Interview, Sebastian Studnitzky on 'Memento Odesa'

Although February 24th 2022 catapulted Ukraine onto the front pages of the world’s newspapers, in many ways this spring sees not the second but the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the conflict. Back in February 2014, I was in the south-west Ukrainian city of Odesa on a choir tour; in addition to experiencing temperatures so bracing that the waves and sea-spray on the Black Sea beach froze, and savouring the magnificent diversity of the city’s architecture and cuisine, my fellow singers and I ended up witnessing at close quarters the first developments - vast demonstrations by both pro-Western and pro-Russian groups, violent beatings of local community leaders - in what quickly led to the outbreak of fighting in the Donbas region, exploding into full-scale war two years ago.

The first thing we saw in Odesa when we got off the sleeper-train from Kyiv was the proud emblem on the inside of the railway station’s façade, proclaiming the city not to its own residents but to disembarking arrivals from elsewhere as a Soviet ‘Hero City’ for its stalwart resistance against fascism in 1941; a powerful symbol, and one that is again apt today.

With all this already in my mind as the bleak ten-year anniversary approached, coming across the new album Memento Odesa from German jazz trumpeter and composer Sebastian Studnitzky and the Odesa Symphony Orchestra hit me like a ton of bricks. The album was recorded in July 2023 in a city that, while mercifully far from the front lines, is nevertheless not immune to rocket strikes and other assaults. As Studnitzky comments, it is not only an awareness-raising project aimed at resisting the tendency for the media cycle to get bored and move on, but also a tribute to the tenacity of Ukraine in general and Odesa in particular. It’s also part of a fundraising campaign for Children of Heroes, a charity set up to help Ukrainian children orphaned by the ongoing war. 

Over and above the sense of moral solidarity you evidently feel with Ukrainians in the ongoing war, what’s your own personal connection to the country and how far back does it go?

The main connection that I have with Ukraine, and especially now with Odesa, comes through a festival that I do in Berlin - it's called XJAZZ! and it's the biggest jazz festival in Berlin. A few years ago we started to spread it more internationally, so we went to Spain, Israel, we wanted to go to Sweden, we did things in Poland. We also did our festival twice in Belarus and then all our partners ended up in jail or having to leave the country; in fact one of our partners there is the main opposition leader in Belarus. We seemed to have a knack for picking countries that would become a mess.

In 2020 we were planning to do something in Odesa. And then Covid started, and after that the war started, and then by accident in March 2022, just as the war was starting, I met our partner from Odesa, Anastasiia Pokaz, in Barcelona. She'd just arrived there with a rucksack as a refugee - back then it looked like the Russians would just go straight to Kyiv and slaughter the whole country, so she left and that's how I met her. She had no plan, no home, no nothing, so I suggested she should come to Berlin and work for our festival, and she agreed.

So of course we started doing a lot of things for Ukraine - a lot of concerts with Ukrainian artists, video features, stuff like that. We put on Pussy Riot's first show after the lead singer escaped - she'd had an electronic tag placed on her after being released from prison in Russia, which she cut off and then went underground; and she surfaced, as it were, at our festival in Berlin in 2022! So we organised a big concert with Pussy Riot and donated all the income to Ukraine. I even started playing in a duo with the husband of a Ukrainian pianist called Anastasia - every now and then he comes from Ukraine to Germany or wherever we are, and we play a concert, and then he goes back to Odesa or to Kyiv. So now there's a lot of personal connection. And out of that came the idea to do this project with the orchestra.

German audio, English subtitles.

So it's that chance personal connection that led you to work with these particular musicians from this particular region of Ukraine, rather than from say Kyiv or Lviv or some other city?

Yes - but also, logistics-wise, Odesa is quite easy to reach. You fly to Moldova, which is a direct flight from Berlin, you take a taxi to the border which is an hour and a half, and then it's forty-five minutes to Odesa.

