Dennis Adu: The story of human unity
Dennis Adu
author, musician
Citizen Jazz (українська та французька версії)
Donos kulturalny (польська версія)
Dennis Adu is a well-known Ukrainian jazz musician, trumpeter, composer, bandleader, senior lecturer at the Department of Jazz Music and director of the Glier Kyiv Music Academy Jazz Orchestra. Since the beginning of the war, Dennis Adu has become one of the jazz musicians with the strongest civic position.
Dennis Adu © Serhiy Sarakhanov
"At first, we didn't know what to do. But when the Ukrainian Art Front was founded in Lviv in March 2022, we did everything we could - unloading trucks, sending humanitarian supplies, coordinating the movement of refugees, playing at the LV Cafe Jazz Club to raise funds for the Armed Forces, organising streams... I have never seen such unity of people," says Dennis.
The Ukrainian Art Front (UAF) is a project of Serhiy Fedorchuk, a Ukrainian musician and music event organiser, and Olha Chertkova, owner of the Kyiv-based communications agency Top Media Communication, which was launched to raise funds for the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
The beginning
The war caught me during my holiday in Vorokhta, Western Ukraine. On that day, my girlfriend Yana Vyalova, her parents and I were returning to Kyiv by train. For some time we hesitated whether to go or not. But we did it anyway, despite the fact that many friends called and asked us to stay where we were at the time.
“I will repeat this more than once: in the first days of the war, incredible things happened, I have never seen such cohesion and humanity in my life.”
When we got to Lviv, we decided to get off (the train did not reach Kyiv at that time - it was stopped 2 hours after it left Lviv). While still on the train, I made a post on Facebook: I was looking for a shelter for 4 people. At that time, there were already a lot of similar posts on social media, so I didn't expect much. But I was lucky that I know many musicians across the country: soon Anastasia Lytvyniuk (Ukrainian pianist, teacher and composer, initiator and co-founder of the Lviv band ShockolaD) wrote to me and told me that she and Ihor Hnydyn (Ukrainian drummer, teacher and composer, also co-founder of ShockolaD) had left for Poland. They still had an apartment in Lviv, so they let us stay there. Andriy Kokhan, a musician, gave us the keys, and we moved in, as we thought, for a few days, but as it turned out later, for at least six months.
I will repeat this more than once: in the first days of the war, incredible things happened, I have never seen such cohesion and humanity in my life.
In the early days of the war, people helped each other as much as they could and in any way they could. There were many people on social media who needed shelter or help getting to the border. Since I have a lot of friends on Facebook, I realised that I had to gather people who had cars that could take passengers with them or host people, and I sent their contacts to those who were seeking refuge in different parts of our country. It was very gratifying, especially when these logistical things worked out and people thanked me for arranging a joint trip or finding a place to stay.
That's how I ended up in Lviv, but at that time I didn't know that an incredible number of musicians from all over the country would end up in this city, and what a common cause it would turn into later.
How did we know what to do?
After the first few days of panic, stress, sleepless nights on the phone and not knowing what was going on around me, I got a call from Serhiy Fedorchuk on 28 February. He asked me if I wanted to join Yakiv Tsvetinskyi, Yaroslav Kazmirchuk (trumpeter, Lviv), Vlad Grudnytskyi (pianist, Dnipro), David Kolpakov (saxophonist, Kyiv), and Taras Kushniruk (guitarist, Lviv), Mykola Goncharenko (guitar, Lviv), Dmytro Zuiev (double bass, Dnipro) to join in filling the bags with sand and loading them for further transport to the checkpoints where the military need them. I didn't hesitate to answer for a long time - I felt the need to help in any way I could.
Left to right: D. Adu, M. Honcharenko, Y. Tsvetinskyi, D. Kolpakov, Y. Kazmirchuk, V. Hrydnytsky, D. Zuev, unknown (photo from archive of Dennis Adu)
This was the beginning of our various volunteer activities. All the guys worked very hard - at the same time it was quite cold and hot for us.
