PARADUSH was founded by Marina Chabanova, a singer with hard-to-find color of voice and approach to singing in Ukraine, and Anatoly Shmargun, a drummer and percussionist who studied in Holland and participated in the best of Ukrainian pop/rock/indie/jazz crossover bands.
They started performing jazz and bossa-nova classics together back in the day, in the year of 2001, playing in most of clubs in Kiev and several festivals in Ukraine. Then they decided to make something else, not jazz. Their “something else” has resulted in extremely unusual project: songs of Andrey Makarevich and his “Time Machine” band, which itself is the classics of Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet rock music.
PARADUSH (two words combined, actually meaning “a soul-pair” in Russian & Ukrainian and sounding quite Brazilian-Portuguese as one word) made those songs be heard in a different way. Brazilian-Latin flavor with some hints of jazz is the strong taste of this band’s music. So forget about Mr. Makarevich and the way he plays his own songs now! PARADUSH took his songs as any other jazz standard, pop/rock song, etcetera, and remade them in the way that only this band could. But wait… most of jazz standards were predominantly pop ditties or songs from musicals in the beginning, weren’t they? In the nineties, quite a few alternative rock songs were transformed into some kind of nu-jazz. Similarly, in the hands of PARADUSH, classic Russian rock songs became “victims” of these beautiful interpretations. They did not pick the most popular hits of the old Russian band, but chose probably the most lyrical (though sometimes less known) of Mr. Makarevich. And if one asks “Why Andrey Makarevich”? -- PARADUSH’s answer is “Why not?”, which is one of the gravest arguments in the art of music.
Though… Andrey Makarevich himself approved the interpretations of his songs. What is more, the “Time Machine’s“ bass player, Alexander Kutikov, produced ‘On One Bee-Line’, which the duo recorded during 2005-2006 with top Ukrainian jazzmen and released in March of 2006, in Russia. They also made a video and had some decent radio rotation of their songs. Now the album is to be released in Ukraine.
Those of us thinking outside of the box would find this music breathtaking and unusual. Yes, they would certainly listen to the lyrics carefully yet getting the most kick out of the style of PARADUSH. It is sensible, womanly, and inventive -- for they combined clearly comprehensible way of singing melodies, so to speak “in your face” method, with more complex harmony and arrangement architectures.
Besides the album On One Bee-Line, the band presented its new program of Brazilian music about a year ago. It is as gentle and comprehensible as the previous one, but… quite different. “Different” is another grave argument in the art of music, as well as rather descriptive term for PARADHUSH and their place in Ukrainian music environment.
