Pianoboy Jazz Live concert on Ukraine's Constitution Day
Dmitry Shurov:
When I joined the Okean Elzy band at the age of 18, the guys nicknamed me “jazz evil”, probably because they were afraid that my love for jazz would break simple and understandable rock and roll. However, life has shown that what drives me most in music is going beyond styles and genres, because this is the energy of association: one person loves simple pop music, another more sophisticated jazz and a third complex classics, but if you juggle styles with love, you can unite people of different tastes and horizons.
Moreover, the piano boy inevitably became a man. My goal is not to impress with technique or an avant-garde approach. I just want to celebrate jazz in all its variety. I want to experience on the Leopolis Jazz Fest stage everything that jazz has given to our civilisation and to me personally – frenzy, riot, sadness, stuffy bars, walks in the rain, the wheezing of old records...
The programme we’re preparing takes what’s closest and most interesting to me in jazz and transmits it through the lens of my songs, established hits and pieces of forgotten classics. It will be a very emotional mix of early b-bop, cool-jazz, swing, Cuban and Brazilian jazz, avant-garde jazz, funk and fusion, tango and, of course, lyrics – ballads, jazz waltzes. We definitely won’t do without classical music, because it’s all part of our comprehension of ourselves as people of the postmodern era.
Jazz is a very companionable and unifying story. It’s a pleasure to play music together: the real magic comes from the contact between like-minded people. This is why I have not only our permanent bass player on stage in our jazz programme, but also a well-known jazz musician, Nikolay Kistenev, and a large band of Ukrainian vocal soloists.
Let’s celebrate jazz!
