Creativity of tough reality
Kateryna Ziabliuk
This article will not cover all the existing initiatives that have developed the culture of Ukrainian jazz, nor will it cover what the life of musicians looks like today. This story is the personal experience of the author, who prefers not to describe things that she has not personally experienced.
Imagine a situation where you are asked to tell a long story that you witnessed somewhere close to the present, and at the same time, you have to be aware of all the previous events that you did not witness, but which have a direct impact on how things look at that moment. As, for example, with the history of Ukrainian jazz, it is an ambiguous labyrinth of scenarios, strongly influenced by social and political factors, and without understanding them, there is no way forward. Therefore, it is quite difficult to talk about the place of jazz in Ukrainian culture today without mentioning the peculiarities of mentality, power, history, sociology, and several other nuances that seem to be unrelated to creativity. They ultimately form the image of the culture of any country, including one that is currently defending its identity against all odds.
These days, such topics are being discussed more and more often, and people from all over the world are learning more and more about Ukrainian musicians, Ukrainian media, and festivals. At the same time, strangely enough, a Socratic paradox is spreading - the more knowledge, the more questions and uncertainty. And there's nothing to hide - it's great because there are still a lot of things that I want to tell you about, supplement, or expand. In particular, about the places where jazz acted as a bridge between people, where people learned its universal language to communicate and implement their creative ideas through it.
Fusion Jam in HVLV, Kyiv. Photo: Oleksii Karpovych
Let's start with the capital's "maternity hospital". In 1980, musician and musicologist Volodymyr Symonenko opened a jazz department at the Reinhold Glier Kyiv Municipal Music Academy (at that time part of the Tchaikovsky National Music Academy of Ukraine) and took over as its director. Symonenko, as a figure, deserves a separate 20-page narrative as the first and one of the biggest enthusiasts of jazz music in Ukraine. In addition to documenting the music being created and compiling the first book on jazz in Ukraine, Melodies of Jazz, he organised most of the country's jazz festivals, led the Jazz Association of Ukraine, and established links with foreign organisations, which, as you might guess, was not an easy task in those days. In the end, the system of the jazz department was not much different from jazz departments in other European countries. There were also a few jazz musicians, all of whom knew each other and also took up the promotion of "bourgeois culture" at their peril. Everything had to be formed from scratch. In a community, all goals seem more realistic, so the teaching staff was more like a group of outsider friends, working together and with sincere mutual support to persevere in a business that the rest of us were at least skeptical about (let's be honest, it still looks like that). Among the first teachers were working musicians: Yukhym Markov, Oleksiy Saranchin, Natalia Lebedieva, Oleksandr Harkavyi, Oleksandr Rukomoinikov, Oleksandr Shapoval and others. Most of them are still running the department, but in recent years, the professorial staff has been supplemented by younger teachers, such as Oleksandr Pavlov, Artem Mendelenko, Ihor Zakus or Anna Dontsova. Due to the rather narrow circle of people who sometimes meet on the same stage outside the academy, the atmosphere in the school is more like a laboratory. There is a certain set of knowledge that you have to work through, but everyone has a thirst to get to the bottom of some truth through the layer of the unknown. It often happened that students and teachers did not know a certain topic and learned together, from each other. Yes, perhaps this method is extremely disordered, as in the old days - self-study in a small pit of ignorance, but at least it gives you an understanding that you are not alone and together you are capable of anything, even if the set of tools is very poor.
The natural progression of events was the formation of a very close environment, which, in the end, was strictly divided into stylistic "castes": purist jazz musicians, rock adherents, pop, and those who play hip-hop and RnB with a jazz musician's delivery. Each of them ended up in the same cauldron - at a big band rehearsal, a class on the history of jazz or classical harmony. There is nothing to hide, it is quite difficult to organise such a divergent group in the interests of the group, but no one wanted to do it, so at some point, the comments of the senior teachers were limited to criticising the "too long" compositions and the fact that the students were forgetting about traditional jazz. The younger mentors did not interfere with this and often preferred to spend time with students outside the structure, which slowly began to be recorded in history. One of these places was local clubs.
