Sitting on bar stool with his feet wrapped around the wooden rungs, Dr. Joe DiCarlo has been spending at least two or three nights a week lately in Moscow nightclubs taking part in what he likes to call his "project."


The project is an acoustic blues quartet which he organized a few months ago and now leads. DiCarlo, an American doctor who arrived in Russia a year ago, has recruited an all-Russian band and indulged his passion for blues music in a way that might have been impossible elsewhere.


"At home I couldn't get professional musicians like this to work for me," said DiCarlo, 35, a guitarist who leads the group called Three Beards and a Boris. "This band is definitely a two-way street. People are complementing each other."


DiCarlo, a soft spoken, bearded man with lively eyes and an easy laugh, came to Moscow by himself in August last year to work on a different kind of project -- Project Hope, a U.S.-based medical education foundation specializing in international development.


He said he would rather have worked elsewhere. "This is the work I wanted to do, but I wanted to do it in some place warm where I could speak Spanish or Portuguese," said DiCarlo. "They said, 'We'd love to have you, but in Russia.' I grew up in Buffalo and lived in Minnesota and really did not want this climate."


After a year of moving around the Commonwealth of Independent States visiting hospitals, working with local doctors and developing new programs, DiCarlo decided in August to renew his contract with Project Hope for another year.


"I've gotten to travel an extraordinary amount and hopefully have come up with an effective way of teaching hands-on projects that will work in my next assignment," he said. "Hospitals here are stuck where I would imagine our hospitals might have been in the 1930s -- in terms of equipment and material. So, you are left with many intelligent physicians working and learning with limited tools."


One of the things DiCarlo, who speaks Russian, said frustrates him in his work is the language barrier -- "not being able to communicate as well as I would like with families and patients."


"There is a bit of irony. At home, I had the doctoring down quite well," said DiCarlo, who specialized in pediatric intensive care at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington. "Maybe because they were my patients there and now they aren't my patients. ... But, there isn't that communication problem with music."


Dima Kazantsev, a 22-year-old guitarist in the band, said DiCarlo has taken the music form to a different level by playing blues standards that other musicians are reluctant or unable to tackle.


"He is maybe the one person in Moscow who can play Robert Johnson in the original. You have to be kind of brave to do that," said Kazantsev. "I can feel the energy inside him, even though he's not jumping all over the place."


DiCarlo, who is modest about his musical talents, said, "Outside of work, this is an extraordinarily interesting project. The energy you can produce with four people is completely different than what you can do by yourself."