By: Maria Williams
Grigorii Palamarchuk is a good representative of most great musical talents. At three and a half years old, he showed an interest and an aptitude for music, particularly the piano and keyboards. There are clips of him as a small, blonde child, no more than six years old, standing beside a river in his native Ukraine, playing music as if it was what he was born to do. Maybe he isn’t Mozart exactly, but those kinds of parallels exist. He could do it.
“I’ve always had weird and extraordinary musical abilities,” Grigorii says. “I have absolute musical hearing. And my musical memory even surprises me. I can remember the pieces I played 20 years ago.”
According to Grigorii, he probably has thousands of musical compositions stored in his mind.
Grigorii is also quite gifted at improvising, which is not always easy for some musicians. While technical abilities can be improved with practice, improvising requires another layer of talent. Grigorii can also pick up new compositions easily, which helped him a lot during his studies.
“Thanks to these talents, I saved a lot of time,” says Grigorii. “While my classmates spent time studying a piece, I could study it in the subway. This allowed me to study at two universities at the same time.”
Those two universities were the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music in Moscow and Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, from which he graduated in 2017 with a degree in philology, Russian language, and literature. Believe it or not, he was thinking about walking away from music for good before that when he studied at S. V. Rachmaninov College of Music. Being in a competitive music school, he faced a lot of pressure and, at times, humiliating situations with his teachers.
“In college, I was under severe pressure,” Grigorii recalls. “So after four years, it was almost as if all my desire to do music was gone.” Instead, he thought about becoming a Russian language teacher. But he was called back onstage before Grigorii made that fateful decision.
“By chance, I got to perform at an international festival with a famous band,” he says. After that, the invitations to perform just came rolling in. He got a gig heading the Philharmonic Jazz Band. He was only 20.
Musical Beginnings
Grigorii was born in Myrnohrad, Ukraine, in 1988. For Grigorii, his childhood in Ukraine in the 1990s set him up for a life of music. He says he absorbed the Ukrainian culture around him, and it has stayed with him throughout his life. When he was five years old, his father made a music video of him that was played on Ukrainian TV. He attended the First Music School of Myrnohrad and later Glière Music School when his parents relocated to Russia. Music became a refuge for him, a place to escape during this time. It was like a home he brought with him wherever he went. He decided to go to music college and threw himself into practicing. At times, he would practice for six hours a day.
“I got so passionate about music that I would sometimes sleep overnight at the college,” he says. On one particularly intense day, Grigorii recalls practicing for 18 hours straight.
From the Glière School, he headed to Rachmaninov College and then to Gnesin Academy. In fact, Gnesin Academy in Moscow became his main hub of learning, and he earned his bachelor’s and master’s there. He also came under the mentorship of Igor Bril, one of the most well-known Russian jazz musicians, who became his teacher. Bril, who started his career in the early 1960s, is renowned for his landmark recording, 1989’s Live at The Village Gate, one of the most legendary jazz clubs in New York, where legends like Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, and other jazz pioneers all played and recorded.
“He’s my main hero,” says Grigorii of Bril, who was his teacher at Gnesin Academy. “I’m immensely grateful to him, and he’s an example for me of a successful pianist, a great person, and just the best teacher there is.”
Grigorii continued this jazz trajectory in Moscow. He worked in different big bands and jazz bands. He performed with the Oleg Lundstrem Orchestra and the Moscow Ragtime Band. He also had his own jazz group, JazzEmotion. He also got a degree in musical management.
Grand Plans
After leaving Russia, Grigorii’s travels intensified. He had previously toured when he was younger, playing dates in Germany, Latvia, Finland, St. Petersburg, and Chelyabinsk. He even conducted a tango orchestra in Finland. Now on the road again, he started playing cruise ships and visited 77 countries over the past two years. Inevitably, the road led him to one of the jazz capitals of the world, New York. He has begun to settle in here, but he has big plans, or “grandiose plans,” as he puts it.
“I’d like to get to know the local musicians in New York and New Orleans,” says Grigorii. “And I want to learn from them.”
There are other dreams: to put out genre-hopping albums, to study again at a US university, and maybe even at the Berklee College of Music. Maybe he could also start touring and play jazz festivals. Most of all, he just wants to keep playing.
“I practice piano every day,” he says. “It helps me to survive.”.
Published By: Aize Perez