It is also worth noting that the concept of a musical tradition among musicians appears mostly in the space of interpersonal connections and a personal desire to create something, rather than in a specific place that has existed for decades and is itself a place of gathering and creative cult for different generations. Whatever one may say, most initiatives were launched with a decent amount of ignorance, which sometimes led to an unexpectedly interesting experiment, and sometimes to a senseless defeat. There were many attempts to start a similar place for jazz musicians, but the idea just kept migrating from one locum to another, from one district to another, so the musicians developed an extraordinary elasticity in themselves, constantly looking for opportunities to organise something. This lottery of life has given people the feeling that nothing lasting can be done here, and only in recent years has this ideology begun to change its focus to creating something stable. One of the figures who has been stubbornly pursuing this goal for a couple of decades now is Oleksii Kogan, a journalist, radio and TV presenter, and director of the Jazz in Kyiv festival. His merits can be listed for a long time, but his actions are also multilingual because he has shown by example what international communication looks like. Thanks to this, more and more people learned about Ukraine and Ukrainian musicians, and in Ukraine, in turn, the general repertoire was enriched and new musical concepts emerged.
For a relatively long time, several clubs in Kyiv played the role of a permanent gathering place. These were Club 44, Divan, Cotton Club and Master Class House, which were places for both ambitious concerts with guests and various jamming formats for musicians to entertain themselves. However, these clubs did not have strict stylistic rules, so quite often you could hear very different bands on these stages, from traditional jazz to rock, ska, or soul. Despite their important place in the cultural space of the city, these places lasted no more than 10-15 years, after which they had to move elsewhere due to financial or bureaucratic difficulties. One of the survivors, Club 44, reformatted into the Barman Dictat club and still exists in the same courtyard on Khreshchatyk Street. Due to its favourable location and long working hours, this place hosted perhaps the largest number of music parties and festival after-parties.
Sometimes these took the form of cyclical concerts that simultaneously gave carte blanche to local composers of all levels, and were called very simply - Composer Series. They were curated by saxophonist Bohdan Humeniuk, a graduate of the Reinhold Glier Kyiv Municipal Music Academy and McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He borrowed the idea from trumpeter Rachel Therrien, whom he eventually invited to take part in the series in Kyiv. The name suggests that the concept was to present the compositions of guests, each time with a different band, with the main rule being one rehearsal. Over time, the process gained momentum, and the Closer Club organising group joined the process and introduced a slightly different format, namely masterclasses with an assembled orchestra performing the compositions of the invited musicians. Thus, Michael Abene, Stephen Feifke and John Hollenbeck visited Kyiv.
Bohdan Humeniuk (saxophonist) with Dennis Adu (trumpet) and Illya Аlabuzhev (douuble bass) in Club 44. Photo: Oleksii Karpovych
The Closer Club is also worth mentioning here. This is a place at the intersection of different environments, mostly interested in jazz and electronic music. Because of this colourful mix, this place always attracts people from different backgrounds, and everyone can find their own niche in it. It is thanks to clubs like these that Kyiv has come to be known as the "Slavic Berlin" - in addition to the progressive format of the venue itself, the organising team has always been committed to creating a friendly dialogue with foreign musicians and institutions. The most prominent figure - particularly in the jazz sector - is Olga Bekenstein, who since 2013 has been systematically developing the taste of Kyiv listeners and, whenever possible, inviting all the leading musicians of the moment whom she had the opportunity to meet during her Fulbright scholarship in the United States. Almost every month, the Closer Club hosted a performance by someone from each of our daily playlists or someone who had been added to them over time. Ambrose Akinmusire, Theo Bleckmann, Fly Trio, Bugge Wesseltoft, Gerald Clayton, Soweto Kinch, Mateusz Smoczyński - and this is just a small part of the club's guests who were with us in every sense. One of the conventional ideas was a short distance with musicians, which was exotic news at the time because you could easily exchange a few words with your idol, have a drink together, and even get into some joint adventures. Later, Bekenstein created the showcase festival Am I Jazz? Festival, which had several successful editions before the war with a line-up consisting of Ukrainian musicians. With the beginning of the full-scale offensive, the concept began to move towards the United States, and leading musicians - friends of the Closer Club - were invited to participate in the American editions to, among other things, make a joint program with invited Ukrainian musicians.
