In their hometown of Obninsk, Russia, a music teacher chooses his best students and brings them together in a band to play bluegrass music. They are still children, but have extraordinary musical talent and soon enough they become well known. They begin to travel the world, charming audiences wherever they go, still together as teenagers; they find themselves in America, where they sign a contract with a record label.  All is good. World success is around the corner. Until they get caught in a web of music business intrigue that leads to four years of bouncing from one label to another.  The band members pass from adolescence into adulthood, thousands of miles away from their families and facing the possibility that everything they had worked for would disappear.

Sound like a movie? It is. The Ballad of Bering Strait, a 98-minute documentary directed by Nina Gilden Seavey.  It tells the true story of a remarkable band.

Given all they’ve been through, it’s no surprise that the six members of Bering Strait - Ilya Toshinsky (lead electric guitar, banjo, backup vocals), Natasha Borzilova  (lead vocals, acoustic guitar), Sasha Ostrovsky (dobro, steel guitar, lap steel), Lydia Salnikova (keyboards, backup vocals), Alexander Arzamastev (drums) and Sergei “Spooky” Olkhovsky (bass)–are anxious for their U.S. career to finally begin. 

“We’ve been waiting and hanging together for such a long time and we’ve been through a lot,” says Ilya. “Now it is time for something to happen. Going through all those labels and deals was difficult. There was a point where some people said, ‘I don’t know if I can stay any longer,’ but we all hung around and we’re happy we did.”

Some of the band members have been working with each other for more than ten years and all of them have known each other for at least that long. They began playing music as youngsters because their parents enrolled them in music school. Beginning at age six or seven, they attended classes after regular school where they received formal training in music theory, choral singing and whatever instrument they chose. For some, those early lessons were the equivalent of having to eat their spinach. “My parents sent me to music school when I was six years old and I really hated it because I wanted to play soccer in the streets,” Spooky recalls. Even as they got older and more interested in their craft, the music study could be a chore. “When you are ten or twelve years old, classical guitar is not fun at all,” says Sasha. Natasha liked playing classical guitar, but says, “It was a lot of hard work, practicing until you had bleeding fingers sometimes.”

But within the school, a guitar teacher had created an oasis of what seemed like pure fun. A bluegrass fan, he realized that his students would respond to the lively music and by playing it would become more accomplished musicians. Ilya was a prime candidate for the project. He fell in love with the banjo when he heard an Earl Scruggs record and begged his teacher to show him how to play. “I started to learn how to play this thing and discovered I had a talent for it – it came natural to me,” he recalls. “I was so in love with it, I was practicing eight hours a day and I played my first concert on the banjo two weeks after I got it.”  The teacher formed a bluegrass band and one by one the future members of Bering Strait became a part of it. Natasha joined a year after Ilya. The band started to build a reputation. Sasha, who left music school when he was ten, began studying again two years later in order to join the band. “I first started playing the banjo because I loved it and I loved the way Ilya played. I was some kind of fan of his. But the teacher said, ‘You’re never going to beat Ilya on banjo. Why don’t you try dobro?’” After finding out what a dobro was, Sasha agreed. “I took a regular guitar and raised the strings and played it like a dobro. Of course it didn’t sound anything like a dobro, but I started to learn how to do that. I was playing banjo for a year and a half and still was at the same point. But I got introduced to the band a month after I started playing dobro.”

It was shortly after the fall of communism and a time when American culture was becoming popular in Russia. “Bluegrass was one of these things that people got interested in. Cowboy hats. Funny fast music. Very cool,” says Sasha. The smiling kids who played the new music and looked so cute doing it made an impression and started making TV appearances. “We had a little bit of celebrity because our hometown was so small,” says Natasha. “We recorded some theme songs for English lessons on TV and all that kind of stuff. And they would show them every day, so our faces were exposed. And then our song was very popular, a children’s song that they showed a lot on television so people would recognize us on the street and sing a little part of the song.”

In 1992, a 14-year-old Ilya got the chance to visit the Tennessee Banjo Institute in Nashville, as the guest of the banjo player from the Russian bluegrass band, Kukuruza. “All my heroes were there – Bela Fleck, Bill Keith, Tony Trischka and Earl Scruggs,” Ilya recalls. “I was just so excited I was like a kid in a candy store. I went to all of Bela Fleck’s workshops, sat in the first row and just stared at him, soaking it all in. Jamming every night and learning new stuff, it was just amazing.” He came away knowing that he wanted to return to the U.S. and specifically to Nashville.

It didn’t take long. In 1993, Ilya and the band traveled to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the sister city of their hometown, Obninsk, on a cultural exchange program. A year later they performed at the International Bluegrass Music Association convention. Meanwhile, at home, they were out of high school, attending jazz college and making the occasional trip outside the country to perform. Lydia joined the band in 1994, playing keyboards and adding harmony to Natasha’s lead vocals.

They were also getting more and more interested in country music, which was booming in the U.S. “For two years, I listened to only Garth Brooks,” Ilya says. “That’s how we learned to play country by listening to Garth Brooks and Alan Jackson,” Sasha says.

