Music Inspired by Taras Shevchenko, Ukrainian Poet

March 9th and 10th were Ukrainian Poet, Taras Shevchenko’s birthday and passing respectively. In honor of these events I found two older tunes from the late 80’s and early 90’s – both were poems of his that I put to music.

I quickly remastered them and posted them to YouTube. They were both recorded on an old 4-track.

The song “Dumka” was recorded as a Demo for the band “Half-Na-Piv”, (“Na Piv” means “and half” in Ukrainian). The band members at the time of the recording were myself, John Plishka my bro, and Ihor Chornij. I believe that Walter Pohribnyj may be on the track as well playing a backing guitar.

The other song, “Vse Ide, Vse Mynaje” was recorded prior to Dumka and it was recorded in my old basement studio in Northbrook. That’s the same studio where my CD, “Spit, Sputter, Blow…” was recorded.

The words are in Ukrainian, but I hope the music helps convey the meaning, even if you don’t understand Ukrainian.

Enjoy!

Read Full Post »

Blog Housekeeping and a Farewell to Posterous Haiku

As you know, I’ve been utilizing Posterous as a way to post to this blog with multiple pics, music and videos-things WordPress doesn’t support fully. Posterous is shutting it’s doors. As a result, many of my older posts may contain broken links to images and or music. I will do my best to make sure they are all reconnected to the new location but double checking every link from many years back is simply not possible.

On the other hand, Posterous has been fickle the last 3-4 months and many posts that I thought were published here, weren’t. The good news is that my posts will not fall into cyber-ether anymore.

With that, I send off Posterous with a stark haiku:

Convenient posting
Inconvenient shutting down
Goodbye, Posterous

Read Full Post »