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March, 2026

By: Kateryna Ziabliuk

Photos: © Erik Mathias; Dovile Sermokas

Meloport/ #IWD2026 | WomenToTheForce | A Gentle Answer in Harsh Times

Disclamer: In this text, russia (as well as related terms like “russian invasion”, and others) is written in lowercase letters. This follows the September 2023 decision by Ukraine’s National Commission for State Language Standards, which ruled that such spelling in unofficial or non-formal texts does not violate Ukrainian language norms—reflecting the ongoing heroic struggle of the Ukrainian people against aggression, a public call by Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk, and endorsements from leading linguistic institutions of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Though this rule is not applicable in English, we keep the same lowercase convention in English as a deliberate symbolic gesture of respect and the broader context of Ukraine’s fight for sovereignty.

A Gentle Answer in Harsh Times

From her earliest childhood, Ukrainian vocalist and composer Kateryna Kravchenko burned with a fierce passion for jazz.  She navigated the comically intricate, at times absurd rungs of post-Soviet musical education—first in Balta, then in Odesa—before stepping into Germany, a land that proved no less stubborn and resistant to mastery. Learning by doing—that is what she calls her life’s guiding tactic, and it turns out to be the most effective strategy precisely in times of turbulence, when distant relocations intertwined with isolation, and isolation, in a single breath, transformed into the martial state that engulfed Ukraine.

Perhaps the truest description of her artistry and of her essence is that old biblical proverb: “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” Later she composed a suite inspired by Maria Prymachenko—the Ukrainian “storyteller” of colours—and founded the Kravchenko/Clees Duo together with Luxembourgish vibraphonist Arthur Clees. Together they weave sonic webs, delicate and translucent, from improvisation, from poetry, and from the voices of Vasyl Stus, Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, Hermann Hesse, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Robert Creeley, and many others. The themes that resound in these texts are raw and painful—solitude, exile, losses that nevertheless hold fragile crumbs of hope for rebirth — yet they are retold with such exceptional care, with such harmonious ambiguity, that one listens and feels: here no one wishes to wound with an extra word.

— Let’s start with the early days. What was important to you in your childhood?

— I was born in a small town where there was essentially nothing — only a music school. They taught academic vocals and classical piano there. No one had even heard of jazz.
Then a new teacher arrived. He had studied choral conducting, but lived in a dormitory with ‘pop singers,’ as they were called back then. So he picked up some jazz terminology from them. It was still Soviet jazz: Melodies of Jazz by Volodymyr Symonenko [Ukrainian jazz pianist and musicologist — ed.] — that is, a kind of ‘bible’ of the first jazz books. But it was he who opened up the world of jazz to me. YouTube had just appeared, and he showed me some recordings that simply blew me away. Before that, I only had radio and television — and suddenly a whole new world opened up. That’s how I first saw Ella Fitzgerald. I was 12 or 13. I wanted to sing only jazz, like Ella, and know all her solos. At that time, I didn’t understand anything about improvisation, I only knew: ‘I want to sing like Ella.’

Then I started taking lessons with a teacher and sang in an ensemble, a vocal quartet with three other girls. It was very interesting. And then I realised: that’s it, I want to be a jazz musician, learn to improvise, have my own band and perform on stage! That’s when the competitions began.

My first one was the Rostyslav Kobanchenko Memorial Competition at the Odesa Music College. I sang ‘Air Mail Special’ and ‘Mr. Paganini.’ I was 13 years old. After that, I was invited to perform with the Mykola Goloshchapov Big Band — my first performance with live musicians. And here, at the Odesa Philharmonic, I performed two songs, including Diana Schuur’s ‘Every Day I Have the Blues.’ It was my first experience of doing my own interpretation — because I didn’t like Diane Schuur’s version, because it wasn’t ‘like Ella’s’ (laughs).

— How did you analyse the songs back then? Did you study the melody, the lyrics, translate them?

