Shapoval Sextet: Kobzareva duma
Review by Tomasz Grzegorczyk
Shapoval Sextet
Kobzareva duma
(Shukai, 2020)
24 and a half minutes - this is how much survives from the recording of Oleksandr Shapoval’s Sextet performance at the 1976 Donetsk Jazz Festival. However, the shortness of the material is compensated for by its intensity, and the recorded composition is one of the most interesting achievements in the entire history of Ukrainian jazz.
Shapoval was an interesting figure in his own right. A saxophonist and flutist, he was one of Dnipro's most important musicians of the 1960s and 1970s. He graduated from the Mining Institute and worked for six years as an engineer at the Institute of Geotechnical Physics of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, but later also completed his musical studies in choral conducting. In the 1970s he led the popular band Vodogari, with which he recorded two albums for the Soviet label Melodia. However, his greatest artistic achievement was the composition Kobzareva Duma with fragments of Taras Shevchenko's lyrics. All told it was one of the first pieces to use Ukrainian folk motifs and the Ukrainian language itself in jazz music. Shapoval's sextet often performed the suite in concerts, but the only recording of it was lost - until it was happily found 45 years later.
How does this material sound today? Superbly! Genre-wise, the recording is wonderfully eclectic - avant folk mixes with rock drive and ecstatic free. However, this whole stylistic kaleidoscope is logical and subservient to Shapoval's sense of composition. Cosmic guitar effects sit side by side with classicising piano parts, folk ritualism with psychedelic trumpet reverberations, and dense funk with the late Coltrane-style saxophone of the leader. And it only takes two notes of Shapoval's tenor - confident and fat - to be sure that this is an instrumental heavyweight. It's a great pity that he wasn't allowed to record more often, but let's enjoy what we have - probably the most avant-garde Soviet-period recording in the history of Ukrainian jazz.