Ukrainian Pianist Defies Labels

The classically trained jazz man Vadim Neselovskyi is trying to stay open to his many stylistic influences.

04/16/2013, George Robinson, Special To The Jewish Week

Vadim Neselovskyi has one particularly vivid memory of a homecoming in his native Ukraine.

Now a highly regarded jazz pianist living in Brooklyn who will be playing in town on April 25, he was not quite 20 in 1997, living in Dortmund. On this occasion, he recalls, “I took a bus from Odessa to Kherson (a four-hour ride) and was sitting close to the driver, who began sharing his concerns with me about Eduard Hurwitz, Odessa’s [Jewish] mayor at the time, and all the Jews in general.” After listening to the driver complaining bitterly about the takeover of the country by the Jews, Neselovskyi said with proud vehemence, “I’m a Jew.”

He drily recalls now, “That certainly destroyed the friendly atmosphere that we had had.”

Before Neselovskyi and his family left the former Soviet Union, such an assertive statement of his identity would have damaged more than the conversational mood.

“We were reminded that we were Jewish all the time by our non-Jewish friends and teachers,” he recalls with a touch of irony. “It was stamped on your papers, ‘Nationality: Jewish.’”

Since the Soviet Union essentially had banned religious practice, Neselovskyi says he “discovered [his] Jewishness through anti-Semitism more than any religious tradition in our family.” His parents never practiced Judaism, but all four of his grandparents did, albeit secretly.

“It wasn’t the coolest thing to advertise,” he notes. “I would see a candle burning in my grandmother’s home and not know what it was. Today I know it was for Sukkot.”

One other memory of grandma’s Jewish identity will be familiar to most Jews of a certain generation. “My grandmother spoke Yiddish so I wouldn’t understand what she was saying,” he says, laughing.

Despite the pitfalls of being a Soviet Jew, Neselovskyi’s talent was too large to be denied. He was admitted to the famous music conservatory in Odessa (officially the Odessa National A. V. Nezhdanova Academy of Music) at 15, the youngest student in the school’s history.

Asked about that achievement, he shrugs it off.

Read more: http://www.thejewishweek.com/arts/music/ukrainian-pianist-defies-labels

Live at Berklee Performance Center, September 27, 2011.
Pianist, Composer, Berklee Professor & Former Gary Burton Sideman
VADIM NESELOVSKYI
Releases First Solo Piano Recording & Sunnyside Records Debut
MUSIC FOR SEPTEMBER
Out March 26, 2013