— I just listened to them over and over again. Then I tried to repeat everything in great detail. But my English was poor at the time, so I first learned the song by ear. Then I opened the lyrics and found that half of them didn’t match. But I still trusted the recording more than the written text.
Because of this, my pronunciation was funny: once, a Canadian English teacher said that it was ‘not appropriate’ for me, a European girl, to sing like that, because there was African-American slang everywhere — it was as if I had suddenly started speaking in the Transcarpathian dialect instead of literary Ukrainian (laughs).

— So you decided to enroll in college. How did that happen?

— Yes. At that time, I already knew that I wanted to become a singer, a musician, and learn to improvise. There weren’t many options. The most realistic one was to enrol in the Odessa Music College, because I lived in the region and my mother wouldn’t let me go any further. So it was either Odesa or nowhere. I enrolled, and I remember those years like this: the best thing about the college was my collaboration with Oleksii Petukhov. Because what was happening in the pop vocal department was really tough. I don’t have many good memories of that. But working with Petukhov was different. He opened up new horizons for me, and I started playing the piano more. I had studied classical piano at school, but at college I began to take accompaniment more seriously and even write improvisations.

It seemed to be the only way to learn to improvise, because our improvisation lessons were conducted like: ‘Girls, listen to the music and do something.’ The teacher believed that you just had to ‘feel’ it. And we wrote improvisations by hand, memorised them, without even understanding how a phrase or harmony was formed.

— So, how did studying abroad work out?

— Viktoria Leleka helped me a lot with my orientation. I met her when she was already studying in Dresden, Germany.
Victoria was touring Ukraine with her band Leleka at the time, and I happened to catch their concert at the Peron 7 club in Odesa. After the show, we got talking, and she said, “If you’re interested, come visit us. There’s a great teacher, I’ll help you.” And she really did help — she told me where to submit my documents and how the entrance exams work.

For me, that was the deciding factor. She became a kind of guide. Because, unfortunately, other musicians who promised to help just disappeared. But Viktoria really did everything she promised.

So I started learning German. One of the main factors was that education in Germany is free, and I had only been there once.

My vocal teacher, Celine Rudolph, was the one who supported me.
She was the first to say, ‘Kateryna, you need to start your own band, write music, perform.’ And that surprised me, because after Odesa I was convinced that ‘you’re not ready yet,’ ten years of honing your skills and so on. But here it was the opposite: ‘Try it, do it.’

— And you started your own band?

— Yes. At first, I didn’t even know where to start. We didn’t have any experience in Ukraine in choosing musicians for a band. It was simple: if you play the piano, you play the piano.
But in Germany, for the first time, I felt that I could choose who I wanted to play with, who was interested in this kind of music. We prepared a few initial arrangements, and I even had one of my own compositions. And this band immediately won the conservatory’s ensemble competition. After three months of training!
It was a big sign for me: ‘Yes, I have to keep writing.’
At the same time, I joined the German National Jazz Orchestra — BundesJazzOrchester, or BuJazzO for short.

— Were you already thinking of your debut album, Stories, as a complete project?

— No, at first I didn’t understand what an album was at all. I was used to listening to music on YouTube in separate videos, you know, those hour-long videos with music and the same cover art.  So the idea of an album as something coherent came to me while I was working on it.

I realised that it’s not just about music — you have to think about the visual image, the concept, the structure, the order of the tracks.
At the time, I thought: just take a photo, release it, and that’s it. But it turned out that you also need promotion, communication, presentations. At the time, I still thought that if you’re talented, you’ll be discovered.

After the album was released, especially during COVID-19, I realised that it was all an illusion.I rethought a lot — who I am, what I do, why. Until then, everything had come naturally — competitions, successes, events. And then suddenly I had to create meaning myself — they didn’t teach that at the conservatory.

This crisis somehow smoothly transitioned into a period of full-scale invasion. My mother came to see my concert and stayed because the war had started. I didn’t immediately understand what was happening because everything that had happened before no longer mattered. I had to rethink myself, my identity, my language.

— That must have been difficult — especially since there are still quite a few russians living in Dresden?

