May Concerts

Well, to say honestly, three concerts I visited this May weren't great.
First, on 10th, was my first visit to Kremenchuk, which is town of about 200 with something thousand people. I was surprised a little when I acknowledged that there are some jazz musicians, especially free-jazz musicians. I meet pianist Sergey Goruynovich month before on concert in Cherkasy. He plays something quite like Cecil Taylor. This time I came to see him in his home setting. But performance was weird a bit. Mostly, what struck me is that it was in a restaurant. Half of program was vocal standard jazz and other half an improvising music. Sergey is nice academically drilled pianist and he quotes classical music a lot from "Flight of a bumble bee" to Schostakovich 7th Symphony, but I guess he's more suited for solo playing.
Small footage here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZG3-3-K9SA
Succeeding concert on May 23nd was Petras Vysniauskas duo with pianst Egidijus Buozis. Petras is excellent free-jazz player but that standard program he turned into some kind of mockery. It was fun to watch, not very interesting to listen.
And the final concert of month was Lviv performance of quartet of saxophonist Roby Glod, pianist Roberta Piket, bassist Mark Tokar and drummer Klaus Kugel. Due to scarce of time I didn't write about concert in English. But the gist of what I wrote in my Ukrainian review was that quartet wasn't playing very coherently. To me, despite nice soloing that evening, compositions at whole seem not very well-rounded. Nevertheless, that was the best concert I visit in May and also I had a chance to spend some time with Yury Yaremchuk. He showed me very interesting recording he made that day.
Now it is summer and the closest event I'm planning to visit is a concert of bunch of people consisting of Perry Robinson, Waclaw Zimpel, Bobby Few, Mark Tokar, Klaus Kugel. For me, a big fan of Mr. Few, it's a huge event but it is planned as far as October.

April Concerts

For quite some time there was no recent reason to write here. Sonore blasted at the end of last year and after that came lull. I wasn't expecting it would last for such long time, but the resolution worth time to wait.
Three consequent sunny April days were denoted with great perefomances.
The 16 of April came Ukrainian trio of Yaremchuck, Goryunovich, Zhilin titled Creative Improvising Trio in city of Cherkasy. Some idea of music you can get from this little video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkulExgsQB8
Yaremchuck is brilliant soloist and indeed worth a lot more appreciation than he got now. The pianist Goryunovich and drummer Zhilin two new names for me (and I'm truely glad that there I still can find new people who playing free music) .
Next day was in Zaporizhzhya. Jamaaladeen Tacuma's recent project Coltrane Configuration. Funky and rejoicing music of John Coltrane was much gratefully admitted by the audience (and me also).
And the next day was the fascinating concert of pianist Havard Wiik Trio in Kyiv. That was quite a revelation to me; even listening his stuff before (with this unit also) I didn't expect his music to be such astounding. His trio brilliantly integrated band with gracefully panned themes and stunting soloist.
So, I had three concerts in three evning in three cities on one great river of Dnypro, all three absolutely differen, and all three definetely nice.

A pinch of geography

That is Ukraine (click to see whole map). What could be said about its free-jazz? I hope some musicians I'm not awere of play in many cities but two best are from Lviv (the most wester red point). Those two are Mark Tokar and Yuriy Yaremchuk. Besides its local players its possesses the longest jazz-fest in Ukraine where head-liners this year was Sonore trio.
Another important city is Zaporizhzhya which is base for enthusiastic guys which call themselves Creative Jazz Fans (CJF). Among others they organized concerts of Ken Vandermark and Charles Gayle.
There were two free-jazz events in capital Kyiv of which I'm aknowleged: loft electro-acoustic performance of Yuriy Yaremchuk and Russian cellist Vlad Makarov in big contemporary art festival called GogolFest ans also concert of Russian free-jazz multi-instrumentalist Sergei Letov in art-gallery.
For the first time in Kyiv took place richly advertised Jazz In Kiyv fest which was not dealing (I hope only this year) with free music.

Second largest city is Kharkiv home of Zajazz fest with great performance of trio of Petras Vysniasuskas, Mark Tokar and Klaus Kugel.
And finally tiny resort town on city shore Koktebel is home for Koktebel Jazz Festival with performance of (not too free these days but a notable figure in jazz history) Archie Shepp and post-Soviet free-jazz spoken-words project Pushkin Jazz (Yuriy Pafenov - trumpet, Alexandr Alexandrov - basson and bass clarinet, Vladimr Volkov - bass, Vladimir Tarasov - drums and unknown for me poet spoken words).
And the final red dot is Kirovograd the town where I live and where you more likely see Godzilla then some jazz concert.
That's something like a sum of free-jazz events in Ukraine in '08.

Welcome

Hello all!
I am from Ukraine and my biggest interest is music. I write from time to time to local journals and resources. I will try to expose the situation with free music here. Hope somebody will be interesting in it.

P.S. Title is borrowed from a great and underrated trumpeter Eddie Gale.