In 1991, amid the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a small delegation of Vermont musicians traveled to Yaroslavl, Russia. The city, located at the confluence of the Volga and Kotorosl rivers, was staging its annual Jazz Over the Volga festival and had invited artists from its sister city, Burlington, Vt.
The Green Mountain jazz scene sent some of its finest: “Big Joe” Burrell & the Unknown Blues Band. But the seasoned pros, who had toured around the U.S. and the globe, were shocked by what they found in Yaroslavl at the end of the Cold War.
“That old Soviet power grid and the World War II-era infrastructure in the cities almost undid us,” Unknown Blues Band guitarist Paul Asbell recalled. The tour was to take them from Yaroslavl to Moscow and St. Petersburg. But without help navigating Russia’s ancient electrical systems and sound equipment, Asbell said, “I honestly don’t think we could have plugged in half of our gear, much less performed.”
Fortunately, some local musicians took the Americans under their wing, led by a stoic young Russian with long hair named Sergei Ushakov (August 16, 1959-January 8, 2025 ).
“Sergei saved our bacon, man,” Asbell said.
Sergei, a drummer for the Russian rock band Telephone, was working as a sound technician for the jazz festival. He helped the band get sorted with power and gear. But it was the sense of camaraderie and musical fraternity with the Russian that stayed with Asbell decades after the trip. When he and his bandmates wanted to visit the nearby region of Rostov Oblast but were hesitant to leave their gear in a strange city, Asbell said, Sergei and his friends gathered the Americans together and offered them vodka.
“We all took some shots, and Sergei said to us, ‘You’re our guests, and we’ll take care of you while you’re in our country,'” Asbell recalled. He added that the moment felt “like an ancient ritual of protection.”
“That was the culture Sergei was from,” Asbell continued. “If you’re friends, you’re friends for life.”
Asbell said that day comes to mind whenever he thinks about Sergei, who died suddenly from undisclosed causes on January 8 at his home in Burlington, where he’d lived and worked as a sound engineer since emigrating from Russia in 1993. He was 65.
Though he toured the U.S. with bands such the Samples and Pork Tornado in the 1990s, Sergei was a fixture behind the soundboard at the downtown Burlington nightclub Nectar’s. There he built a reputation as one the area’s finest — and perhaps most terrifying — sound engineers.
On Saturday, February 15, Nectar’s hosts Celebrating Sergei: An Analog Outpouring to commemorate the late sound engineer’s life. The community will have a chance to swap “Sergei stories,” many of which will likely include his exasperated exhortations to timid vocalists to “Swallow the mic!” or his typical curt response if some unsuspecting drummer asked for more guitar in the monitor — in a word, “No.”
DJs will spin selections from Sergei’s legendarily epic vinyl collection. That will be followed by exactly what Sergei would have wanted: a night of loud music with his friends, including the Grippo Funk Band, Jazz Mandolin Project, Blues for Breakfast, Al’s Pals and Pork Tornado.
“My father made thousands of musicians sound incredible from that stage,” Sergei’s son, Steven Ushakov, said. He recalled running around the darkened club before it opened with his sister, Kristina, when they were kids, the floors still sticky from the night before. “It was part of our lives growing up, and it was another home to him,” Steven said. “It’s where he did what he loved.”
The no-nonsense Russian projected surliness, especially at first — also, directives to turn down an amp just sound harsher delivered in a Russian accent. But he’d soften as you got to know him and earned his respect, especially if you mentioned how great the Grand Funk Railroad track he was playing over the PA sounded. The truth was that Sergei approached music and sound with seriousness and attention to detail, and he had no patience for anyone who didn’t.
Al’s Pals bassist Alex Budney worked with Sergei at Nectar’s for many years. He said the soundman made a lasting impact on him. “Anything can remind me of him these days, from seeing his colored gaffer tape on my XLR cables,” he said, “to being at a show and realizing how annoyed he would be about the sound.”
Music was Sergei’s obsession. And it’s what eventually led him to leave Russia for Vermont.
Well, in true rock-and-roll fashion, it was music and a woman.
Sergei met Marina Collins in 1992, when he and some other Russian musicians returned the Unknown Blues Band’s favor and visited Vermont to play the Burlington Discover Jazz Festival. But it wasn’t until the following year, when Collins traveled to Yaroslavl with her band Science Fixion, that she and Sergei really hit it off.
“We ended up hanging out every day and night while I was there,” Marina said. “I got my visa extended because we were having this great love affair.”
They relied on a pocket Oxford Russian Dictionary to communicate in the early days, though Sergei’s English improved quickly after some classes. When Marina returned home, she wrote him letters, though getting mail to and from Russia was no easy prospect. She soon convinced Sergei to come to Vermont. When his own visa ran out, the two married.