The cohesion and efficiency of the work was simply amazing, and only now I am beginning to analyse and think: how and by whom it was all organised, where the trucks and tractors came from, where the sand and bags, thousands of which were available (sometimes, when they ran out, we had to buy them at our own expense, because there was nowhere else to get sand) - it was like magic that was happening at that time.
Women came with thermoses and poured hot tea. A girl with a stroller came in, saw a bunch of boys and girls and returned an hour later with 2 pots of food. It was an atmosphere of pure labour, no one wanted to stop for a minute. Some people just walked by, saw what was happening, threw things on the ground and joined in.
A few days later, Serhiy received a call saying that a warehouse in Malekhiv (a town near Lviv) needed people; we started going there and working on unloading, sorting and loading medicines, food, clothes and various equipment. It was a huge warehouse, where 20-tonne trucks with various things and medicines arrived from abroad.
At first, it was a complete chaos - a lot of people, and no clear understanding of what to do and where to put it. No one could explain it clearly. This went on until one of the guys offered to lead the process because he had experience working at Nova Poshta. From that moment on, everything became completely different - he told me how to sort, where to put everything, how to load it correctly, and so on.
Once again, I was amazed at how people can organise themselves in difficult times, and how some of them can take responsibility. Everything in this warehouse worked like clockwork thanks to this self-organisation, from the maintenance of mechanical tasks to the creation of comfortable conditions, such as a mini-restaurant and recreation areas. It was incredible and, of course, completely voluntary.
J. Kazmirchuk, Y. Tsvetinskyi, D. Zuev are waiting for unloading (photo from archive of Dennis Adu)
For some time, no one really talked to each other, most of the time they talked about business. After a while, someone asked over lunch: "Guys, what do you do in general?" And we told him that in our everyday lives we are jazz musicians. Then we had an idea to boost the morale of the volunteers working at the warehouse - we decided that the next day, during the lunch break, we would play a small mini-concert right on the street in front of the warehouse.
“...there is a war going on, people are coming from Kharkiv, Dnipro, Luhansk, Mariupol, and we need to find something that is not too cheerful, but not too sad - something that lifts the spirit. We thought about it for a while and decided that it should be John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Bobby Timmons.”
At the railway station in Lviv
Over time, Serhii created a telegram chat and began to gradually add musicians who were in Lviv at the time. They were mostly jazz musicians, but there were also local guys from the Philharmonic. Every day, this chat received information about where, why and how many people were needed.
Our Lviv team and I mostly worked in Malekhiv, and then I joined us. But there were days when we worked in other locations, for example, at the railway station. It was quite a lot of work, as many people were arriving every minute. Some people needed to get to the border with their belongings, small children and pets, some were looking for shelter in the city, some were hungry. There were people who left without clothes and belongings, taking only the most necessary things. Sometimes the guys and I made sandwiches in the tents, sometimes we helped Serhiy, who coordinated the cars that took refugees to the border and returned for more.
Several times my task was to regulate the flow of people and cars at the pedestrian crossing. Because there were so many people walking towards the tents where they were being fed and provided with various assistance, a huge number of cars could not pass, and a huge traffic jam formed in this place. The traffic jam was made up of cars bringing and taking people, or bringing water and food.
To be honest, my conducting skills helped me a lot at that time. I gestured very intensely. Sometimes I also had to shout because people were either on their phones or walking, looking right through me. I didn't judge them - they were probably coming from hell - but I tried to do everything politely and clearly, as best I could. Of course, the reaction was sometimes very unpredictable, some people looked at me as a sick person, and some, realising later what I was doing and why, came back and thanked me. The most grateful, of course, were the drivers, and there were even those who came to the station several times and greeted me with gestures as if we were "friends".
