Celluloid: the Tequilajazzz album the band played in full 23 years on

Tequilajazzz counts its history from 4 September 1993, the night the band made its debut at the TaMtAm club in St Petersburg. The musicians came from two Leningrad groups, Object of Ridicule and Nol. Evgeny Fedorov, who sings and plays bass, joined Object of Ridicule in 1986, and until it split in 1991 that band toured across the Soviet Union. Tequilajazzz built its first records on hardcore and funk, and its debut album carries the title Strelyali?

By the middle of the decade Fedorov wanted a different sound. He told Afisha that the 1995 song Solntse was his first attempt to leave hardcore-funk for a thicker, bluesier groove. He was listening to PJ Harvey at the time. In 1996 the band recorded a cover of Vysotsky's Bolshoy Karetny for a compilation put together by Shevchuk, and Fedorov recalled that he only knew the chorus back then. Virus and Celluloid followed.

Celluloid came out in 1998. Its song Zimnee solntse (Winter Sun) made the band known well beyond the club circuit. The record also contains Krome zvyozd, Tema proshlogo leta and Aviatsiya i artilleriya. Later the musicians grouped Celluloid with 150 Billion Steps, Vyshe oseni and Zhurnal zhivogo as a four-part cycle and called it their violet period. They used that phrase in 2009, when the last part appeared. A reviewer for Lenta.ru noticed the link in the band's self-quotations, with some songs echoing tracks from earlier albums.

The cycle held its place in the early 2000s. In 2003 the St Petersburg magazine Fus named Vyshe oseni album of the year, the band's third award from the magazine after one for a video and one for a song. Fedorov told Radio Liberty that prizes reach a musician late, and added that his mother enjoyed the statuettes more than he did.

For the band's twentieth anniversary Celluloid came up again. In November 2013 drummer Alexander Voronov told Afisha that the plan to re-record the album had existed for about a year, but nobody had time for the studio. He did not promise regular shows after the jubilee. The one concert took place on 1 December at Glavclub in Moscow, and Fedorov said beforehand that it would include many songs from the first album.

In April 2021 Tequilajazzz played Celluloid in full on a Moscow stage. The hall filled almost to capacity even though pandemic rules limited ticket sales. A reviewer for Moskovsky Komsomolets listed every song from the album, noted the extra numbers from other records (Zveri, Pedro and Ukrashaya zmey), and singled out the drummer: the complex metres, he wrote, sounded like a living organism. Five months later the band released a new album, Kamni.