Marina showed her new husband around the local nightclubs and introduced him to musicians. Sergei joined a hair metal outfit called Tantrum on drums, as well as a New Hampshire band called the Regular Einsteins. He also began to get more gigs as a sound engineer and quickly established himself as one of the best — if not the best — in the area. His meticulousness and compulsive need to get the sound just right soon became the stuff of local legend.
When they met, Sergei cautioned Marina that his first marriage had ended when his passion for music become a problem. Young and in love, she brushed off the concern. But 13 years and two kids later, the warning would prove prophetic.
“Yeah, it became a problem for us as well,” she admitted. “His first love was always music. It was all-consuming, and he had no room for other obsessions.”
As a child of the Cold War in Russia, music was Sergei’s escape. Suspicion and paranoia were rampant in Yaroslavl, a city with a history of resisting the Soviet government, including mounting an armed rebellion.
“When he was young, his neighbors would rat you out to the KGB for anything,” Marina explained. Sergei and his friends wore long hair and bought rock records on the black market. But they had to be careful. Friends of his were arrested for possessing the illegal contraband. But that didn’t stop him from secretly hoarding albums by the likes of Grand Funk Railroad and Deep Purple.
“Listening to rock and roll, that was his way of being bold and breaking the rules,” Steven said. “It was also a connection to his inner child, a place to be creative and play. That gruff exterior always masked what a big kid he was inside.”
Evidence of that youthful passion can be found in the veritable mountain of music gear left in his apartment after he died. While neither of his kids knows exactly why he hoarded it, Kristina has an idea.
“I think he had this sort of dream that one day he could bring all this gear back to Russia to share with his friends,” she said. She added that while he stayed in Vermont for family, “Burlington was also the place where he found his people and felt so seen for his extreme nerdiness.”
Though Sergei’s children and friends witnessed his tender, playful side, he was hardly an open book. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, the Russian was a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside a black T-shirt.
Here are some things about him that might surprise even longtime friends: He once worked in a traveling circus in Russia, cleaning animal stalls and refereeing bouts of clown wrestling. He played trumpet in the Soviet Army band while stationed in Armenia and, later, with Yaroslavl Philharmonic. And he was mostly self-taught as a sound engineer — a gifted student in school, he learned to tinker with electronics while in the army, building microcircuits in an aerospace factory.
“It took forever for Sergei to tell me anything about himself,” said Ryan Clausen, a drummer with Pulse Prophets and the Grift. He’s also a longtime Nectar’s employee who worked with Sergei for almost a decade. “Once you spent some time with him and earned his respect, he’d open up a little and tell you about how he built his first [sound]board with his own hands or show you a dumb video on his phone and giggle.”
Sergei kept his emotions close to his vest, according to his daughter, Kristina. “He could be very Eastern European in that sense,” she said. “Dad was never someone who would look at you and say he was proud of you or that you did a good job — it just wasn’t how he was raised. He would tell everyone else how much he loved you, and you would eventually hear it from them.”
True to form, it came as a surprise to his family last year when he turned 65 and informed them that he’d been thinking of his own mortality. He hoped to move back to Yaroslavl for his final years and eventually be laid to rest in the cemetery alongside his late parents and brother.
It was the first time he’d revealed that desire, but Kristina understood it immediately. Her father cherished his Russian roots, whether talking about his mother’s cooking and making blini — Russian pancakes — or streaming Russian state media on his laptop at 3 a.m. after a long night running sound at the club.
His announcement spurred Kristina, who had recently turned 29, into action.
“I wrote him a letter that said how I felt like I was really just starting to get to know him,” she said. Though she and her father had never been estranged, he had been remote at times, with a stoic demeanor that could be mistaken for detachment. “I told him that I know how proud of us he was, and I told him how proud of him we are.”
She slipped the letter under her father’s door on Christmas. He died two weeks later.
As soon as she got the keys to his condo after his death, Kristina went inside to see if her father had read the letter. “My grieving process and sense of closure would be very, very different if he hadn’t read it,” she said.
There, among the piles of gear, gadgetry and a lifetime’s worth of electronic tinkering, she found the letter. It had been opened.
Celebrating Sergei: An Analog Outpouring, Saturday, February 15, 5 p.m., at Nectar’s in Burlington. Free; donations accepted. liveatnectars.com
“Life Stories” is a series profiling Vermonters who have recently died. Know of someone we should write about? Email us at lifestories@sevendaysvt.com.
The original print version of this article was headlined “‘My Father Made Thousands of Musicians
Sound Incredible’ | Sergei Ushakov, August 16, 1959-January 8, 2025″
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Obituary: Sergei Ushakov, 1959-2025
This article appears in Love & Marriage Issue 2025.
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