Volodymyr Gitlin fell in love with music as a boy in Kryvyi Rih, 280 miles southeast of Kyiv. He picked up the clarinet by the time he was eight and began studying at a local music school. When the time came, he set off to the Odesa Conservatory for professional training. There, he fell in with other music students who were more interested in the raucous sounds of Odesa’s streets and courtyards than in the elevated music found in recital halls. 

Gitlin began performing on the street himself, playing his clarinet in pick-up contests that demanded bravado, as one musician tried to upstage another. These musical street matches paralleled what happened in New Orleans, which only seemed natural to Gitlin as he worked to perfect his instrument’s Dixieland heritage. 

Other influences propelled Gitlin’s musicianship forward, especially Jewish klezmer music and a local chanson movement that, much like the New Orleans battles, encouraged confrontations with musical instruments as weapons. He and his conservatory pals spread out across Odesa, spurring flash mobs at the Privoz Market, on local streetcars, and along the famous Primorsky Boulevard. 

Before too long, a makeshift band took shape, performing at restaurants with a combination of “Odesa gansta folk” music, as its members called it, mixed with tall tales, anecdotes about old Odesan life, and table-dancing competitions. By 2014, the band had grown from three members (vocals, accordion/double bass, guitar) to seven (original instruments plus clarinet, trumpet, trombone, and drums). The band’s reputation went national—and international—when it opened the Odesa Jazz Fest that year under the name Dengi Vpered (“Pay Up Front”). 

Vocalist Bagrat Tsurkan signed on in 2020 as other musicians rotated through. A new music video, “Babushka Zdorova” (“Grandma is Healthy”), had thousands of views on Facebook. Leaving for an international tour in 2021, the group changed its name to Kommuna Lux, to reflect a growing community of like-minded musicians and fans. 

The 2022 Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine changed everything. Some band members went to war. Those who stayed transformed the group into a promotion company to raise money for Ukrainian charities. Emerging at this time as a favored klezmer band in Poland and Germany, the group raised thousands of dollars on its tours for those in need back home. The musicians’ rambunctious and rebellious brand of Ukrainian, Jewish, and Eastern European folk music expressed their notion that music brings light, freedom, and many good feelings to their audiences. Audiences became supercharged with energy wherever they played.

The band has continued to play across North America and Europe over the past year, before large and small audiences. No venue is too large—it played in January at New York’s Lincoln Center—or too modest, as it performed in community centers, church and synagogue halls, and clubs of displaced Odesans living elsewhere. Every concert includes a blend of music and storytelling, jokes, and tricks, a reminder of Odesa itself. To ensure that the point is not lost, the band prints a newspaper each year full of Odesa lore that it hands out at performances.

Since its founding, Odesa has been a music machine. Attracting residents from across the Russian Empire and the Mediterranean region, all sorts of sounds from all sorts of cultures crashed together, often accompanied by ecstatic dancing. As a young Gitlin understood, music was to be learned in the streets, courtyards, and taverns as well as at the city’s renowned conservatory, symphony hall, and opera house. In Odesa, music is the rocket fuel of diversity.