A small bump in the road...to Koktebel

Needless to say, I am a little shocked that Orest over at Ukrainian Musical Matters closed down his blog supposedly on my account, but that is a topic of another post.

As in all online competitions to select musicians, when you run one for the first time you hit a few bumps along the way. This seems to have happened with the people at the Koktebel Jazz Festival. After having their voting process up for many months, along with their very unclear set of rules of who could participate in the competition, when a number of musicians began receiving little postings next to their competition entries stating they would be removed from the competition. There were a few different bands that I like besides my friend Yevhenia Sakharova who found themselves in this position with a little more than a week of voting left, some of which I have heard perform before. All this happened after the server was down for maintenance last Saturday for more than seven hours. So some were considering it to be foul play...

After review the comments of the "Expert Council" on many different bands who had this happen to a couple of friends and I contact Yevhenia. "Zhenniu, we seldom see you perform as a duet, you have to do something if you really want to go to Koktebel! See if you can't resubmit with your regular band members..."

Yevhenia, with our moral support found the right phone numbers to call and did what she had to, and early this morning I found out from her as well as other partners in crime that her new application with her more complete group was excepted.

Better yet, I just found out from her that her votes for her new entry of Сахарова & Band would be merged with the votes which she receive from today until the end of the competition on August 4, 2008. So if you haven't registered and voted, then please do so.

Shooting for Koktebel

Last Saturday after meeting someone, retreating from the rain and to use the WiFi at a little place called Kupidon that I frequent, I was sitting there drinking tea and taking care of some correspondence. Oddly enough at about 12:00 in walks a friend of mine Yevhenia Sakharova. Yevhenia, for nearly the last two years or so has been performing on Saturday nights at Kupidon, and continues to perform there regularly. However, to see her at this time was kind of odd as she usually goes on at 21:00.

Well today was going to be something a little different, she had decided with her and her guitarists that they were going to do a photo shoot. After the shoot she told me that she needed some help to set up a site on MySpace. The reason for this she told me was to be able to participate at the Koktebel Jazz Festival this September.

Yevhenia has over the time that I have known her developed quite a bit professionally. When she first was on stage she was shy with little eye contact with the audience, now she has fewer problems with that and continues to develop her repertoire of lounge, bosanova and jazzy improvisations of traditional Ukrainian pieces.

While set up a simple site on MySpace can be fairly simple, its not always clear on how to merge a personal profile with a artist's profile. This I finally accomplished with Yevhenia at Kupidon on Tuesday evening. As a result she has a site on MySpace which can found at: http://www.myspace.com/eugeniasakharova.

I think you all may enjoy Corcovado in Ukrainian the first song she uploaded and a couple of the other of the tunes she has put up.

But more important is let's help Zhennia get to the Koktebel Jazz Festival by voting for her. In order to do so you have to visit the http://www.jazz.koktebel.info and register. Yes the form is in Russian, but that is a moot point at this time. Once registered, you can go to the voting section and go to Дуэт Сахарова и Бондарь (Sakharova Bondar Duet) and cast your vote.

Let's help Zhennia and Hennadiy get to Koktebel. I believe they have to be in the top ten positions in order to be selected.