I also just fell in love with the Philharmonic Hall; I saw it on some music videos and it's a beautiful place. Through our musicians we also had some connections to the orchestra. I wanted to do something collaborative but I didn't want to include other German musicians or the rest of my band, because I didn't want to take that responsibility. The way the orchestra project works is that I go there with my music and play with the orchestra there. So yes, logistics-wise it was the most realistic thing to do.

Speaking of which, most governments and insurance companies still advise categorically against any travel to Ukraine - how difficult was it to arrange the logistics of your visit in July 2023?

I was very aware of how risky it was to go - it's not on the front line, but when I was there there were sirens at least twice a day. They were attacking Odesa; but at the time they were concentrating on the harbour infrastructure, so back then there wasn't really much chance of a rocket attack inside the city. Of course it feels strange to be there and hear the sirens and everything, but statistically I thought it was a reasonable risk. There's no shooting, the Russians are a couple of hundred kilometres away.

I remember the feeling when I crossed the border, walking with my suitcase, and seeing the Ukrainian flag and a lot of military convoys and guns and checkpoints and everything. But we weren't naive - we knew the political situation and we decided that the risk of bombardment to Odesa was low. The situation did change two weeks later; two weeks after our recording session the Ukrainian Army had some successes on the front line and immediately the Russians dropped a bomb on the cathedral in the middle of Odesa and destroyed it. It was just a couple of hundred metres away from the Philharmonic Hall. While I was there I also played a concert with a friend in the art museum, which was also bombed a couple of months later.

Ukrainian and English audio, English subtitles.

Was this project more of a collaborative ‘co-composition’ with the orchestral players from Odesa, or did you have a fairly clear idea already in your mind of how you wanted the music to sound?

I came to Odesa with the scores already prepared, and we recorded it. There were of course a lot of question marks about the planning of it - I didn't know how good the orchestra were, whether the piano was in good condition, how the acoustic and technical situation were - so I had no expectations of being able to record. One song, five songs - anything would have been fine. So I was flexible in that sense, but in terms of the music, I brought my sheet music and it was a fully-composed piece.

We managed to record three tracks out of that, and I'm very satisfied with the result. The orchestra and conductor were great, the hall was great, the emotional response was crazy. Everyone was crying by the end - it was very magical, very special.

Once we were in the space it was obvious that we couldn't really do more than these three, because the circumstances were just too unclear. I'm very happy that we have these three recorded to the standard that we have, given that our recording arrangements were extremely improvised - actually I carried all the microphones in my suitcase! - but now in March we're bringing the orchestra to Germany for a tour of concerts. It's not the whole orchestra, it's only the strings - among other things, the men in the orchestra might not be allowed to leave the country - but we'll be presenting it live. Hopefully we'll work towards a recording session while the orchestra are in Germany, so we can record more songs and then release it as a full, physical album.

"Memento Odesa" - (official music video)

Listening to the album’s three tracks ‘Margolina’, ‘Memento’ and ‘Organic’, I found it very hard to categorise their musical style, and the Presto team had a bit of an argument about whether it should be considered jazz or classical. Maybe that’s intentional! How would you describe the musical voice that you’ve found in this album?

The funny thing is that behind me on the shelf there's a German jazz Grammy that I won for jazz trumpet, and next to it is a German classical Grammy that I won as a classical pianist! I love to combine the styles, and that's what my music is. From inside the music, there's no boundary; when you have to put it in a department, that's when it gets tricky.

With this kind of music... I'm the guy who is improvising on the piano, but the orchestral writing is basically classical music.

The incredibly soft sound of your solos on the trumpet is immediately recognisable - how did you develop this unique tone?

It's the way I want to sound - I'm a professor of trumpet at one of the conservatories here so I could give a detailed explanation - but I can tell you that it's a very un-economical way to play it. The sound comes at the cost of being a lot less flexible. This is my ideal sound.

I like soft instruments in general - I prefer the viola to the violin, and also low instruments. One of my favourite instruments in the world is the duduk, from Armenia - it's like an oboe but with a very thick reed. It has such a beautiful rich sound, like a very thick English horn.

The orchestral compositions are written around my aesthetics, of course, and I know how I would play it on the trumpet, so I create the base on which that can sit.