Oleh Skrypka without the band: bayan, orchestra, jazz cabaret

On 18 April 2003 Oleh Skrypka walked onto the stage of the Stoned Baboon club without his band. For nearly two hours he played alone on bayan, guitar and whatever else was within reach, and a Kyiv Post reviewer called him a one-man band. The set held his own takes on folk songs, melancholic love ballads, and songs by AC/DC, Louis Armstrong and the band Kino. Between numbers he read his own poems. Ukrainian, English and French words turned up inside a single song. For the encore Skrypka played three Vopli Vidopliassova hits over a prerecorded drum track.

Another solo format appeared in 2010. The project was called Jazz Cabaret Zabava, and Skrypka built it on songs by Bohdan Veselovsky, one of the first authors of Ukrainian pop song in the 1930s and 1940s. In August 2010 he brought Zabava to the Art Jazz Cooperation festival in Rivne, straight from a tour of the United States and Canada.

The result was the album Zhorzhyna. Skrypka presented it on 18 March 2011 in a Kyiv club, together with the musicians of Zabava. The record rests on “Karii ochi”, “Usmikh”, “Ne pokyn” and “Pryide shche chas”, all in Ukrainian. Skrypka described the work as a restoration of forgotten repertoire and said he spent more than five years on it in Toronto, Kyiv and New York. His reasoning: jazz, tango, foxtrot and swing are usually taken for overseas or European genres, and he wanted to show that Ukraine has a rich musical history of its own.

With an orchestra, Skrypka plays his songs on folk instruments. The National Academic Folk Instruments Orchestra of Ukraine was founded in 1969, received national status in 1997 and is led by Viktor Hutsal. It uses more than forty instruments, among them bandura, cimbalom, kobza, sopilka, basolia and lira. On 25 May 2024, at his 60th-birthday concert at Stereo Plaza in Kyiv, sixty orchestra players took the stage with Vopli Vidopliassova, a folk choir and dance groups. “Dyvo” and “Rozmova z Mahatmoiu” were played with the orchestra for the first time.

Skrypka changes the smaller line-ups from show to show. His Bandcamp page holds sixteen live recordings from March 2023 to January 2026. The credits name the orchestra, Band XL, Love Band or Grand Cabaret Girls Band, and the recording of a Kyiv concert at Gulliver on 17 August 2025 is marked as solo. Among them are a Rock & Folk programme with the orchestra from 19 April 2023 and a Christmas “Shchedryk” concert from 15 January 2025.

In January 2023 Skrypka toured Canada with a Christmas programme: the first concert was in Vancouver on 20 January, and the last was set for Toronto on 4 February. He played with a team of Canadian-Ukrainian musicians and took the guitar and accordion himself. The programme included two of his arrangements of “Shchedryk”, one folk and one rock version with Vopli Vidopliassova.