{ { Infobox musical artist
| name = Kukuruza
| image =
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| origin = Moscow, Russia
| genre = Bluegrass, country, country-rock, country folk, Russian folk
| years_active = –present
| label = *Greener Pastures
Sugar Hill Records
Gadfly Records
| associated_acts = *Орнамент (Ornament) Рыжая трава (Red Grass) ГрАссМейстер (Grassmeister) | website = | current_members = Lineup beginning c. 1998/2000 Svetlana Shebeko (lead vocals) Pavel Titovetes (electric guitar) Sergei Novikov (violin) Roman Mayboroda (bass guitar) Dmitry Krichevsky (drums) Georgi Palmov (harmonica, mandolin, acoustic guitar, vocals) | past_members = Lineup 1993 Irina Surina (lead vocals) Alexei Aboltynsh (acoustic bass, electric bass, vocals) Anatoliy Belchikov (drums) Sergei Mosolov (fiddle, vocals) Andrei Shepelev (banjo, dobro, steel guitar, acoustic guitar, vocals, composer) Georgi Palmov (mandolin, clarinet, vocals) Dmitry Vakhrameev (banjo) Mikhail Venikov (guitar, electric guitar)Additions from 1998 album Endless StoryIlya Toshinsky (banjo) Roman Zaslavsky (piano) | module = | module2 = | module3 = }} Kukuruza' is a Russian band who progressed from a student startup to become an international touring act in the early 1990s.
In 1994, the Chicago Tribune said they were "among the top country groups of Eastern Europe and Russia". That same year, they performed their bluegrass-influenced music before the genre's founder, Bill Monroe, at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee. As of 2013, they were the only Eastern European group to play at the Opry.
Their repertoire includes a mix of music, from Russian folk to American bluegrass, to country-rock, rock-and-roll and blues. The band toured the United States six times from 1991 to 1994. 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. The band is still active, but with a different lineup of performers than they had in the mid-1980s and 1990s when they rose to international prominence. In 2010 they played at the Montreux Jazz Festival.
The band's name КукурузА is the Russian word for corn. Years after the founding, the story of taking the name has been lost, as different members remember different things. The name wasn't meant to imply corny or funny, however. It was a serious name that implied that the band had many flavors, just as corn has many flavors, depending upon where it is grown.
Beginnings
The band began as a student "collective". In 1975, students Sergei Senchilo (acoustic guitar) and Czech student Vladimir Ambros (harmonica) got together to play songs of United States, England, and Scotland. By the next year, they had attracted others, and were calling the group Ornament. Ornament lasted until about 1983. Beginning in 1984, some of its members continued to play together under the new name Kukuruza.
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. 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.