Cheres to bring authentic Ukrainian folk to the Richmond Folk Festival.
Andriy Milavsky has been called “the Charlie Parker of Ukraine.” Even though bebop jazz and Ukrainian village music are seemingly worlds apart, the bandleader and clarinetist can see the connection.
“Charlie Parker, ‘Bird,’ was known for playing in the fast tempo, rapid chord changes and instrumental virtuosity so characteristic for the bebop style,” says Milavsky, a longtime jazz fan, calling from New York City. “I see the resemblance with our repertoire and don’t mind the comparison at all, since Bird was a great musician.”
Milavsky’s five-piece band, Cheres, will be one of the featured performers at this year’s Richmond Folk Festival, slated for Oct. 13-15. The Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress calls Cheres “the best purveyor of authentic Ukrainian folk music in the United States.” Powered by Milavsky’s virtuosic turns on the clarinet and other woodwinds, and flavored with Igor Iachimciuc’s exotic cimbalom, a type of hammered dulcimer, the band’s fast-moving take on traditional Eastern European wedding marches and circle dances draws from an endless well of Carpathian Mountain traditions.
But when Milavsky, 61, came to the U.S. more than 30 years ago, after earning a master’s degree from the Kyiv State Conservatory of Music, he wanted to play American jazz. It was a “bizarre” music that had been forbidden when Ukraine was a Soviet republic. “I played traditional jazz and learned how to play jazz piano with the left hand. It was fun. So I could have been a jazz musician.”
Instead, he became one of Ukrainian music’s most potent folk ambassadors, performing traditional works over the years with different incarnations of Cheres. The band name comes from a protective, metal-studded ornamental belt worn in Milavsky’s home country. “In the olden days it was a warrior’s belt,” he says. “Essentially a bulletproof vest. In the same way, we are preventing these folk traditions from vanishing in a technological world and its progress.”
Cheres specifically keeps alive the sounds and songs of the Carpathian region — that includes Ukraine but also its neighbors. “We play indigenous music that comes from the ages. It has elements of Hungarian and Romanian music because it’s all music from the mountains,” he says. “Sometimes a Hungarian will live in Ukraine, sometimes a Ukrainian will live in Bulgaria, it’s [intertwined]. These places all have distinct musical traditions, but it’s like language. Latin can [inform] the other languages, but those languages are still Italian and French and German.”
Pete Rushefsky, the executive director of New York’s Center for Music and Dance, says that Richmond audiences are in for an experience. “Cheres plays wonderful music, very soulful, it can be very frenzied at times, and it reflects the diversity of the Carpathian region. They are conservatory trained, but at the same time they grew up playing traditional weddings and celebrations so they have a foot in both worlds.”
These are living, breathing traditions that go back thousands of years, he adds. “It’s absolutely still vital, particularly in the Carpathian mountains, a rural area that holds onto tradition. But across Ukraine there are state-sponsored groups that support this music, and if you go to a wedding up on the mountain this is the kind of music you are likely to hear.”
Milavsky was born in Hryniv, in the Halychyna region on the outskirts of Lviv. It’s the same village where his grandfather Mykhailo Sypko played the clarinet — which he found on the side of the road and learned to play himself — and led the village band alongside his brother. After grandfather died, he inherited his clarinet and it became his signature instrument (he’s proficient on nearly two dozen).
“No one in the old days had a musical education,” he says, adding that his grandfather’s music included a lot of polkas. He argues that being musically trained helps him to interpret the old Carpathian songs and motifs. “There was no counterpoint in my grandfather’s music, but we can tastefully put it in. It’s still folky, there’s still dust and beer and sweat in it, but it’s richer.” He jokingly refers to the sound as “Carpathian bluegrass,” a reference to another Western music genre he loves.
When performing, Milavsky doesn’t talk much about his homeland’s ongoing war with Russia — “I’m not a politician, I’m a musician.” He’s more concerned with preserving Ukrainian traditions and touting its culture. What most Westerners know about the region isn’t always good, he points out. “The first big thing that happened to Ukraine was Chernobyl, so the world discovered Ukraine in a bad way. And we were part of the Soviet Union for a long time, so people would always refer to us as Russians.”
“They let the mission do the talking,” Blaine Waide says. “When I saw them, they didn’t mention the conflict once. This isn’t the first time Ukraine has been threatened so it’s more about the historic need to preserve and defend the culture.”
Waide is associate director of the National Council For the Traditional Arts (NCTA), which programs the RFF and others, like the National Folk Festival. “If you think about the mission of the NCTA, it is about honoring and celebrating the cultural traditions of all Americans,” he says. “And part of our work is to advocate for cultures when they are threatened. In the case of Ukraine, in a very intentional way there’s an argument being made that a distinct culture does not exist there, that it’s just a diluted version of Russian culture.” Cheres is the perfect corrective to that view, he adds.
Today, Milavsky lives in midtown Manhattan with his wife, Lila, a retired writer and editor. She sang with Cheres in its earliest days. “She even played the double-headed drums that I brought back from Ukraine,” he says. “She doesn’t perform with us now. She’s now a published poet. That has always been her dream and now she can do it full time.”
Milavsky’s dream continues to be keeping his embattled homeland’s traditions alive and pure. “Some people just do folk music because it’s a job,” he says. “They don’t know the difference between stage folk and real folk. We are on a stage, yes, but we keep it real. That’s my mission.”
The Richmond Folk Festival takes place Oct. 13-15 along the Richmond waterfront. For more information and a detailed schedule, go to richmondfolkfestival.org