The multi-instrumentalist Roman Miroshnychenko won the prize for The Best World Traditional Song, reports the website gorod.dp.ua. The prize was awarded to his song “Unforgiven.” It is an exquisite work on verging between jazz and flamenco.
This event overwhelmed the entire world music community, because he became the first nominee from the CIS countries in the past nine years and immediately won the prize. Miroshnychenko’s competitors in that category were such masters of music business as Dan Milner, a creator of Irish ballads from North America; Ablaye Cissoko & Volker Goetze, a duet consisting of a Senegal master of playing on bark and a German trumpeter; Ranger & the Re-Arrangers, an American “elf” band; Solam, a beautiful trio from Switzerland that plays flamenco.
Independent Music Awards (IMA) is indeed a very prestigious American award that has been around for a decade now. Unlike the respectable Grammy Award, only independent musicians who are not bound by record companies’ contracts are nominated for IMA. The winners in 50 nominations were selected by a panel of judges. This year it included such international stars as Peter Gabriel, Tom Waits, Norah Jones, Melissa Etheridge, Paquito D’Rivera, Suzanne Vega, Buddy Guy, Lou Reed, Ozzy Osbourne, ICE-T, John Pattitucci, and others.
Unfortunately, people in Ukraine are largely unaware of Miroshnychenko despite the fact that he has already won a great number of awards and prizes. He performs with such stars of world’s jazz as Al DI MEOLA, Frank Colon, Djivan Gasparyan, Saskia Laroo, Richie Cole, Milcho Leviev, Mario Parmisano, and Joao Donato. He also works together with the masters of Russian jazz, such as Igor Bril, Leonid Vintskevich, Igor Butman, Aleksey Zubov, and many others. Miroshnychenko’s characteristic performing features are expressive melodiousness, perfect improvisation thinking, masterly performed passages, and an original mixture of the acoustic guitar with modern technologies of guitar equipment.
