A Brooklyn DJ’s journey from Central Asia to Central Park

By Tomas Kellner

When Rustam Ospanoff walks onto SummerStage in Central Park to spin his records on July 20 — he opens for Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist Cory Henry — he will take New Yorkers on his trademark, propulsive ride through jazz, funk, boogie, disco, house, and gospel seasoned with rare grooves from around the world.

And they will include beats from deep inside the former Soviet Union, where Ospanoff’s own unlikely journey began.

Ospanoff, who lives in Bed-Stuy, has had a long career as a DJ and concert promoter. He worked with British funk stars Jamiroquai, Brazil’s Marcos Valle, German groovers Jazzanova, and the U.K. tastemaker Gilles Peterson. He’s played clubs in Tokyo, Paris, New York, and other cities.

These places have one thing in common: They are far away from the concrete apartment complex of his youth in the Kazakh town of Aktau. There, on the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea, he grew up watching MTV recorded on VHS tapes he got from his friend’s older brother, who was allowed to leave and study abroad. “There was censorship and we literally had no record stores,” Ospanoff says.

But that didn’t stop him from sharing his MTV contraband in turn. The teenager recorded the songs he liked from his VCR on cassette tapes and played them to passersby on the street below his window. “I was a 10-year-old kid and I had music other people didn’t have,” he says. “Playing it for them gave me joy. I love music so much because it brings people together. It’s a universal language and it allows us to find each other.”

‘I wanted to say something to people’
He had first discovered that language first hand when his dad took him to see Batyrkhan Shukhenov, a Kazakh musician beloved for his music and for his poetry. “It was the first time I heard live music and we were right by the stage,” Ospanoff says. “It just blew my mind. It was probably the best musical experience you could have in the Soviet Union then. Dad had been playing records for me, but I don’t think even he realized how much the show affected me.”

In something of what has become an Ospanoff signature — he radiates calm and quiet charm that endears him to people everywhere — Shukhenov would become a close friend 20 years later, after a chance encounter at a radio station. “We were both Stevie Wonder fans and we bonded over ‘Ribbon In the Sky‘,” he says.

He applied to the Red Bull Music Academy — a coveted workshop for up-and-coming DJs, musicians, and producers — and was selected as one of the first DJs representing the former Soviet Union.

Spending two weeks at the Academy in Rome with his peers opened new possibilities. Ospanoff started to travel to London, Tokyo, Rotterdam buying records and visiting parties and music festivals.

Back home in 2009, he launched the Jazzystan. a music festival in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, that brought big names like Jamiroquai, Incognito, EZRA Collective, Nubya Garcia, Kyoto Jazz Massive, and other global artists to the republic, which had won its independence from Russia by then. “I wanted to use that stage to say something to people,” he says. “Many people in my country have never had the musical experience I had, traveling to Japan and Europe. I believed I can do something for my city, and introduce my people to the live experience of the beautiful world of music which was always hidden from them for such a long time. I put my heart into it.”

Through it all, Ospanoff and Shukhenov remained close until Shukhenov’s death from a heart attack in 2014. “There were thousands of people in the streets when he died and we were all feeling the same thing,” he says. “Something changed, it was in the air, I couldn’t feel the same spirit in my city anymore.”

Ospanoff (photo by Kanat Beysekeyev)

B-side himself
By then, Ospanoff was also ready for change. In 2016, he won the green card lottery and the following year he, his wife Vera, and their young son Mansur landed in Brooklyn.

Ospanoff was excited. Back in Almaty, he had studied from afar New York’s pioneering DJs like David Mancuso, Larry Levan, “Little” Louie Vega, and Danny Krivit, and the music they played.

But getting a foothold in New York, with its cadres of established and aspiring DJs, essentially felt like starting over from scratch. “I had to sacrifice my ego,” he says. “I had to accept this new reality where nobody knows you and where nobody cares who you were in the past. It’s just you in the present moment who you are here and now.”

Gradually, Ospanoff was able to cobble together a steady income, steady enough for Vera to get pregnant again with their daughter Maya.

“I have always been very impressed that he pretty much singlehandedly got a whole generation in Kazakhstan into all things soulful,” says Ben Goldfarb, a longtime New York jock who performs as DJ Scribe. “But it’s even more impressive to me that starting as a total unknown in New York City, he is doing the same thing here, bringing something exciting to us that we didn’t even know we were missing.

Pandemic pivot, flip it and reverse it
When the pandemic killed off all income, Ospanoff kept streaming music from home, driving around and playing from a converted food truck in the streets of Brooklyn with his friend from Los Angeles. He also launched his weekly radio shows on The Face Radio Brooklyn, Soho Radio NYC, and for Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide FM.

Now, the SummerStage gig is days away. “A few years ago I was with Vera in Central Park and I said it would be amazing to DJ at the SummerStage one day,” he says. “It was just a dream but for some reason I had this feeling like it would happen one day.”

In some respects, the dream had become a memory. But this spring he got the message from Paula Abreau, director of programming at City Parks Foundation, which organizes SummerStage. She says she met him through SoHo radio. “I was immediately impressed by his global understanding and approach to music, both on spinning and curation. His mixes take you on a joyful journey of discovery,” she says.

“I still don’t understand that something important is happening to me,” Ospanoff says. “It’s like when you cut yourself. That’s the only way I can describe it. You can see that it’s happening, but it takes a little bit of time before you can feel it.”

His calendar is filling up. He’s been playing premier city venues, including Elsewhere, Nowadays and Jupiter Disco in Bushwick, Jupiter Disco and Black Flamingo in Bed-Study, and Good Bar and Ponyboy in Greenpoint. On most weeks you can also catch him in the Ace Hotel lobby near Union Square.

In early 2022, he launched Precious Love, a series of listening parties in Soho where new and established city DJs can bring and play their records. The event takes place in Yuji Fukushima’s Blue In Green Store in Soho. The vibe is equally relaxed and avant garde, something David Mancuso, whose original Loft was not far away, would enjoy.

Ospanoff does not promote Precious Love on social media. Instead, he picks the DJs and invites the guests to create a unique vibe and experience. But it does not mean the gathering is exclusive. “It’s open for everyone who appreciates the music and sound,” he says.

The word among DJs is getting around: “Little” Louie Vega, New York’s house music legend, stopped by in May.

Precious Love may take place in the heart of New York City, but in a way, it’s not different from Ospanoff’s boyhood window in Aktau. He still plays music because he wants to give people joy. “I think it is my mission,” he says. “I feel it in my heart. This is my spirit. It feels like I was born for this.”