Mariana Sadovska & Borderland

Sometimes a musician has such an inborn desire to communicate that her message naturally becomes universal: it doesn't matter whether she is singing soul or bel canto or folk. The responsibilities, protocol and tradition of whatever style she is working in just vanish; she replaces them with pure vitality.

Such was the case with the Ukrainian singer Mariana Sadovska, who performed on Friday night at Exit Art in the penultimate event of its Balcan Cabaret series. The slight, intense Ms. Sadovska, who is in New York only briefly, working with the Yara Arts Group, a theatre troupe, at LaMamma, stormed on stage, stood behind a harmonium and quickly announced that all the songs she would perform had been given to her by women she had met in her travels through Ukraine.

"After ten years of travel," she said, "I understand that a song can be a map which leads you to your life."

Ms. Sadovska has a hollering, slighty nasal voice and she pushed into the ribs and tears in it, filling the room, singing fast and using the harmonium notes to jerk herself forward.

The songs, all about the rituals and psychology of a remote, rural life, had strong melodies, only occasionally in minor keys; she used whipping trills in her voice. One was a widow song summoning the courage to live on after the death of a husband; another was that of a girl drawing water from a well and speaking with doves; one was a song to push sirens away; another, to push clouds away. Between verses she rattled off aproximate english translations.

Some moments in the performance recalled white gospel music from Appalachia. At other times Ms. Sadovska's delivery was as wired forthright and sexual as a rock star - Polly Jean Harvey perhaps. She could have been singing the same material in front of a rock trio.

Towards the end she sang in front of slide projections of the areas she had travelled through; the images depicted farms, weddings, children, churches, weathered old women with tough smiles. The performance was rushed and nearly reckless but oddly perfect.

Ben Ratliff - The New York Times, 8/03/2001

Most expressive:an astonishing melange of archaic elements, vocal arts, hard rock and theatrical-ironic refractions - WDR, Western German Broadcasting, 23/11/2006

...absolutely unique, never heard before, you get electrified; by far - the most outstanding stage presence! - JURY, creole: Competition for World Music from Germany, 2006

Popular Ukrainian actress Mariana Sadovska is a passionate advocate and goodwill ambassador for the eerie, gypsyish folksongs from the remote villages of her native land. What was most striking about her show at Joe’s Pub last night was how relevant she made them for an urban, non-Ukrainian-speaking audience. Many of these songs involve conjury - for fertility, the change of seasons, the harvest - and unsurprisingly have an otherworldly, magical feel to them. Accompanying herself on Indian harmonium and backed by her terrific jazz trio Borderland (German natives Jarry Singla on piano, Sebastian Gramss on bass and Peter Kahlenborn on drums), Sadovska delivered the songs dramatically and fervently. Moving in a split second from a whisper to a wail, crying, growling and, once in a while, shrieking, she showed off a vocal style more evocative of Nina Hagen or Diamanda Galas’ recent work than, say, Lydia Lunch. There were also echoes of Bjork and, on one long, trancelike number, vintage Patti Smith circa Radio Ethiopia: clearly, Sadovska has listened widely in creating her utterly individual, idiosyncratic arrangements of this material.

Sadovska learned it the old-fashioned way, going from house to house a la Allan Lomax, asking for songs. As she told it, villagers welcomed her and even took her in, as if seeing in her a new messenger for their centuries-old songs. While her often hypnotic, gypsy-jazz versions likely stray considerably from their roots, her passion for the music is contagious: it ought to resonate with fans of the current gypsy music craze. And crazed much of it is: among the songs she and the band played tonight were a lullaby in which a mother prepares her newborn child for the day she sics him or her on the enemy, a fertility song with a somewhat familiar, chromatic gypsy melody and all kinds of tricky time changes, a long, eerie witch’s incantation and a love song with an unlikely melody which she and the band used as an encore after the audience wouldn’t let her leave the stage without one.

Playing prepared piano, Singla went inside the instrument to pull and hammer on the strings to add strangeness. Gramss bowed and plucked his bass in the highest registers for a violin effect while Kahlenborn propelled the unit with considerable fervor. Although the show started slowly on what seemed a slightly contrived note for a couple of songs, the final three-quarters of an hour was fascinating and frequently entrancing to experience. - Lucid Culture, 25/08/2008