Michael Abene conducts an orchestra of Kyiv musicians at the Closer club. Photo: Closer/Facebook
This was the concept of the friendly club Jazzva, created based on the Kyiv Mohyla Academy by its former students - Nazar Polyvka and Artur Shramko - and the photographer Oleksii Karpovych, who was outside the academic environment. They formed the ideology of this place. Despite its short existence, they managed to instill this need for human closeness among musicians and listeners, and, in the end, the aforementioned specific method of organisation surprisingly glued people together through unpredictable force majeure and attempted to solve it together. For example, preparations for a concert by the Polish band High Definition as part of the Jazz Bez 2012 festival began with dragging a piano across snowy roads from the academy to the basement concert hall. Marcus Strickland, who had not yet been promoted to the world level at that time, came to give a concert in the same year, warming himself with cognac surrounded by the organisers and their friends, or Matthew Shipp, who arrived at the very beginning of the Revolution of Dignity on the Independence Square. No word about the various photo exhibitions and mini-festivals (for example, the Hostynnyi Dvir Fest at the Hostynnyi Dvir building) is needed, which were imprinted in the memory of all those present.
A few years after Jazzva closed, Kontra Jazz Club opened in its place, the name of which came from its location (Kyiv Mohyla Academy is located opposite Kontraktova Square) and as a hint of resistance to dusty jazz clubs that played the same old stuff year after year. It was a kind of quintessence of all the possible ideas that have been popping up in the Kyiv creative space in recent years - there were composer concerts, battles, themed jam sessions, film screenings, and dances with live bands. This place aimed to fuse different musical environments, which could have an open space for experimentation and learning there, in the Kontra Jazz Club. Unfortunately, this initiative lasted only a year, but for some time there was another one, created by the founders of Meloport magazine (Oleksii Karpovych and Kateryna Ziabliuk), called Meloport Loft. It was a cross between a rebellious hyper-social counter-club and house concerts in the style of Jazzfest Berlin and Jazztopad, where spontaneously formed bands played short improvised sets in unpredictable places - apartments, coffee shops, galleries, workshops, and anything else that was accessible.
Is it even necessary to emphasize how much these events broadened the horizons of young musicians and music lovers? It is an undeniable truth. If only because at some point two worlds that had previously existed in opposite realities - rave, film and theatre culture, and jazz culture - met and began to learn about each other with interest and in some places cooperate creatively. Historically, this could be called "neo-futurism" in Ukrainian improvisational music - the moment when completely new points of view penetrate your worldview and you naturally question the knowledge that has been polished for years and has become a familiar, everyday norm. The new question was: "How can music change the environment?"
Meloport Loft in the BZ-art gallery, Kyiv, 2018. Photo: Oleksii Karpovych
Back in 2019, during one of the fusion jams in Kyiv, we were sitting with a large group of young jazz musicians. Everyone was engaged in a heated discussion, accompanied by music in the background, cigarette smoke, and endless glasses of various liquors. It was hard to focus on one thing, attention was moving from one thread of the story to another, but one random leitmotif stuck in my memory as a distant echo: "...all I want is to make the present moment always be art". Who said this is unknown, but it doesn't matter anymore, because at that moment, each of us, consciously or not, is guided by this moto and creates music that primarily allows us to "let off steam", to inform the world about our difficult battles with reality, spiced up by the consequences of the war in the east and the encroachment of our intrusive Russian neighbours on our territories. It was imperative to unite. Suddenly, our rather hermetic jazz circle began to include people from other creative environments, with a fresh perspective on music and the courage to combine the incompatible.
