DakhaBrakha Brings Kyiv To New Haven

Lucy Gellman Photos.

Olena Tsybulska and Iryna Kovalenko locked eyes, their hands ready to do all the talking. Leaning forward, Tsybulska offered a rolling drumbeat and Kovalenko answered, a djembe fitted snugly beneath her knees. The two leaned in, grinning as a rush of cello and accordion joined the fray. They were still several feet apart but seemed completely intertwined, as if one could not exist without the other.  

As she listened on the New Haven Green, Olena Jureczko Murphy heard the sound of home—just never as she'd heard it before. 

Thursday night, the Ukrainian folk-rock global music quartet DakhaBrakha transformed the Green for World Refugee Day, presenting a show that was at turns a cultural bridge, teaching tool, unclassifiable soundscape and moving display of solidarity for Ukraine. Held as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, it captured the way war, colonialism, and man-made borders have redefined a far-reaching refugee crisis, in which some lives are still valued more than others. 

Members of the quartet include Marko Halanevych on vocals, darbuka, tabla, didgeridoo, accordion, guitar, and trombone; Tsybulska on bass drums, percussion, and garmoshka; Nina Garenetska on vocals, cello, and bass drum; and Kovalenko on djembe, bass drums, accordion, percussion, buhay, zgaleyka, and piano. The evening also featured a World Food Bazaar and opening performance from the Haitian band Jo. L. & Friends; read more about those in the New Haven Independent.

"It's really important for us not to play only music, but to also tell people more about war in our country and to ask the whole civilized world for support," said Halanevych, speaking in Ukrainian as band manager Irina Gorban translated after the show. "It's not only about music. It's not only about art. It's something deeper now." 

Formed 20 years ago at the Kyiv Center of Contemporary Art, the quartet—their name means “give/take” in Old Ukrainian—is many things at once. There’s folk, certainly, but also rock, punk, lo-fi, rap, rumbling instrumentals, a kiss of dirge, and a love song to history that isn’t fixed or finite  Musicians, all of whom play at least four instruments, wear tall, black wool caps and long traditional dresses, in an homage to Carpathian dress that makes their fresh  music and lyrical swerve feel revelatory. 

The result is a sonic footprint that criss-crosses boundaries and defies any understanding of traditional Ukrainian folk music as listeners know it. In one moment Thursday, the group reimagined Shakespeare’s Sonnet 77, with persistent, throbbing vocals and an operatic falsetto from Halanevych. In another titled “Karpetsky Rap,” Garenetska completely reshaped a Carpathian folk song about how hard it is to find a good husband, dropping bars as hot, low-bellied cello and didgeridoo danced around her vocals and Kovalenko and Tsybulska joined in.  

As they opened with orchestral versions of their 2014 “Kozak” and “Sho z-pod duba," their multi-pronged approach came to life, holding the attention of the audience for over an hour. Over the quartet’s heads, projections flickered and danced, blooming into bright circles, outlined figures, rolling hills, starbursts of color. “Що з-под дуба да з-под кореня,” (“What comes from under the oak, comes from under its root”) they sang, and suddenly the song had bridged thousands of miles, paying homage to the oak trees that have come to represent the national spirit of Ukraine.

As they continued—“Що з-под дуба да з-под кореня/Там вода ручайом бяжить” (“Comes from under the oak, comes from under its root/There is the water flows, the creek”)—a few stragglers trickled in, some moving to the beat as soon as they walked onto the Green. Close enough to the stage, a person could feel the bass drum in their bones, coming up through the ground and making it hard not to move. 

Onstage, the group split into a spare, penetrating harmony, and it was enough to stop a listener in their tracks. When they finished the first two numbers, cries of “ Slava Ukraini!” peppered the applause. 

“Hello New Haven! We [are] really happy to be here, because it’s a new meeting,” Halanevych said to cheers before launching into “Sonnet,” off the group’s 2020 album Alambari. “It’s a very big opportunity for us, to say thank you for support and solidarity with our country.”

A second cheer went up from the audience: Westvillian Lisa Brandes had jogged in front of the stage, waving a small Ukrainian flag that fluttered in the breeze. The child of a Polish-Ukrainian World War II refugee, Brandes grew up “eating Slavic foods” and learning about her heritage—but she didn’t find a Ukrainian community until she moved from Louisiana to Connecticut. 

When she read that the group was coming to New Haven, attending the concert was a no-brainer. 

“I have a personal connection to refugees through my mother,” she said in an email after the concert. After the Second World War, her mom, Helena Sokolska, worked for the Red Cross and United Nations Relief & Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), and later as a translator and clerical worker during her own immigration by ship to the U.S. 

It was through her mother’s stories that Brandes, then a kid in the Bayou, became interested in political science, and later an avid supporter of refugee rights and resettlement in Connecticut and across the globe. When she thinks about what’s happening in Ukraine, “it’s so difficult and so sad,” she said. 

Top: Brandes. Bottom: Grooving to the sound. 