One day, when I was regulating traffic at this pedestrian crossing, a girl drove by in a car. As I was letting her through and holding up pedestrians, I saw her open her window and shout out to me: "Are you Dennis Adu?" and I replied: "Yes, I am. Drive faster, don't hold up the traffic." I could see the surprise and confusion in her eyes, but she also had a smile on her face. It was nice. But there was no time to be surprised, everything, both sad and happy, was realised later.
Working in a call centre
I will also never forget the night when my girlfriend Yana and I worked in a call centre that provided information on the city of Kharkiv (Kharkiv SOS). It was already getting dark, and we received a message in our chat from Sergey saying that they needed 2 people to work in the call centre overnight to inform people about various issues. No one volunteered for a while, so Yana and I decided to go. We were greeted by a very charismatic girl (unfortunately, I don't remember her name), she was very polite, but extremely tired (she had been working for 2 days without a break) and very quickly began to explain to us what we needed to do.
There was so much information that my memory stopped working after 5 minutes of her explanations. We were a little scared that we wouldn't be able to cope with this task, but it was too late to refuse, and the curfew was approaching, so we stayed. By the way, after the briefing, this girl tried to call a taxi, but there was still an hour before the curfew and no one wanted to take the call. I remembered that Pavlo Lytvynenko, a pianist from Kyiv, had permission to drive at that time, as he was working as a volunteer and transporting people. I called him, and he helped this girl get home and take a break.
We stayed and studied the information on the walls and in the computer for a while. Mostly there were lists of volunteers with cars that could take people to train stations or other cities in case of emergency, a map with districts of Kharkiv, various phone numbers of organisations, schedules of suburban buses that were still running at that time, train schedules and so on.
Everything was quiet until about 5am, then the calls started. As we found out later, at that moment, shelling started in Kharkiv and people were calling in panic, asking how best to evacuate the city, how to get to the railway station or suburban villages, etc. We provided them with information as best we could; there were an incredible number of calls, phones rang at the same time, and the questions were very different.
One woman who was in a bedridden state asked if someone could pick her up and take her to her relatives in the village. I tried to give her the phone numbers of volunteers with cars who could do this. There was a man who asked how best to get to the train station, I advised him to use the taxi apps we were told to offer people during the briefing, he called back a few minutes later and said that one of the apps offered him UAH 11,000 for a few kilometres of travel, and he was again asking what he should do.
It was a very stressful night, because we understood that our job was to inform people and tell them what their options were and where they could go, so we could not influence their situations in any other way. It was very difficult when people called, especially the elderly, and just shouted into the phone: "Help us, we are at such and such an address, we have limited mobility, we need to get to the train station urgently, send someone"; at such a moment, we advised them to call 102, because it was the police who were evacuating people with disabilities. At 8 am, everything started to calm down more or less, our shift arrived, and we, exhausted physically and mentally, went to rest.
Music again
On 18 March, Serhiy came up with an idea, as he put it, to "demagnetise" the people arriving at the station by evacuation trains, and to do it with music. He suggested that we form a small ensemble and play at the main entrance to the railway station. A very important part of the performance was the selection of repertoire, because there is a war going on, people are coming from Kharkiv, Dnipro, Luhansk, Mariupol, and we needed to find something that was not too cheerful but not too sad - something that would lift the spirit. We thought about it for a while and decided that it should be John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Bobby Timmons.
The reaction to our performance was very diverse, people came out, some of them didn't understand what was happening at all, some shouted something like: "There's a war going on, and you're here with your music at the wrong time" (without the rude epithets). But by the end of the first song, we had already gathered a small circle of people who were listening attentively, and some were filming with their phones. There were also people who came up and thanked us. After some improvisation, I heard somewhere in the crowd: "Mum, look, it's Dennis Adu playing the trumpet, it's just incredible" (we later took a picture with that boy).
