Mikhail Romadin is known not only as a painter, but also as book illustrator and stage set designer. He was born into a family of artists, his father and grandfather were also painters. He studied at the Gerasimov Soviet State University of Cinematography. In addition to a number of jobs for theatres, he contributed to films of A. Konchalovsky and A. Tarkovsky (Solaris, Andrei Rublev, The Mirror). He was a rather productive artist, drawing and painting tirelessly, almost all the time, everywhere. Generations grew up on his children’s book illustrations. His style can be related most of all to German expressionism, characterised by strong colours and lines. His compositions generally feature a multitude of figures, almost crowded. His depictions are always narrative, like illustrations. The Great Jam Session depicts Soviet and American musicians. Following the trend of old, illustrative scientific depictions, the figures are accompanied by numbers, with a catalogue of the musicians’ names next to the numbers in the upper third of the image. The painting features the most well-known American jazz musicians from Bing Crosby through Duke Ellington and Doris Day to Thelonius Monk, but we can also find Russians in the picture, like the pianist Vagif Sadikov or the music expert Aleksey Batashev. The figures in the painting are probably the artist’s personal favourites, whom he considers the greatest in the genre of jazz, and whom he would like to hear play together in a great jam session, which is obviously unfeasible both in terms of time and geography.