GANNA

(UA)

There are wars that seek to erase not only lives, but memories. There are voices that resist.

GANNA is the voice of a Ukraine that resists through song: an artist who transforms ancestral songs into contemporary soundscapes, blending jazz, electronic music and improvisation. From Berlin, she brings to the world a country that is wounded but alive, where every song is also a political gesture of remembrance and hope for the future.

Born near Kyiv, in a village called Vyshnyaky, Ganna Gryniva emigrated to Germany with her family in 2002 and grew up between two realities: post-Soviet Ukraine in transition and a Western Europe that welcomed her. In the midst of war and against a backdrop of threats to Ukrainian identity, she sees herself as the guardian of a living heritage, collecting songs from villages and archives and bringing them back to life on stage with the power of a manifesto.

Ganna studied in Leipzig and at the Franz Liszt University of Music (Weimar), but it was her discovery of her country’s folklore, during research trips across various regions of Ukraine, that gave her true artistic direction. Since 2013, she has been travelling through villages, talking to traditional singers, recording stories and melodies, and collecting songs of harvest, rituals, love and mourning, building an intimate archive that fuels her creativity. In 2014, she founded the GANNA Ensemble, a Berlin-based ethno-jazz quintet for which she writes and arranges the entire repertoire.

The ensemble’s debut album, Dykyi Lys (‘Wild Fox’, 2020), presents a bold fusion of traditional songs with modern jazz and improvisation. This is followed by Home in which the concept of home is explored in relation to one’s country of origin and exile, with folk melodies serving as the central thread throughout. On Kupala 2023), released under her own name, Ganna experiments with loops, samples and electronica, moving towards folktronica, and on Utopia (2025) she takes this approach further, blending Ukrainian ritual songs with indie-pop, and echoes of the kora and African lamellophones. Her influences range from rural vocal traditions to the European jazz school, via experimental electronica and roots music from other continents.

On stage, GANNA performs both as part of an ethno-jazz quintet and in solo electro-folk performances, in which she sings and manipulates synthesizers, loops and samples live. Her voice is supple and deeply expressive, capable of ancestral melismas, intimate whispers and improvised outbursts, whilst jazz harmonies and electronic textures envelop songs about love, harvests, water spirits or mermaids. The lyrics, almost always in Ukrainian, speak of villages, fields, ghosts, stubborn grandmothers and an intense relationship with nature, sounding poetic even to those who do not understand the language.

GANNA’s music is, at once, care and a cry: it protects a threatened tradition and cries out for a country that insists on existing through art.

Yegor Zabelov

(BY/PL)

When the Belarusian people took to the streets following the rigged presidential elections of August 2020, Lukashenko responded with violence, imprisonment and exile. Among those who left were musicians, writers, artists and academics, the most creative generation of a country that the regime treated as its private property. Yegor Zabelov already had the world as his territory before this rupture, but the rupture made him realise, more keenly, that carrying a country’s culture in one’s luggage can be an act of resistance as urgent as any other.

Yegor Zabelov, now based in Poland, grew up in Mogilev, a city in eastern Belarus, a few kilometres from the Russian border. His father was a musician. He was Yegor’s first accordion teacher, when Yegor was seven years old. This direct, hand-to-hand transmission shaped in him a relationship with the instrument that would never be purely technical: it was always also emotional, familiar, almost biological. He studied at the Mogilev Conservatory and completed his training at the Belarusian State Academy of Music in Minsk. An institution of strict classical rigour that provided him with the technical foundation, but did not conform him. Even whilst still a student, he began to compose. His first work, a Sonata that included references to The Prodigy, won first prize in the Conservatoire’s composition competition. It was a declaration that the boundaries between classical and popular music were of no concern to him.

In 2002, he won the International Competition for Folk Musicians in Belarus. In 2005, he founded the duo Gurzuf with drummer Artyom Zalessky. It was with this project that he toured Europe from festival to festival for years, including the Acordeões do Mundo festival in Torres Vedras. In 2010, he received the Sergey Kuryokhin Prize for Contemporary Art in the Ethno-Mechanica category, in recognition of his unusual fusion of folk tradition with electronic experimentation. In 2011, he founded the Yegor Zabelov Trio, with Alexander Efimov on bass and Vladimir Beger on drums. His flagship project.

Yegor Zabelov does things with the accordion that most accordionists would never imagine possible. His stated influences are as diverse as they are revealing: Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Michael Nyman and Arvo Pärt on the classical minimalism side; the Finnish Kimmo Pohjonen on the side of extreme experimentation with the instrument; and the Esbjörn Svensson Trio on the side of introspective Nordic jazz. On stage, the accordion ceases to be what one recognises and transforms into something stranger and vaster: a generator of soundscapes ranging from post-rave ambient, avant-garde jazz, neoclassicism and beatless electronica. The British publication Louder Than War wrote that ‘no one would have imagined it was possible to make sounds similar to those of Aphex Twin on an accordion’.

There are musicians who play well. There are musicians who invent a new language. And there are musicians who, in inventing a new language, carry with them the weight and memory of a country that the world insists on ignoring. Yegor Zabelov is all three at once: virtuoso, inventor and witness. At a time when Belarus resists in silence and its culture survives in the luggage of those who have left, listening to him and seeing him at Med is also a way of not looking the other way.

Ablaye Cissoko & Cyrille Brotto

(SN/FR)

Ablaye Cissoko & Cyrille Brotto represent a rare convergence between the age-old oral tradition of West African griots and the dance-like rhythms of southern France. At the crossroads of mandinga tradition, folk music, traditional European dance, jazz and classical music.

Ablaye Cissoko lives in Saint-Louis, Senegal. He is a descendant of griots, the traditional guardians of West African mandinga culture, known locally as djelis. Historians, genealogists, storytellers who pass on knowledge from father to son through music. Cissoko, known as ‘Le Griot Rouge’, a symbol of an age-old tradition in constant reinvention, is a masterful performer on the kora. An instrument with eight hundred years of history, combining the characteristics of the lute and the harp, used extensively by djeli. families. In his hands, the 21-string kora is neither a museum piece nor a folkloric curiosity: it is a living being, capable of whispering and screaming, of recounting suffering and joy with the same naturalness with which rain falls. Softness of tone, delicacy of melodic lines, fluidity of touch, unostentatious virtuosity, purity and generosity.

Cissoko is probably one of the most versatile African artists of his generation, moving with equal ease through the worlds of world music, jazz, classical and even Baroque, particularly in the fruitful collaborations he has developed with the Ensemble Constantinople led by the Iranian Kiya Tabassian.

Cyrille Brotto hails from the heart of rural France, where the diatonic accordion is a mother tongue, an instrument of celebration and remembrance, the voice of the fields and Occitan taverns. He is a musician accustomed to getting entire villages dancing, but also to experimenting with electronic music and contemporary styles in fascinating projects such as Groove Factory.

The meeting of the two results in a dialogue that is both unlikely and obvious at the same time. An almost telepathic rapport. It is not fusion in the easy sense of the word. It is a conversation between equals, a mutual and contemplative listening taken to a degree of refinement that few manage to achieve.

In 2025, following the beautiful 2022 album Instant , the pair returned with Djiyo,, meaning ‘water’, bringing their spiritual and mystical songs rooted in the dialogue between the kora and the accordion. The water of the title is no gratuitous metaphor: it is the exact image of what this music does: it flows, circumvents obstacles, finds its way, unites what seemed separate.

The result is Afro-European chamber music: intimate, warm, with hints of jazz improvisation, yet rooted in a tradition that knows exactly where it comes from.

RAIA

(PT)