There were a lot of emotions during the game, I saw these eyes of confused people, understood the despair of their losses and tried to encourage them through my instrument and say something like: "Everything will be fine with you, you will cope with this, you are strong!" Of course, at that time I hadn't played the trumpet for almost a month, which was one of the longest breaks I've ever had in my life, but I gathered all my spirit and strength and played as if it was the last time.
D. Kolpakov, S. Fedorchuk, D. Adu, A. Arnautov, M. Krysa, K. Kravchuk (private archive)
After this performance, we gradually began to realise that we could also do good with music, not just work in warehouses. And we gradually started playing more.
К. Kravchuk, S. Fedorchuk, D. Adu (private archive)
LV Cafe Jazz Club
The LV Cafe Jazz Club has become a haven for musicians. The owner of the club, Yuriy Sadovyi, took the musicians under his wing and provided a venue where they could play charity concerts, hold jams and rehearsals. Musicians in difficulty could also have a free lunch at the club.
I remember the first jam session: there were so many musicians that it seemed like we were in Lviv not during the war, but during the Leopolis Jazz Festival - everyone missed music and what they could do. Events were developing so rapidly that we could barely finish before the curfew. It was immediately clear that the musicians wanted to play. Meanwhile, we continued to go to Malekhiv, as they still needed our help, but we started to create different ensembles and play charity concerts at LV.
It was an incredible time, there were so many different collaborations that are hard to imagine in peacetime, because so many musicians in one city would only get together there during Leopolis. It was a strange feeling, because the war was still going on, but on the other hand, it led to a small cultural boom around one jazz club, LV.
During these jams at LV, I met some young guys from Kharkiv. In recent years, I have not paid much attention to the musical environment of this city, and it has been a long time since I have heard about young talents from Kharkiv. So it was a pleasant surprise to meet them and hear them play at the jam. I was especially pleasantly surprised by the skills of one young musician, whose name was Lev Borovsky. He first approached me and asked if I could give him a lesson at the academy. I agreed, and during the lesson I immediately noticed that the guy was very talented and already knew a lot of things, but he impressed me with the number of instruments he had. At least at the jam, he played the trumpet and trombone very well, and he put out his own records where he played the tuba, the flute, and I think several other instruments.
Lev Borovsky © Yuriy Gryaznov
Having talked to Kharkiv's "young lions", I was very happy to hear that the Kharkiv music community continues to exist, and music lives on in this wonderful city.
Mykola Lysenko Lviv National Music Academy
The Mykola Lysenko Lviv National Music Academy has hosted many young musicians in its dormitory and given them the opportunity to study at the academy. It was very appropriate, because I had nowhere else to study. I turned to Ostap Ivanovych Maichyk (professor, head of the Department of Variety and Jazz Music), who kindly accepted me and gave me permission to attend the Academy. This gave me the opportunity to study, and it was incredible and very important at the time. In my opinion, there is a great lack of people who have the power and understand how the education system works, who know what young musicians need and can organise it for them. For me, Ostap Ivanovych Maichyk is an example of a person who supports various initiatives of young musicians, is interested in the musical life of the city, creates opportunities for young teachers and musicians, and generally does everything to make jazz musicians feel comfortable in Lviv.
I've seen him at various concerts and youth events, he always communicates with young people, and I think that's why he understands more about what to do for them and how to encourage them to create new music.
I realised that I hadn't experienced such pleasure from personal lessons on the instrument for a long time. Every day at the academy, I practised as if it were the last time in my life. It was also interesting to observe the students and teachers who looked at me and did not understand who I was, where I came from, and what I was doing here. Of course, there were also those who recognised me, came up to talk to me, asked me about various technical aspects of playing the instrument, as well as about improvisation. I was happy to share my knowledge and experience and even gave a few lessons to trumpet and trombone players.
I also remember meeting Yuriy Gryaznov, one of the best concert photographers and videographers in our country, at the club. I was very happy to see him - when I see him at a concert, I know that the photos from that concert will be incredible.