Back onstage, DakhaBrakha played through that weight in real time, with a reminder of how much is at stake in the destruction of cultural heritage. Addressing the war, the quartet slipped into a relatively new song, the women’s three voices raised in a stark, mournful chant that split into a harmony, and then a call-and-response. Halanevych came in guitar, more Velvet Underground than Balkan folk, and somehow still managed to marry the two.

Even from several yards away, a listener could feel a heaviness descending on the stage. As Halanevych began to rap softly into the mic, percussion and cello surrounded him. His vocals swerved in and out of the instrumentals, methodical, quiet but certain. Then slowly, the work collapsed into noise, with drums that sounded like the clanging of industrial equipment. Above them, vocals became frenetic, as if they were looking for something or someone that no longer existed in the wreckage.

When they subsided, it was Kovalenko who came back in first, with such a longing in her voice a listener could feel it in their chest. Maybe that’s what it is to live surrounded by war, constantly aware of one’s own mortality, and still write about apple orchards and blooming flowers and springtime in the midst of it.    

While they provided no translation—nor did they need to—previous performances of the song have come with the caption: “Around 19,000 Ukrainian children were kidnapped by Russia from occupied territories,” highlighting one horror of the war that is still coming to light as a full-scale invasion continues. Between the lyrics was a plea, applicable in any language: Do not forget about us. 

“People have started to forget about it, because it's not on the first pages of the newspapers now,” Halanevych said through Gorban after the show. “It's why we just use this, our music, as a reminder to people. Not only Ukrainians need support. Democracy needs to be supported. We try to remind people about the fragility of our world, and how beautiful it can be without war.”  

That message resonated for sisters Olena Jureczko Murphy and Ola Jureczko Furmanek, first-generation Ukrainian Americans who grew up in New Haven and are now raising families of their own. As kids, they attended Ukrainian school and camp, as well as weekly services at St. Michael the Archangel Ukrainian Catholic Church  on George Street. There with their friend Christine Hauser, the two appeared mesmerized by the music. 

“We all have family there, so this is very real for us,” said Hauser, another first-generation Ukrainian who sported a blue-and-yellow pin that read “Fuck Putin.” “This is nothing like we’ve ever heard. I can’t believe they’re here in New Haven.”

Christine Hauser, Olena Jureczko Murphy and Ola Jureczko Furmanek.

Back onstage, DakhaBrakha showed the audience just how versatile the group can be. Jumping through time and space—and a 20-year discography—they conjured spring with bird song and rain sounds, then just as quickly dropped a dirge-like anthem to Ukrainian culture. They traded drumsticks and brushes for hand drums, accordions, guitar and piano so quickly that it seemed impossible that only four artists were onstage. They slowed it down to smoldering in “Baby,” then picked up the pace as they reached the final few songs. 

By the time they asked for help keeping a beat on “Vynnaya ya” (“Sweet and Sour”), over a dozen people stood at the lip of the stage, grooving along. The song, on which Halanevych turns his hand into a kazoo, tells the story of a mother and daughter in an apple orchard. If there is such a thing as a Carpathian bop, they have found it and made it their own.   

As she danced close to the stage, self-described fangirl George Sparrow—she’s been to four DakhaBrakha shows and counting—began to weep. Decades ago, her mother and family were driven by Soviet troops from the Carpathian mountains, in a chapter of world history that she finds is completely overlooked. When they resettled in East Haddam, they had to rebuild their whole world. 

Lulu and George Sparrow and Maria Macfarlane.

While Sparrow and her daughter, Lulu, now live in Berkeley, her mom is still in Connecticut. As she cheered, she crossed the grass back to her mom, Maria Macfarlane.

“This really hit a nerve,” Sparrow said. For many who may hear DakhaBrakha, she continued, the music is much more than music—because there’s no safe home for them to go back to. The sound may be rock-kissed and contemporary, but it holds the same deep sense of longing that is the soul of Ukrainian folk.     

“I cried!” she said to her mother as the three stood together on the grass, three generations of Ukranian American women. “I cried for you.”   

A few songs earlier, Arts & Ideas Executive Director Shelley Quiala had called the event a triumph years in the making. After seeing the group perform at Lincoln Center's globalFEST in 2021—less than a year into her tenure at the Festival—she started trying to bring them to New Haven. She had no idea that it would take three summers of planning. 

"I was just captivated," she remembered. At the time, she had no way of knowing that Russia would launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine less than a year later. That in the years that followed, her new home state would resettle over 1500 Ukranian refugee families. That in the same timespan, Border Patrol officers would turn away thousands of asylum-seeking families at the country’s Southern border, in a sobering reminder of who whiteness protects and who it penalizes. 

That on a night in June 2024, she would bring the quartet onstage in New Haven with a Haitian opener, starting a conversation around colonialism, color, and which refugees are readily accepted to the United States. That it would start not with words, but music—and that it was on New Haven to continue it. 

"These borders," she said, trailing off for a moment to listen to the group jam. "We create them."