The Geranium is essentially the latest Vezhlivy Otkaz release published by the time the project closing was announced in Dec 2002. It became the apex of the almost ten-year-long chapter in the band’s story and a sort of a bridge from the “classical” quartet of the early nineties to the sextet of the Geese and Swans years.

Geranium creation correlates with three marker events in the band’s history. First, Pavel Karmanov, a composer himself and the pianist with a broad range of musical interests—from Steve Reich and Valentyn Sylvestrov to Gavin Bryars and AC/DC,—joined the band on their tour to US and made a very organic addition to Geranium’s studio sessions. Second, the late poet and philologist Grigory Dashevsky joined the poetry section of VO and created most of the lyrics that are hallmark to this album. Dashevsky’s dashed writing and an occasional pseudo-parody of a pop song proved more than appropriate to both the sound and the spirit of the Otkaz of the period.

The third notable event associated with Geranium concerns the transition into acoustics for the first time mentioned in the ancient interview of 1991 that Dmitry Shumilov gave to the Smolensk newspaper Tuesok. It’s not only that Roman Suslov had swapped his faithful electric Gibson for a new acoustic Guild. The sound, too, got some nearly indoor quality to it—in the face of all the rage of Andrey Solovyov’s trumpet and Pavel Tonkovid’s sax—trustingly homey and naturally free. The listener firsthand hears the storyline songs about a flower boy in the subway, the soldier and the dzhigit who dropped their cigarettes, Leo Tolstoy and the supposed King Herod. The only exception is “Civil War–Offensive,” which unexpectedly acquired a resounding stadium-like echo as it was being mixed.

The point about freedom here is not about an improvisatory or a convention-free music-making freedom but the jazzy lightness that is close, surprising as it is, to hard bop. At least it is this natural lightness that can be heard in each of “Pizza,” “Closet,” “On the Move!” and in the jocularly ironic sketch “Marina and A Bear”.

Geranium is undoubtedly a complex cycle that has absorbed both the core “storyline” material and “lyrical digressions” that are “Lullaby,” “To Writer,” “Flight into Egypt,” and “God Byka.” The storyline of this work are the unquestionably outstanding and some of the best compositions ever composed by Roman Suslov: “Pizza,” “Closet,” “Marina and A Bear,” and the sister pieces of “Civil War” (“Offensive” and “Retreat,” which are essentially the same musical score, written “forward” in the first instance and “backward” in the second—or the other way around).