The band began as a student "
collective". By the next year, they had attracted others, and were calling the group Ornament. They began their interest in western music before the end of the Cold War. Their early adaptation of western music in the years before
perestroika was difficult and dangerous, because
western music was suspect (possibly illegal) in the Soviet Union. Facing bans for playing "music of the ideological enemy," they pursued their musical interests in the mid-1980s, attending music festivals and recording their first album,
We Sing in English, which was not one of their bluegrass albums. The Soviet Union gradually loosened official resistance to western music and some western bands were able to tour. After seeing performances by
Roy Clark (who visited Russia in 1976 and 1988) and the
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (who toured Russia in 1977), the students who would become Ornament and Kukuruza looked for music that they could access to learn from. Not being in the United States, they didn't have the bluegrass community's artistic pressure to conform to use only acoustic instruments. They adapted electric guitar into their mix, perhaps led by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, whom they had seen in concert, who also used electric guitar in some of their music. Learning the style on their own, they successfully blended it with Russian music. They began a process of fusing east and west. Songs such as
John Hartford's 1971
progressive bluegrass "Vamp in the Middle" were translated and adapted, using bluegrass instruments to create the sound but blending with Russian vocals. Similarly they applied western instruments (electric guitar, banjo, mandolin, fiddle) to a Russian jazz work,
Leonid Utesov's "The Old Cabby's Song". Russian folk songs were adapted too, and one of the band, Andrei Shepelev, proved to be a songwriter as well. He was credited as writing or adapting many of their pieces on the albums made in the United States. When the 1998 record,
Endless Journey was released, the president at Gadfly Records, Mitch Cantor, commented on the group's style. He said that he didn't think of them as a bluegrass band, but a group with a "unique juxtaposition of styles," able to switch between Russian traditional, jazz and bluegrass styles of music, yet still maintain their own sound. ==United States tours==