Dark Side Trio: Industrial Song

The sophomore album from Kiev-based tenor saxophonist Danylo Vinarikov's Dark Side Trio is a tuneful, burnished affair which belies the rather forbidding name of the band, the seriosity of the album title and the dark satanic mills evoked by the sleeve art. The name of the band is also paradoxical, for the Dark Side Trio heard here is augmented by three other young lions of the Ukrainian jazz scene.

Jazz from countries formerly part or satellites of the USSR has had a long struggle to be heard. After the post-revolutionary freedoms of the early 1920s, jazz was systematically repressed by the Kremlin, which grew increasingly suspicious of the music's American origins and regarded it as a Trojan horse which, if it could not be silenced completely, then needed at least to be pushed to the very margins. Soviet satellites such as Poland, which were nominally independent, had a head start on Soviet republics such as Ukraine.

But on the evidence of Industrial Song, Ukrainian jazz is catching up. The musicians are technically adept and Vinarikov, trumpeter Yakiv Tsvietinskyi (a Fulbright scholar), keyboard player Misha Lushenko and guitarist Konstantin Ivchuk are assured soloists. Vinarikov is also an engaging composer, writing all the album's seven tunes. There are times, probably inevitably, when the music resonates with the work of an earlier generation of players from neighbouring Poland, notably Tomasz Stańko and Krzysztof Komeda, who have presumably been an important influence on the development of the Ukrainian scene.

As Vinarikov's generation of Ukrainian musicians develop a more clearly defined Ukrainian voice things will get even better—and if the six musicians in the Dark Side Trio are indicative, the chops are there, ready to go. Stay tuned.