Neselovskyi was paying close attention from afar, and he noticed that others were, too. When I caught the band at Birdland the following year, I took note of Neselovskyi's delicate touch at the piano, along with his deft hand as an arranger.Īt the time, Ukraine was in the midst of a groundswell of democratic protests known as the Orange Revolution. This quintet released a 2005 album, Next Generation, under Burton's name. Even against that imposing yardstick, he says, Neselovskyi stood out: "He's able to drift back and forth between classical and jazz more seamlessly than anyone I have heard before."īurton formed a group around the considerable talents of Neselovskyi and several other Berklee students at the time: guitarist Julian Lage, bassist Luques Curtis and drummer James Williams. Burton, a former child prodigy himself, came up in the 1960s alongside future piano titans Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett. His synthesis of those two elements, at that stage in his development, instantly caught the ear of Gary Burton, an illustrious vibraphonist who was Berklee's Dean of Curriculum at the time. By the time he arrived at Berklee, he was as serious about jazz improvisation as he was about classical composition. "Waltz of Odesa Conservatory," a piece on the new album, recalls his experience as the youngest student in that institution's venerable history.Īs he settled into life in the west, Neselovskyi began to understand the freedoms, both civic and creative, that he had never known. His early life in Odesa, a cosmopolitan city on the Black Sea, had shaped his foundation as a classical piano prodigy. "I grew up basically in a dictatorship," Neselovskyi tells NPR, speaking over video from his mother's home in Dortmund, Germany, where his family moved when he was 17. Neselovskyi was born in Odesa, the Southern Ukrainian port city, one month after the 1977 Constitution of the Soviet Union was ratified by the Communist party under Leonid Brezhnev. Courtesy of the artist Cover art for Vadim Neselovskyi's Odesa.
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