A Ukrainian band is treating international audiences to their country’s traditional folk music, spiced up with world music and some rap, with the aim of aiding the struggle against cultural “assimilation” of their country by its neighbor Russia.
Ukraine’s DakhaBrakha ensemble started their performance at the Parisian Cabaret Sauvage with the greeting “Good evening from free Ukraine,” before singer Marko Halanevych, cellist Nina Garenetska, keyboardist Iryna Kovalenko and percussionist Olena Tsybulska launch into the evening’s program.
Wearing identical traditional peasant blouses and layers of necklaces, the group’s three women could pass for sisters. Their tall black hats resembling stove pipes, but are just a fun prop with no actual roots in Ukrainian folklore.
Photo AFP
“We’ve been suffering from Russia’s assimilation policy for three hundred years,” Halanevych said.
After “so many tragic episodes, it’s a miracle that Ukrainian identity, culture and language still exist,” the trained philologist added.
Much of modern Ukraine’s territory was part of the Russian empire under the tsars and then the Soviet Union following the Bolshevik Revolution.
Photo: AFP
Many Western analysts said that Russian President Vladimir Putin long dreamed of absorbing Ukraine into Russian territory even before the February 2022 full-scale invasion.
In conversation, the singer’s fatigue becomes apparent. He admits to being tired, not just from the group’s ongoing tour taking it to France, Switzerland and Luxembourg, but also from the strain brought on by Russia’s war on his country.
DakhaBrakha’s concerts are interspersed with reminders of the conflict, and part of the proceeds go to the national war effort.
“We are aware of course that people in Europe are tired of hearing about it,” Halanevych said. “We understand, and we don’t judge.”
After a two-year break due to the Russian invasion, DakhaBrakha, which has been around for two decades, resumed touring, mostly abroad, but sometimes at home.
Last spring, the quartet performed in Dnipro in the east of the country — where the gig was interrupted three times by air raid sirens — as well as in Chernivtsi, Odesa and Vinnytsia. Next month, it is planning its first studio session since 2020 in Kyiv, which they called “an important and symbolic choice” of location.
The folkloric repertoire has seen a resurgence in Ukraine over the past decades, with ethnomusicologists often recording elderly women to preserve the heritage as faithfully as possible.
However, DakhaBrakha is not shy about lacing central European polyphonic traditions with thumping bass lines, distorted electric guitars and vocal lines akin to rapping.
Their concerts, which have taken them across Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, sometimes have moments of “disconnect” as news from home abruptly bursts into joyful performances with alarm signals from Ukraine flashing up on their smartphone apps.
“Each time we worry about our loved ones,” Halanevych said.
The quartet’s front man is the first to acknowledge that weaponizing music might not be enough of a contribution to the war effort indefinitely, given that Ukraine is finding it increasingly difficult to recruit soldiers.
“We may need more people to take up arms or dig trenches,” he said. “I am ready to defend my country.”
Halanevych’s brother Taras, 37, a journalist and sound engineer, began his military training last month.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS