San Jose Jazz Winter Fest Spotlights Ukrainian Culture

By DownBeat I Feb. 14, 2023

Pianist Vadim Neselovsky will perform at this year’s San Jose Jazz Winter Fest: Counterpoint With Ukraine.
(Photo: Yaroslavna Chernova)

San Jose Jazz has announced the lineup for its 2023 Winter Fest, co-curated with Am I Jazz? Festival, the leading-edge jazz programmer in Kyiv, Ukraine. The festival, which carries a theme of Counterpoint With Ukraine, takes place Feb. 16–March 3 in downtown San Jose, California.

For this initiative, San Jose Jazz and Olga Bekenshtein (founder of the Am I Jazz? Festival) celebrate the rich Ukrainian culture that the Russian war on Ukraine seeks to eliminate with an arts festival unlike any other ever presented before. To mark the one-year milestone of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the co-curators programmed a cross-cultural collaboration between Ukraine-based artists performing alongside many of today’s top American jazz artists for a multimedia festival of improvisational music, Ukrainian fine art, independent films and dance.

The more-than-two-week SJZ Winter Fest unveils the artistry of musicians currently living in wartime Ukraine, including Borys Mohylevskyi (saxophone), Dennis Adu (trumpet) and Yakiv Tsvietinskyi (trumpet), as well as Ukrainian-born artists Alina Sokulska (dance), Igor Osypov (guitar) and Olesya Zdorovetska (vocals), DJs Karine and Shakolin, and U.S.-based Vadim Neselovsky (piano). The American artists will include Jazzmeia Horn with the Marcus Shelby Orchestra, Ambrose Akinmusire & Rafiq Bhatia, Madison McFerrin, John Hollenbeck’s GEORGE Featuring a Solo by Dancer Alina Sokulska, the SJZ High School All-Stars playing arrangements of John Hollenbeck, Kassa Overall, Orrin Evans, Marcus Shelby Orchestra, Mark Guiliana, Vân-Ánh Võ and the SJZ Collective.

San Jose Jazz Winter Fest: Counterpoint With Ukraine will include an exhibition of paintings by internationally renowned Ukrainian artist Lesia Khomenko, who brings her Unidentified Figures 2022 series to downtown San Jose’s Unzipped Pavilion for its West Coast premiere. Khomenko’s paintings focus on the ways war represents itself, with personal photographs depicting soldiers having their faces obscured for the eight larger-than-life-sized paintings. The intention of the soldiers is to protect the art spaces where lively concerts, films and dance performances will celebrate culture through the lens of Ukrainian and American artists.

A Ukrainian Film Festival also takes place at 3Below Theaters in San Jose throughout SJZ Winter Fest, with six evenings of film including special screenings of the 1965 classic Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, a Ukrainian film by Sergei Parajanov; the award-winning 2021 Ukrainian coming-of-age film Stop-Zemila; and silent shorts by Ukrainian-born American experimental filmmaker Maya Deren with live accompaniment by Olesya Zdorovetska.

For more information on the San Jose Jazz Winter Fest, click here. DB