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.
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS