The upcoming Music Without Borders concert features the music and collaboration of Ukraine's Braty Bluzu, the Netherland's Rens Newland and Canada's Lionel Lodge.
rom three different countries playing distinct styles of music.
But what makes this concert unusual is that each participant will perform not their own music and genre, but the compositions of one of the other groups.
Ukrainian band Braty Bluzu, Dutch funk-jazz guitarist Rens Newland and Canadian folksinger-guitarist Lionel Lodge will play at the event, which promises to be more of a jam session than a performance.
The concept of Music Without Borders came about after the 1998 Sziget Music Festival in Budapest, where the musicians met for the first time. Sziget provided the right atmosphere to encourage culture crossover and musical experimentation – and the stimulus for Music Without Borders.
“The concert was a wonderful mixture of our cultures that blended our musical colors into a finely woven tapestry,” wrote Lodge in an e-mail interview from Austria, where he is currently on tour.
Newland said that the collaboration is a natural fit, despite the diverse backgrounds of the three acts.
“Music and the arts don’t accept borders,” Newland said. “Although we have a long way to go, this is a start.”
Newland said the need for integration was driven home to him during his first visit to Ukraine last Christmas, when he had to tackle a real border issue.
“Passing the heavy-duty border control into Ukraine made me realize even more that we need to break down these borders through the arts,” he said.
But the musicians admit that it hasn’t been easy. Braty Bluzu, Newland and Lodge found that logistics and overcoming cultural and musical barriers proved challenging.
After meeting at the Sziget festival, they began exchanging songs via the Internet, and playing each others’ music.
“When we first exchanged our songs through e-mail, we all were afraid to add our own style and technique,” Myroslav Levytsky of Braty Bluzu said. “We were afraid that the other person might not agree to the new sounds they were hearing.”
Even the styles of composing were very different, Levytsky said.
“We come from different schools of music,” he said. “Ukrainian musicians write down the notes of a song and then play it, while Westerners create the songs in their heads and then write down the notes.”
The system has worked well for Braty Bluzu. The six-member Ivano Frankivsk band has been playing music together for nearly a decade.
While the name Braty Bluzu sounds like it might mean “Blues Brothers,” it is a slang phrase meaning to “Take off your jacket” or, simply, “relax” in Ukrainian.
Instead of blues, the group plays instrumental jazz. Braty Bluzu has performed in Poland and in Belarus at the Slovyansky Bazaar music festival. And the band was invited to perform for U.S. President Bill Clinton during his visit to Ukraine in 1995.
The band hasn’t performed together in a while because the band’s saxophonist Oleh Levytsky is currently living and playing in Chicago. But Oleh Levytsky will return to Ukraine to play the concert.
Levytsky said working with Newland and Lodge has opened doors of musical opportunity for Braty Bluzu.
“We laid bare our imaginations to the possibilities and found new worlds in the process,” he said. “I feel that there is a brotherhood between us.”
Experimenting with music and culture via the Internet is one thing. Performing live together is another. Braty Bluzu, Newland and Lodge got that chance last June at the Linz musical festival in Austria when they played together for the first time.
“The main challenge for me is being open to the eccentricities of the performance and staying together through it,” he said, “riding it out with each other.”
On Oct. 29 the musicians will perform separately, except for one piece that will be played by Myroslav and Newland.
Backing up the their blend of jazz, funk and folk will be Swiss violinist Oana Zaharya, the string section of the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra, bass guitarist Volodymyr Sorochenko of the group Air Jazz and Second Breath drummer Volodymyr Myhailchenko.
Music Without Borders
Oct. 29, 8 p.m.
Ukrainian House.
Tickets $40.
For information, call 228-0026.
