Aleksei Kozlov

Alexei Semenovich Kozlov was born in Moscow on 13 October 1935. His father taught at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute named after V. I. Lenin. His mother, Ekaterina Tolchenova, was a chorus conductor and music-theory teacher; his grandfather Ivan Tolchenov sang in opera and church choirs. Kozlov finished music school as a pianist, then taught himself saxophone. He graduated from the Moscow Architectural Institute (MARKHI) in 1962 and worked as an architect at the Institute of Technical Aesthetics from 1962 to 1967 while building his jazz career.

He began performing as a pianist in the mid-1950s and debuted on tenor saxophone in 1957. In 1959 he formed a quintet with Andrei Tovmasyan. From 1961 to 1966 he was a mainstay of the Molodyozhnoye jazz cafe in Moscow, shifting to alto saxophone as his principal voice. With Vadim Sakun's sextet he played Jazz Jamboree in Warsaw in 1962, among the first Soviet jazz musicians heard at a major foreign festival.

In 1973 he founded Arsenal, the first professional jazz-rock ensemble in the USSR, later attached to the Kaliningrad regional philharmonic. Arsenal became Russia's preeminent fusion group; Kozlov led it for decades as saxophonist, composer and arranger. He wrote for film and theatre, appeared in documentaries including Jazzist (2021), and from the 1990s presented television programmes such as Ves etot dzhaz (ORT, 1994) and educational radio and lecture-concert series on jazz and rock history. Memoirs and popular books include Kozel na sakse (1998), Jazz, Rock and Brass (2005) and Jazzist (2011).

Kozlov lived in Moscow. He was married to Lyalya Absalyamova, an English teacher, and had a son, Sergey, from his first marriage. A Moscow jazz venue, the Alexey Kozlov Club, carried his name. In later years he gradually stepped back from full-time performance as younger musicians, including Anna Korolyova, continued strands of his work.

Kozlov died in Moscow on 25 September 2026, aged 90, at home after a short illness, according to his press secretary and reports by TASS, Izvestia, Komsomolskaya Pravda and Vedomosti. The Alexey Kozlov Club and Russian jazz community announced the news the same day. He would have been 91 on 13 October 2026.

He is remembered as a founder of Russian jazz-rock and as a public educator who brought jazz history to television, radio and lecture halls. Arsenal's Melodiya recordings and his own books remain reference points for Soviet and post-Soviet fusion. Honours included Honored Artist of the RSFSR (1988), People's Artist of Russia (2003) and the Order For Merit in Culture and Art (February 2026).