And so came the next step. “We all realized that if you’re playing country music, you need to come to the U.S.,” says Lydia.  “We started coming and going, a couple of months in the U.S. and then back home.  I didn’t really realize at first that pursuing this might mean I’d have to move to America.  I don’t think I ever made a conscious decision, ‘Okay, this is what I’m doing for a career.’ It just kind of happened.  I was just finding myself coming over more and more for longer periods of time, until one day I realized that succeeding with the band was my priority.”

Over time, the change in location and career pursuits affected the band’s relationship with the guitar teacher who brought them together. “We weren’t kids any more and he didn’t want to acknowledge that,” says Ilya. “And back in Russia he was the man, he was the boss.  In America there would be other people involved and he wouldn’t be as powerful as in Russia and I think it freaked him out. I don’t think he was excited about us pursuing something over here. He wanted to go back to Russia.”  It took two years, but by 1998 the split was complete.

“Once he was gone we were somewhat abandoned and scared and didn’t know what to do because we were with him for eight years.” Natasha says. “But at the same time, because of that abandonment, we knew we had to do something – pedal really really hard, otherwise we were just going to sink.”  At this point, the man who would later become their manager, Mike Kinnamon, came on board and started helping them regroup creatively and professionally (he even housed all six band members in his home for almost two years).

In 1999, the band signed with Arista Records. “We thought: we got the record deal, great, we are there,” Lydia remembers. Ilya has similar memories, “I thought in a few months we’ll be on the road, we’ll have a song on the radio and we’ll be huge and everyone will be talking about Bering Strait.”

They found a producer, Brent Maher, who helped them define and refine their sound. They went into the recording studio. They were happy and excited and completely unaware of how big a step they’d taken. After years of minor celebrity, world travel and constant praise for their talents, the record deal seemed the natural course of events.

Then came a bit of bad news. Arista was going through some big changes at the corporate level and it was going to affect the Nashville division. Tim DuBois, then president of Arista Nashville who had started the label in the 80’s and who was responsible for signing Bering Strait, was leaving and Arista would essentially be absorbed into the RCA Label Group. This would be their first brush with uncertainty. But they didn’t worry. DuBois was moving to another record label that Gaylord Corp., owner of the Grand Ole Opry, was starting up. They asked for their release from Arista and figured this was just a minor bump in the road. “There was frustration, but we were told that we were going to transfer over to Gaylord immediately and that it should be viewed as a minor change and that everything was fine,” recalls Natasha.

A few months later, a corporate shakeup at Gaylord led to DuBois leaving the company in anger. The new Gaylord label fell apart soon after and Nashville was buzzing about what would happen with Tim DuBois. At first Bering Strait remained optimistic. “When it first happened, we were okay with it,” says Sasha “We thought, Tim DuBois is going to find a job, he’s one of the most respected people in town. So he’ll be at this label or that label and he’ll take us with him. But five months later he wasn’t at a label. We came back from the Christmas holiday in Russia last year and had a band meeting.”  During the meeting they discussed the grim reality that with only a limited amount of resources left, the band needed to get a record deal within a month or reconsider their future together. Mike Kinnamon, who had supported the six band members for the past few years, was slowly going broke and the band members couldn’t work “regular jobs” to support themselves due to visa restrictions.

“Before Gaylord, when something went wrong we would immediately pick up our stuff and move on to something else,” says Natasha. “We lost our record deal for seven months and for all of that time we were just doing nothing, just sitting in our apartments by ourselves. I was in my first apartment. I was all alone. I had no friends in Nashville and we didn’t know if things would ever improve or if we would ever get our record deal back.”

As time ticked by, the possibility that Bering Strait would disband seemed frighteningly real. They couldn’t just pack up and start over in Russia. “It’s very pop there. Trying to be a country band in Russia, we’d be bound to play clubs for all our lives,” says Ilya. “We were really too tired of the whole thing to keep playing with each other at that point,” adds Alexander. Gallows humor took hold. “We were going around joking, ‘okay we’re shopping for a new label to destroy,’” says Natasha.

As it would happen, the band’s four-week deadline proved prophetic and fruitful.  DuBois had a meeting with Tony Brown, President of MCA and he signed the band in January, 2002.  Brown and DuBois moved them over to their Nashville based newly formed joint venture with Universal Records called Universal South.  Their debut album is scheduled for a January 14, 2003 release.

“I couldn’t be more happy,” says Ilya. “I’ve never seen a team so pumped. I see fire in Tim’s eyes. I never saw him so energized about us and it makes me energized.”

Sasha looks back on the Bering Strait saga philosophically. “We were just coming here for fun, playing music. All of a sudden we were close to record deals then we went through big changes, became adults and separated from the people we used to depend on and went on our own. At that point we started learning about the music business more and more. It seems like we took everything for granted until this certain point. Then we realized, wow, a lot of people don’t have record deals in this town and we came all the way from Russia and didn’t even think about how lucky we were.”  “When we started appreciating that, things started changing for us. We are here and ready to kick some butt.”