"Jazz in the Bomb Shelter"
In early April, the LV Cafe Jazz Club turned into an amazing cultural centre, with a variety of music playing every day, jams being held, and an amazing variety of ensembles, people could come to listen to the organ trio of Konstantin Goryachy, Taras Kushniruk, Yakov Tsvetinsky, Leonid Petkun, Yaroslav Kazmirchuk, Sergey Fedorchuk, Andrey Arnautov, and so on, all in different line-ups.
Once again, Serhii and Olha conceived an interesting project called Jazz in the Bomb Shelter and decided to implement it together with the famous Ukrainian bandura player, singer and composer KRUT. The purpose of these cultural events was to draw the attention of the foreign community to the events in Ukraine and to raise funds for the Armed Forces of Ukraine through donations during the video broadcast of these events. We made a whole programme of Maryna's songs, adapted her songs to our line-up, added improvisational parts to the pieces, and we came up with some pretty interesting material.
Maryna Krut © Yuriy Gryaznov
“Unbreakable”
Another big project of Ihor Zakus was the symphonic poem "Unbreakable", which was brought to life together with the Academic Symphony Orchestra of the Lviv National Philharmonic. The symphonic poem "Unbreakable" includes poems by Ukrainian poets written in the first month of the war between Ukraine and Russia.
"Ukrainian Jazz”
At the end of April, I was contacted by Mykola Kistenyov and Pavlo Ilnytsky, who had an interesting idea to make a programme called "Ukrainian Jazz" and offered me to make arrangements for several Ukrainian famous songs and American standards, which Pavlo was to sing in Ukrainian.
I got to work and we met for a rehearsal. We decided to record an album. We thought that we should somehow support the trend of the surge of Ukrainian culture and go on a small tour of western Ukraine, to lift people's spirits and moods with a Ukrainian song.
Returning to Kyiv. The Music Academy in Kyiv
Gradually, closer to June, the musicians began to leave for their homes in different parts of Ukraine, and I decided that it was also time to return to Kyiv in early July. At that time, the situation in Kyiv was more tense than in Lviv. Of course, this tension did not allow us to hold as many cultural events as in Lviv, because everyone was mostly at home, scrolling through social media, following the news. But slowly, some cultural events began to take place.
In July, the entrance exams to the Glier Academy of Music were held, and in September we returned to hybrid studies. Everyone understood that we also needed to encourage students to work and thus pull them out of the difficult moral situation they had found themselves in during the hostilities in their cities. Finally, we started to hold "offline classes", as during the first months of the war it was very difficult to study online, and most students were not always able to do so.
You could feel how much everyone missed playing together, even when we held orchestra classes with 5-6 people, everyone was very happy to be here, to play together and learn something new. The eyes of most students changed the moment they entered the rehearsal rooms, and I, along with them, forgot about the horrors that were happening in the country for 2.5 to 3 hours, and only the air raid alert brought us back to reality. All people began to get used to the conditions in which they had to live. And musicians are no exception.
International performances
It was quite a strange feeling, because as much as I travelled during the war, I had never travelled before. I also had a sense of surrealism when I travelled, going from my home country at war to the peaceful life of neighbouring countries. In these situations, I felt the need to talk about Ukrainian culture and draw the world's attention to what was happening here. All my performances abroad then began with the Ukrainian anthem.
The first experience of playing abroad for my quintet was participating in a cultural residency in Trnava, to which we were invited by Olga Bekenstein. It wasn't easy to get everyone's travel permits, and it was also difficult to get to the city itself. We spent about 36 hours on the road, with adventures - the first bus we got on in Kyiv broke down in Lviv. But it was a great performance, there were a lot of people from Ukraine who were very happy to see and hear us, and after the concerts, many people came up to us to thank us for our music and support.
