Ukrainian bands DakhaBrakha and Kazka are penetrating the horrors of war with soulfulness and defiance
Those concerts have offered their audiences moments of respite—and a shared community coming together in the fight for Ukraine.
Creating the music has not been easy, however. DakhaBrakha’s musicians anxiously scrolled their phones for messages from home before going on stage in Paris in March. And others say playing music can seem jarringly at odds with the grim reality around them. “In the first few days of war it was very hard for me to play music, because it is a time when people are dying, kids are dying, and music was always a form of entertainment for me,” says Dmytro Mazuriak, wind instrumentalist for the Kyiv-based group Kazka. Shortly after the war began, he fled Kyiv for a village in western Ukraine, where he heard women singing while they were stitching camouflage nets for soldiers on the frontline. He says it made him realize that he needed to play music.
Music brought Mazuriak a kind of solace, too. After collecting sleeping bags, gloves, and other items for the platoon in which his brother was fighting, his brother called to say he had been wounded in a missile strike, and that all but four of the 30 men in his unit were dead. In March, Kazka recorded its new wartime song, “I Am Not Okay,” remotely, with Mazuriak still in the relative safety of western Ukraine, and lead vocalist Oleksandra Zaritska in her temporary refuge in New York; guitarist Mykita Budash, who also recorded the song from western Ukraine, later returned home to Kyiv. From there, he showed us his blacked-out apartment and the empty streets outside his window, visible proof of a country under attack.
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