Eduard Shyfrin and his band Shyfrin Alliance have a debut album out in September. Interview by Sebastian.
It’s the appealingly dark and gravelly voice of experience. Ukrainian-born former entrepreneur Eduard Shyfrin has an unusual story to tell, and is telling it by composing, singing and reciting. Of the twelve tracks of the album “Blues Upside Down”, due for release in September, two singles have been released so far, including “Unconditional” (YouTube below).
Where did the idea for him to start composing and songwriting come from? “It was a completely out-of-the blue process,” he tells me on the telephone from his home in Monaco. “I had a musical training. Classical. Seven years piano and guitar. But I grew up surrounded by the sounds of jazz in my parents’ small apartment: Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong…” He grew up in Dnipro, then called Dnipropetrovsk. His parents loved jazz, he even remembers that they bought him a book of it to play at the piano. Then came a gap “of at least three decades when I didn’t touch the instruments”
In our interview, he quickly told me the story of those intervening years. As a schoolboy he was physics champion for the whole of the USSR two years in a row. After studies at Moscow University he started work in metallurgy plants back in Ukraine, during which he completed a PhD in physical chemistry. He set up, ran and owned a successful business which he sold in 2010, but also does not disguise the fact that he had a mental crisis in 2000.
Since 2020 he has divided his time between London and Monaco. And his post-business career has also taken him in the direction of intellectual pursuits. He wrote a book “From Infinity to Man” which is the fruit of his studies of the Torah and Kabbalah, and is particularly interested in the intersection of science and religion. His Judaism was suppressed in his younger life in the Soviet Union, and the calling to these intellectual pursuits related to his Jewish identity is strong – “ we are people of the book”, as he describes his outlook. He has presented and talked twice at Kings Place’s Jewish Book Week in London.
Is there any kind of link between his composing and lyric-writing? Yes absolutely he affirms. “All my lyrics are strongly affected by my cabbalistic studied, there are hidden cabalistic ideas and messages in them. Love is the most important issue in the Kabbalah.” “Unconditional”, released as a single, is in that vein.
What really kick-started his musical activity was the lockdown. All of a sudden Shyfrin realised he had time and re-started music lessons on piano, guitar and vocals. “Regular lessons,” he says. “If I do something I do it systematically, otherwise it doesn’t make sense.”
A key figure in helping him develop his musical activity was English-born (Birmingham conservatoire-trained) , French-based jazz singer and singing teacher Lizzy Parks. He was taking singing lessons with her, and she was the one who encouraged his first steps in composition, and introduced him to a network which includes arranger Fred Luzignant., who has done a large scale Nelson Riddle-ish orchestration for “I See Your Eyes.”
And his own inspirations as composers? He expresses a strong admiration for Enrico Morricone and Nino Rota; The track “Conversation with Love” is under that spell and is reminiscent of Morricone’s theme for “Le Clan des Siciliens”.
And where is all this musical activity headed? The first point which Shyfrin makes is that it is above all keen that it is in no sense a competitive activity. He is enjoying it: “The ability to express and send a message for me is a big reward.” He is not a “slave to numbers,” he insists, but also enjoys the fact that his songs have already been played on over 150 radio stations in the US and fifty in the UK.
As Shyfrin admits: “For me this is a huge result; I never dreamt of this.”
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