Festival Of New Trumpet Music
About a year before, I received a letter from Dave Douglas, one of the most famous trumpet players and musicians of modern improvised music today. He wrote that he had come across my album Sunlight Above The Sky by chance and really liked it and would be happy if I could perform at the FONT festival one day (Dave is one of the founders of this festival, which has been going on for over 20 years). I gladly agreed. And in August 2022, Dave wrote again and said that for the last 3 years, due to covid, the festival has been held online and he wants to invite 3 trumpeters (Dmitry Bondarev, Yakov Tsvetinsky and me) from Ukraine to record a live video of the performance. Thus, Dave wanted to draw the attention of the American society to the war in Ukraine once again.
Europe Jazz Conference
Later, Mariana Bondarenko organised a trip to the Europe Jazz Conference for us. We went together with the famous Ukrainian sound producer and electronic artist Dmytro Avksentiev (Koloah), with whom we created a joint project a couple of years ago. Our performance took place at the conference when all these people were gathered in a huge hall. I can safely say that thanks to this performance, I have new opportunities to perform abroad.
Musicians with Maryana Bondarenko (private archive)
SVITANOK festival in Norway
In November, Olga Bekenstein wrote to me and offered to go to Norway to perform with the very famous Norwegian musician Bugge Wesseltoft at the SVITANOK festival. It was very unexpected and pleasant, especially as I found out later that it was Bugge's idea to invite me. As I found out later, he was in Kyiv 10 years ago with a concert, heard me at a jam session at the Barmen Diktat club, and wanted to do a joint performance. Other performers at the festival included singer Olesia Zdorovetska, sound producer and drummer Stanislav Ivashchenko, and Kyiv-based sound producer, film composer and singer Mariana Klochko. The first concert took place in Oslo at the underground club Bla, and the next one in Bergen at the Bergenkjott club. This time, Lesia Zdorovetska and I played together with local musicians from Bergen, and it was my first concert of completely improvised music, without any preliminary discussion or rehearsal - we just met at a sound check, got to know each other, and after everyone checked their instruments, I asked if we would agree on anything and choose some songs to play together. The double bass player from the band answered me: "Why? I feel like we're going to be fine." And the drummer added: "I've been playing only improvised concerts for 10 years now". It surprised me a lot, but I'm open to new experiences. And surprisingly, I really liked it - the musicians were very experienced, listened to each other and responded incredibly.
San Jose Winter Jazz Festival: Counterpoint With Ukraine
It was an incredible journey and series of performances. That winter, San Jose JF decided to hold the festival together with the Am I Jazz? festival, founded and directed by Olga Bekenstein, in order to support Ukrainian culture, to present it at the festival and to draw attention to the war. In addition to the musicians, the choreographer and impro dancer Alina Sokulska, who has been involved in several projects, also came there. In turn, the Ukrainian musicians included Yakiv Tsvetinskyi, Borys Mohylevskyi, Ihor Osypov, Olesia Zdorovetska, and Vadym Neseelovskyi.
Together with Boris Mohylevskyi, we travelled by train from Kyiv to Warsaw, then flew for 20 hours with three transfers to San Francisco, and then transferred by car to San Jose. Together with Boris, we played three concerts at the festival, two concerts with the Marcus Shelby Orchestra and one concert with Marcus' trio, as well as an inspiring meeting with Ambrose Akinmusiri. The trip was also memorable for the communication with ordinary Americans who were very interested in what was happening in Ukraine. Many people started the conversation with the words: "Is it true that you have a war there that is shown on our TV?". We had to tell them about the realities in which we live, what we know and see every day. Many of these people were shocked by our stories. I felt again that our mission is not only to promote Ukrainian culture, but also to talk about how important it is to support Ukraine at all possible levels.
During the first months of the war, I realised that I could be useful in a warehouse or regulate a crossroads if necessary. I can do whatever is needed. But I am a musician, and I know how to play music better than anything else. I believe that the preservation and development of culture is an important component in the development of the nation and society. I will do much more good by playing the trumpet, raising funds at concerts and spreading our culture around the world, than by doing other activities not related to music.