she told me over Zoom. ”He's still seen as someone who fought the regime, championed the underground movement in adversity, and speaks for freedom. Everyone’s well aware who he is and there’s a real admiration. I remember being in places chatting with Leo, and people would come up and give him CDs. They're hoping he can open something up for them.” At the September weekend festival Hume will screen a new film about Leo Records by documentary maker Ioana Grigore.

Meanwhile the label is still uncovering gems by younger musicians; Leo has continued to be prolific in the 2020s even if some of its discs meet with little or indeed no acclaim. Tales is a German trio led by Fabian Neubauer – piano, bass and drums but augmented by electronics and a Wurlitzer. They’ve been compared to Bill Evans’s trio with Scott LaFaro. I’m also somewhat seduced by Pago Libre & Sooon’s FriendShip (2021): an outgoing song project convened by Swiss/Irish pianist John Wolf Brennan, they arrange material by Yes, Pink Floyd and Paul McCartney, garnished with yodelling. Then there's my favourite, Unrecorded Beam by Billy Bottle & The Multiple (2014), setting texts by Henry David Thoreau. This is a Matching Mole-type update on the Canterbury scene. Billy and his wife Martine perform with the jazz orchestra of Mike Westbrook (another of Feigin’s neighbours), but also made time to belt out "The Power" (by Snap!) on TV’s The Voice.

Our conversation today has been spirited and shot through with laughter, but on a couple of points it’s hard to be upbeat. Brexit and its VAT mayhem are killing the label. He carries in a dismal boxful of packages returned from Europe. “I got back 150 of them – Belgium, Spain – and you can’t run a label without promotion. If I had money I would take the government to court, and now I would win. Because they started this Brexit affair, and of course I voted to leave because the promise was that everything will be simpler and faster, no bureaucracy. So it’s no fun any more.” This time the laughter is bitter.

And then there's the state of Russia. “There's a lot of great music even now in Russia,” he muses. “Because the harder the circumstances, the greater the music. This is a law, unfortunately. There are, I don’t know, maybe 15, 20 people playing this new music. In the West half of the musicians are self-taught, but for Russians to be self-taught is not to be a musician, you have to graduate from a serious establishment. This is what was so amazing about The Ganelin Trio, people couldn’t fathom it, highly trained people playing in this way. But in the last two years about ten million young people have left Russia, they are running away from Russia to anywhere. So it's a very sad picture now.”

The Leo Records 42nd birthday celebration takes place this September at Ashburton Arts Centre. Read Andrew Turner’s feature on Leo Records from issue 1 via exact editions