Kyiv hosts first children’ s festival

Two events occurred in the city’s jazz life in the first half of October. The 44 Art Club, owned by Eric Aigner, a well-known patron of young people’s alternative music, hosted for three days the Atlant-M first children’s jazz festival actively sponsored by an automobile company. The participating children were selected by Oleksiy Kohan, radio commentator, jazz concert host, and jury member at the last academic year’s city jazz contest of musical school pupils. The concerts were accompanied by the Skhid-Side jazz quintet. Adult musicians also played and sang with about thirty children. Among the participants was American vocalist Denise Perrier accompanied by Petersburg keyboardist Andrei Kondakov, a Kyiv duet of Yuliya Roma (vocal) and Natalia Lebedeva (keyboard), and the Beauty Band girls’ vocal ensemble. After the performance, the children received gifts and their first hard-earned, if small, money. The club bubbled with the sensation of feast, fun, and happiness for all — artists, parents, teachers, and guests.

Then played the Austrian duet Muthspiel Brothers, consisting of brothers Christian (trombone, piano, and recorder) and Wolfgang (guitar and violin) Muthspiels. Concerts at Aquarium and 44 were part of the cycle Art Club 44 Presents World Jazz Stars. The tour, called Early Music, is dedicated to the duet’s twentieth anniversary and the memory of the musicians’ father, the prominent Austrian choirmaster Kurt Muthspiel. It is the father who molded the tastes and interests of these stars of the first magnitude. The brothers, more than once recognized as Europe’s best jazzmen, work at the Vienna Art Orchestra, one of the best in the world. Playing an hour and a half, the musicians performed eight fifteen to thirty minute compositions. Theirs is typical modern European jazz music consisting of three components: the American jazz skeleton, the muscles of European philharmonic chamber avant-garde, and the skin that covers this musical body (in this case, of Tyrolean folklore intonations).

The program’s title has a dual meaning. Every composition was preceded with a brief introduction, a fragment of an audio CD recording by a choir conducted by Kurt Muthspiel performing late- Renaissance choral music from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.