It was during this period that we met Sasha Pinchuk. He had never studied at a music academy or played various instruments, and in general, at his young age - he was 21 at the time - he gave the impression of a savvy Valhalla wanderer. Blond, moderately strong, covered in tattoos, and wearing the same clothes for all occasions, a knowledge-hungry maverick with the ability to lead people. He was not yet able to fully describe his idea, which he had been nurturing for some time, but the main idea was to bring together a creative community that would meet at jams, concerts, and festivals that they would organise themselves. Sasha loved jazz and hip-hop, but he often expressed his dissatisfaction and wondered why pop was doing so well in Ukraine, while new jazz and hip-hop jazz could be found in a shabby garage converted into a rehearsal room that no one knew about. This is how FUSION was born - a lively improvising organism, a collective of similarly daredevilish people that continues to attract with its experimentalism and sometimes brutality and uncompromising attitude. From the very beginning, the main contingent at this event were students of the Reinhold Glier Kyiv Municipal Music Academy (mostly from the jazz department, or officially, the department of musical entertainment), those who were systematically expelled from there, and those who did not try to find a common language with this structure. It would seem that people with polarised views were going on stage together and making music they liked, but they could not publicly admit it anywhere.
Sasha Pinchuk. Photo: Fusion/Facebook
In March 2019, the first party called FUSION took place in the sieve printing workshop. The system is quite simple: call up your friends, organise it together, and donate to the organisation's development. Everyone brought their tools and had no particular expectations, and there was a long debate about whether this was the right place for such an adventure. As usually happens in such controversial situations, everything went not only well, but also in a way that no one had anticipated. Jazz musicians with a rock 'n' roll soul gave free rein to their true musical voice, met musicians from completely different backgrounds on a small piece of stage, and together they quickly created a favourable aura around them based on electronica, alternative rock, drum and bass, framed by a collective desire to improvise. Thanks to this incendiary background, the process of improvisation naturally expanded its sphere of emotional influence, increasingly putting an exclamation point at every phrase played and often assertively declaring the presence of their performers in this world, thus metaphorically illuminating the essence of his or her character - either due to the specifics of the mishmash of styles or personal sentiment towards them. In any case, this is not essential: the most important thing is that from the very beginning, extraordinary communication between the musicians developed, thus educating them in all possible aspects.
Fusion Jam в 20ft Live, 2021, Kyiv. Photo: Oleksii Karpovych
FUSION has formed a permanent circle of people who not only exchange musical ideas but also create a whole family that spends time together and supports each other in any situation. This strength of bonding was especially effective after the tragic death of Sasha Pinchuk, when the entire band had to learn to self-organise without a leader in a very short time. And again, there is no way to go on without unity. With the outbreak of war, this structure only intensified - the platform's concerts became a headquarters for supporting the military, refugees, hospitals, and FUSION itself became a foundation for artists, a label that at some point began to travel with a delegation to other cities and countries. During this period, it was important to highlight the key players in the music scene, especially since bands and projects that are now shaping the image of the Ukrainian jazz and alternative scene were naturally born at FUSION events. These include Hyphen Dash, OTOY, musicians Andrii Barmalii, Zhenia Pugachev, Diana Jabbar, Misha Birchenko, Yegor Havrylenko, and his project The Lazy Jesus. And yet, each of them chose their musical path, and it was no longer possible to throw everyone into one "arena", but to introduce a stage division into acoustic (improvisational) and electronic at concerts. The circle expanded, the support group grew stronger, and brotherly bands started to appear in different cities of Ukraine, moving in a similar direction.
Oleksandra Kuvshinova during the Fusion Jam at 20ft Live, 2021. Photo: Fusion/Facebook
It would seem that we have found the answer to the question about the impact of music on society, but there are still many things that do not work so well and there are very few prospects for changing this. Strangely enough, we are talking about enthusiasm and creative openness, the ability to show your creations to the whole world without remorse and too much challenge and to enter into a coherent dialogue with the rest of the world. No matter how cool and fresh Ukrainian jazz and experimental music may seem at the moment, everyone faces the fear of the present, the future, and the fact that no one understands us but ourselves. Basic things - how to feed yourself, how to survive, how to withstand psychological pressure, how to support the army and the people around you. Almost every concert that takes place in the country is not primarily aimed at creative innovation, but at charity fundraising and saving culture from collapse, and this is, unfortunately, the main motivation to do something. Of course, there is no way to think only about music, and therefore, it is quite difficult to talk about musical development in Ukraine today. And yet, art plays a key role in this struggle for survival, because it unites different people for the sake of one idea, and with the right support from the outside, it can blossom into a vibrant colour. This inspires not only artists to boldly express themselves in the world but also the world to accept and support them.