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root salad Svjata Vatra
Hard to pronounce, great to hear. Andrew Cronshaw introduces a fine Estonian/ Ukrainian band.
S
vjata Vatra, led by Ukrainian singer- trombonist Ruslan Trochynskyi, delivered a powerful, exuberant set at Tallinn Music Week. It showed just how far they’ve come since Ruslan played at Viljandi festival ten years ago as a member of pioneering Ukrainian folk-rock band Haydamaky, found love, settled in Estonia and looked around for musicians.
Ruslan was born in Belitskoya in the Donetsk region. His grandmother was a tra- ditional singer who sang unaccompanied at social gatherings, and he grew up listening to her.
“The people spoke Russian, but my grandmother sang me Ukrainian songs, and talked to me in Ukrainian. My native lan- guage is both Russian and Ukrainian, and now my children speak Estonian, Russian and Ukrainian at home.”
Ruslan was in Kyiv studying trombone – captivated by its vocal sound, he was aiming not to be an orchestral player but a soloist – when his grandmother died. He couldn’t afford the train ticket to her funeral, so friends suggested he busk in Maidan Square. “I asked what would I play. ‘Play what you want’, they said. I felt so sad inside, I didn’t know what I was playing, it was like being in a trance. I just played, and what came out were my grandmother’s songs, and people started to give money.”
“I bought the ticket and went to her funeral in Odessa. When I came back to Kyiv I started to play regularly in Maidan, more and more traditional Ukrainian songs, be - cause I understood this was what I wanted, this direct contact with people. They’re only with you for a minute, and it’s important to get their attention and make them stay.”
In 2001 accordeonist Ivan Lenyo invited him to join Haydamaky, a ska-reggae band that increasingly incorporated traditional music, blazing a path away from the Soviet- style TV pop known as estrada. It became very popular, and that same year signed to EMI for its first album.
“When Haydamaky played at Viljandi festival in Estonia, we found ‘Wow, the peo- ple here in Estonia love their own roots! We want Ukrainians to do the same! There must be a festival in Ukraine like that.’ We went back to Ukraine and talked about it, and now in Ukraine there are a lot of festivals.”
At Viljandi Ruslan fell in love with Terje, the Estonian assigned to look after Hayda - maky. They married and he relocated to Estonia, where he began to jam with the Viljandi-based musicians of the Estonian folk revival. He played with bagpiper Cätlin Mägi,
then formed his own band, playing Ukraini- an and some Estonian music, initially com- prising piper Sandra Sillamaa, percussionist Silver Sepp and accordeonist Kuno Malva. He named it Svjata Vatra – ‘Sacred Fire’.
His animated, audience-rousing physi- cal stage persona, born of busking and Hay- damaky, was in marked contrast to that of the less extrovert Estonians. Terje, who became the band’s manager, confides, “They asked me outside and said ‘Please say to him he could be more… polite on stage. Not jumping so much, it’s embarrassing’. I said ‘No, I can’t, because this is him.’”
Those first members have all headed
off to develop their own projects, and the line-up has evolved over the decade. Current members, all involved in Viljandi Cultural Academy as students, graduates or teachers, are Ruslan on vocals, trombone and scythe, accordeonist Madis Pilt, Juhan Suits on Esto- nian bagpipe, horn, whistle and jew’s-harp, drummer Martin Aulis and the most recent addition, bass guitarist Arlet Tiigi, whose first gig with them was the Tallinn show- case, firming up the sound with a full rhythm section. “We used to use the accordeon as a bass, and it worked, but as our show has got more powerful on bigger stages it wasn’t strong enough.”
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ately Ruslan and Svjata Vatra have become involved in support for Ukraine. “Wemade a big concert in the main square here in Tallinn, Freedom Square, with Estonian musicians, and TV showed it and people sent money by SMS – 200,000 Euros.” Estonia’s impres- sive and popular US-educated president Toomas Hendrik Ilves (a music enthusiast who, among other things, taught a course on the history of rock to motivate his stu- dents in the US, and who always comes to the Tallinn Music Week delegates’ hotel for an informal chat) awarded Ruslan the Order Of The White Star as a Ukrainian cultural ambassador. He also arranged, in conjunction with Radio Svoboda, and paid, for the band to go and play in east Ukraine last November. They played in Sloviansk, Kharkhiv, Dnepropetrovsk, and Ruslan’s birthplace, Belitskoya.
SV’s songs come largely from tradition, but not done in a traditional way; some, such as the sing-along Kalina Malina, a spring game-song that’s one of their signature numbers, are re-purposed children’s songs. Ruslan writes the remainder. For the east Ukraine trip he wrote one about love and forgiveness; it’s on the new Svjata Vatra CD Vabadus (Freedom), released in mid-2015.