— Terribly. There were quite a few people from russia in my circle — students, musicians.
There weren’t many Ukrainians there, and it was very easy to perpetuate the myth that ‘we are all the same, and the Germans see us as one.’ We had a common social circle: it seemed that there were no problems, that art was outside of politics. But after 24th of February, everything fell into place.

One of my close friends, a very talented singer, simply returned to russia and started performing concerts during the war.

That’s when I first clearly realised who I was. I began to think about my culture, about Ukrainian music. And it turned out that I knew very little about it. I always liked the Ukrainian language, I loved Ukrainian literature, but in educational institutions it was treated formally — you had to sing one song in Ukrainian at the state exam, and that was it I learned more about Ukrainian music from Viktoria Leleka. After the Maidan, it became obvious to her that Ukrainian culture is complete and powerful in itself. I didn’t really understand that at the time, I was a teenager. Although I couldn’t write lyrics in Russian — they didn’t sound right. However, the first song I ever wrote, ‘Tam, de ty’ (‘Where You Are’), was written in Ukrainian.

— You approached the person of Maria Prymachenko in one of your projects, it is the suite. How did it come about?

It all started in Sweden. It was early 2023, and I had the opportunity to create my project for the New Sound Made festival in Stockholm, a composition for a large ensemble. Then I learned that the Maria Prymachenko Museum had been destroyed at the beginning of the Russian invasion. I discovered that her fellow citizens had saved her works, hiding them in their homes under bombardment, at the risk of their lives. There is such power in that — humanity, dignity, when the world around you is falling apart, but you choose to save art. So I decided to dedicate the suite to Maria Prymachenko, to her paintings and to this story.

We also performed this programme in Ukraine, at the Odessa Philharmonic, in the autumn of 2023. During the first piece, an air raid siren sounded. We went down to the basement of the philharmonic, where there was an old grand piano. The musicians began to improvise and continued the concert there, in the shelter. It was the most powerful experience of my life. It was a true act of resistance, showing that no matter how difficult things get, life goes on.

It wasn’t just about Maria Prymachenko, but about all of us. It was about why we preserve culture even when the world is falling apart. It was about showing how much culture is part of our identity. For me, it was also a moment of reconciliation with myself: after searching for many years to find out who I was in this world, this suite became the answer — I am a Ukrainian musician, and this is my story.

One of your most active projects is your duo with Arthur Clees. How did it all start?

Initially, we planned a duo concert and only had a few weeks to prepare the programme. Then we constantly refined, modified and enriched it. The duo is very organic: a combination of vibraphone and voice, concise but leaving plenty of room for improvisation. Sometimes we call on other musicians or visual artists. Our duo is already a successful project, but it’s very flexible. We can do absolutely anything we want with it.

And, in fact, the new album Faces was also born out of this duo, wasn’t it?

We recorded it under the direction of Wanja Slavin, a saxophonist and producer from Berlin. Thanks to Wanja, our sound has become different, more complex, more voluminous. We used unexpected instruments, such as a church organ, whose sound added depth. It’s a very personal album. The songs are based on Ukrainian, German, American and Spanish poems. Vanya helped us find the balance between jazz, electronic music and atmospheric intimacy that we were looking for. It will be released on 10 April 2026.

Este artículo se publica simultáneamente en las siguientes revistas europeas, en el marco de “Milestones”, una operación para destacar a las jóvenes músicas de jazz y blues : Citizen Jazz (FR), JazzMania (BE), Jazz’halo (BE), Meloport (UA), UK Jazz News (UK), Jazz-Fun (DE), In&Out Jazz (ES) y Donos Kulturalny (PL).

This article is co-published simultaneously in the following European magazines, as part of « Milestones » an operation to highlight young jazz and blues female musicians : Citizen Jazz (FR), JazzMania (BE), Jazz’halo (BE), Meloport (UA), UK Jazz News (UK), Jazz-Fun (DE), In&Out Jazz (ES) and Donos Kulturalny (PL).

#Womentothefore #IWD2026