Oleh Skrypka’s jazz-cabaret

Recently Oleh Skrypka presented his new album Dahlia in the fashionable metropolitan club Crystal Hall. This album can be called his new experiment. (Probably, explaining the singer’s creative longevity.)

The disk is recorded in jazz-cabaret style in cooperation with the band Zabava. Work on the disk lasted for five years: it started in Toronto, continued in Kyiv, and finished in New York. The CD is based on Bohdan Veselovsky’s songs; he lived in Lviv in the 1930s-1940s and then immigrated to Canada for political reasons. The famous composer is called one of the first creators of Ukrainian popular music. His light and rowdy tracks were played in cafes and restaurants in Lviv. They were mostly played by orchestras of the time, notably the one of Leonid Yablonsky (the Yabets orchestra), in which Veselovsky performed. However, his songs were so popular that they were played all over Halychyna and Bukovyna. Some of them were even seriously considered folk songs, for example the song “Brown eyes.”

Oleh Skrypka and his band managed to find the unique materials in Toronto and to reproduce the authentic arrangement and performance. As a result, the audience is plunged into an atmosphere of elegance and light humor of one of the cities in Halychyna, Bukovyna, or Ukraine in general at the beginning of the 20th century

“Jazz, tango, foxtrot, swing are often considered European or transatlantic genres,” says the musician. “With this project I want to show that our country has its rich and unique music history, too. We started the tradition of jazz-cabaret soirees,” adds Oleh, “where the atmosphere of openness and chic reigns. Now, in times of wild eclectics, it seems interesting to revive this genre using modern techniques. A hundred years ago cabarets were analogues of present clubs and parties, and the musical component of the concerts harmoniously united popular genres of the time: jazz, urban love song and operetta. Later, within the last genre the aesthetics of the Broadway musicals, various erotic shows and even rock-n-roll was formed, but the tradition of ‘drunken dances on the tables’ comes from cabaret.”

“We can say many things about Oleh Skrypka — that sometimes he repeats himself in his creative work,” sums up Yurko Zeleny, “but the fact that he’s a musical trendsetter is indisputable. In the 1980s when his band VV was created, their leader set the fashionable trend of funny, entertaining and ironic songs in Ukrainian. Later he popularized the ethnic style. On the one hand, a lot of musicians started using folk songs in their creative work; on the other hand, there were many events that followed the ‘Country of dreams.’ I’m sure that his new initiative will have its followers as well, and they will mostly play in various dives and not in the big concert halls. Accordingly, they will be able to fill the sector of chanson on the radio. It will be the Ukrainian chanson. Grown on our ground, without criminal aesthetics. And finally, all the initiatives of VV leader have an educational component. This is important.”