The traffic was fierce along Moskvaretskaya Naberezhnaya on Monday, and the afternoon sun beat down steadily on the musicians' necks, but the saints came marching in regardless.


From the shadows beneath Bolshoi Kamenny Bridge, along the embankment to Red Square and the Rossiya Hotel, a 15-man Dixieland band serenaded commuters with rousing classics like "Sweet Georgia Brown," "Suwannee River" and "All of Me." Escorts from the State Traffic Inspectorate tapped their fingers against their steering wheels, the crowd swelled to about 70 people and bandleader Nikolai Titov blew his trumpet until he fell to his knees on the cobblestones.


The Dixieland parade kicked off Moscow's Second International Jazz Festival, a four-day celebration of foreign and native jazz acts. The festival will bring the American singer and pianist Ray Charles to the stage of the Rossiya on Wednesday and Thursday nights -- an act that overshadows the rest of the program for non-purists -- as well as the American saxophonist Lou Tabakin and the Belgian trombone player Phil Abraham.


The first act of the festival was the Oleg Lundstrem Orchestra, a Russian-American group which celebrated its 60th anniversary this year, qualifying it for inclusion in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's oldest active jazz big band.


The crowd outside the concert hall Monday night was giddy with anticipation -- all this, in a country that actually banned saxophones 45 short years ago. Russia's love affair with jazz has been nothing if not stormy. Although the music was popularized in the late 1920s, the Communist Party later condemned jazz as bourgeois, and waged several aggressive campaigns aimed to stamp it out entirely.


Since most of the early Soviet jazzmen came from ethnic minorities, the anti-jazz campaign of the '30s and '40s was also a cultural purge. Anti-jazz lecturers, who linked the music to drug use and homosexuality, worked the high school circuit and raided dance parties to monitor the music selection, according to the historian Richard Stites.


One bandleader was actually arrested on stage, and those ensembles that were allowed to keep playing were strongly encouraged to beef up their orchestras with balalaikas and concertinas -- instruments better suited to the proletariat. "When I hear jazz," Nikita Khrushchev once said, "it's as if I have gas on the stomach."


But as the Dixieland ensemble -- made up of Titov's Patephon Jazz Band and the Capella Dixie Orchestra -- struck up "Sweet Georgia Brown" on the embankment, the crowd showed few signs of bourgeois dissipation. Twenty-year-old hipsters in dark glasses walked alongside businessmen in suspenders and striped shirts.


The mood, in general was good. "It's music for fat people, and we are fat," said Georgy Yukab, 61, a trader in town on business. "It's music for people from the Urals, and we are from the Urals."


For others, who remember when jazz was declared illegal, the appeal was something deeper.


"Jazz is the music of freedom," said festival organizer Rafael Avakov, as he walked backwards, attempting to guide the band without stepping into traffic. "It's something we could never have."





The Second International Moscow Jazz Festival runs through Thursday night at the Rossiya Concert Hall at 1 Moskvaretskaya Naberezhnaya. The Ray Charles Orchestra is scheduled to perform on June 13 and 14. Ticket prices range from 80,000 to 200,000 rubles ($40 to $100). Call 923-5606 or fax 288-9588 or 921-3578. Nearest metro: Kitai-Gorod.