“Special guests from Ukraine”

The tour’s route passed through New York, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Calgary and Dauphin. All concerts and meetings with the public will be long remembered by the musicians, the Haydamaky’s band press service reports.“New York seemed familiar —I’ve read so much about it, seen it in films. But this deja vu did not diminish the impression,” admits Volodymyr Sherstiuk. “The sheer scale of the city is very impressive, unrivalled by any European capital: the beautiful Central Park, Times Square, Rockefeller Centre… The architecture is incredibly eclectic, accumulating all styles... New York breathes money, careers skyrocket and then plummet...”

Everybody has his own New York: Babylon, a city of opportunity, tremendous metropolis, centre of finance, the arts, architecture, media, and the world’s centre in general. As it is said, “New York is not America — it stands on its own,” and this is also true. Here Haydamaky played at the Soyuzivka Ukrainian Cultural Festival, which each year gathers thousands of Americans and Canadians of Ukrainian descent, as well as people from Australia, Germany, Argentina, Spain and Italy. You can see the trident on huge cars, the clothes, and even tattoos — a real cult of Ukraine exists there.

“We are very well received,” tells Alexander Yarmola. “For Americans such music is a cultural shock. People could not find words, they said: ‘Where have you found it? What is it at all? Let’s play it again!’ In America, all modern music is built on three pillars: jazz, blues, and rock and roll. Everyone, from Madonna to Metallica, has the same chords. Great Broadway orchestras play these songs. All radio stations, from Alaska to Mexico, broadcast the same music. Because Americans are unequalled in implementing any idea, all forms of combinations of these several chords are brought to perfection here. Instead, almost everything that comes to America from other cultural worlds isn’t so shiny. But if someone comes who performs at a high level, yet differently from traditional American styles, they will be torn to pieces by their fans. This happened with the British Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and with the German band Rammstein, too. We, the Haydamaky, are, of course, ‘all from Vasylkiv,’ but it didn’t prevent us from constructing a Harley-Davidson from different bikes’ parts in our backyard.”

In Canada, the Haydamaky played twice at the big open-air Calgary Folk Music Festival, in Winnipeg and Edmonton, and, as “a special guests from Ukraine,” at the Canada’s National Ukrainian Festival in Dauphin. Let me remind that first concerts of the Haydamaky took place in Canada a year ago, and Canada was the beginning of their discovery of the American continent.