A duo that in its own unique way combines jazz improvisation with dying-off traditional songs from Polissya region in Ukraine. In their compositions they evoke spring, wedding and love songs, as well as lullabies, and put them into stories mapping the cycles of nature and human life. Together, they narrate tales that cross the boundaries of time and musical genres, drawing from Maniucha’s many years of travels to Ukrainian village singers along with their own shared musical imagination.
Released in March 2017, their first album called Oj borom, borom… is an attempt to create a multi-layered tale based on archaic songs from western Polissya. Their starting point are traditional songs, stories and fairy tales from a small village near Novohrad-Volynskyi.
The vocal techniques and emotional charge of the music itself, but also memory of situations, people, nature and stories accompanying the songs are a pretext for making music together. The voice and the bass become equal participants of musical action, blending together, balancing and exchanging roles. The process reveals that traditional and improvised music are so similar they could be local dialects of the same language.
Maniucha Bikont (vocal)
Ksawery Wójciński (double bass)
