Kukuruza

Kukuruza is a Russian band who progressed from a student startup to become an international touring act in the early 1990s.

[2] That same year, they performed their bluegrass-influenced music before the genre's founder, Bill Monroe, at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee.

Their repertoire includes a mix of music, from Russian folk to American bluegrass, to country-rock, rock-and-roll and blues.

[5] They have performed country and bluegrass-influenced music longer than any other Russian group, with a total of 15 albums over 30 years, 3 in the United States and 12 more in Russia.

[2][15][14] They learned the bluegrass style by listening to Czech bands, and to American performances through banned Voice of America shortwave radio broadcasts and black-market second-hand records.

Similarly they applied western instruments (electric guitar, banjo, mandolin, fiddle) to a Russian jazz work, Leonid Utesov's "The Old Cabby's Song".

During the release of their second record made in the United States, Crossing Borders, they performed at the Grand Ole Opry, and were on the television show Nashville Now.

Larisa Grigorieva, lead singer for Kukuruza from 1980 to 1989, performed on the albums Let's sing in English and The Magician.

[24] That name was also used as an album title by former Bering Strait performer Ilya Toshinsky and had been suggested in the United States in 1994 as an apt name for pre-perestroika Russian-bluegrass music.