Musicians Learned How to Negotiate in Ukrainian

Maria Sonevytsky, an ethnomusicologist, joins Susan Hwang, her bandmate from the Debutante Hour and Main Squeeze Orchestra, to discuss their career playing gigs in the Ukrainian Village.

MARIA SONEVYTSKY: My connection to the Ukrainian National Home goes back to my early childhood. I grew up in the Ukrainian diaspora outside New York City. We would come in every weekend for Plast. And sometimes that would end up with a meal at the Ukrainian National Home. My grandmother actually lived just above it. I moved to New York in 2001, and I booked Debutante Hour’s first show at the Ukrainian National Home in 2007. We were an accordion duo that became a trio, and we were always looking for venues that were cheap. For me, it represented a hybrid place because I had the childhood connection to the Ukrainian diaspora, which was formal and familial and part of a culture that I thought of as not very cool. At the same time, I knew that New Order had played at the Ukrainian National Home back in 1981, so it felt exciting to reclaim a space like that and fill it with people who might not otherwise have gone to that venue.

SUSAN HWANG: I remember when you were making arrangements, you’d always speak in Ukrainian to one of the ladies there. And then sometimes I would go and drop off the deposit and she would recognize me from having been with you. And that’s how it was in the whole community. People started to recognize me as the Asian woman who was always singing with Maria.

M.S.: I don’t remember what the booking terms were. I do remember trying to ingratiate myself with the people there and promising I would bring a crowd that would buy a lot of food and booze. I could speak Ukrainian to them, but still it took persistence to book the place. It wasn’t obvious. You didn’t send an email. You had to go and find the guy who would give you the number to call, and the guy who answered the phone spoke only Ukrainian. It wasn’t easy, but it worked enough times that they started letting me book more stuff there. And then we could sort of do whatever we wanted. It was a DIY space, no infrastructure, no sound people, no stage, really. It was at the moment when there were some really exciting things happening around the Ukrainian scene. I mean, the bigger Ukrainian scene. Eugene Hütz was DJ-ing at Mehanata Bulgarian Bar every Thursday night. Gogol Bordello was the biggest band in that scene.

S.H.: It’s funny that you didn’t think Ukrainian culture was cool. You introduced me to all of that, and I thought, Why does Maria think being Ukrainian is so uncool? I’m Korean. I don’t think that’s cool. But then you’d take me to those nights and we would see Eugene, and we would try to talk to him and finagle some kind of a show with Main Squeeze Orchestra and him.

M.S.: And we succeeded! We did the Irving Plaza show, Halloween 2004. Main Squeeze Orchestra was 18 women with accordions, and we opened for Gogol Bordello. The after-party was at Sly Fox—a bar my cousins bartended at in the ’80s.

S.H.: And in 2009, we did our telethon at Ukrainian National Home to raise money to do our next record.

M.S.: I had collected 25 Soviet telephones in Ukraine. The phones didn’t connect to anything. They were just art objects. But we brought them to Ukrainian National Home and set them up, and that whole event was just random and hilarious and weird with a really crazy lineup—singers, comedians, magicians, musicians. I had an opportunistic relationship to that venue. And now other people have that relationship.

S.H.: And it still looks exactly the same! Recently, I booked a performance series there. The back room where the shows are still looks like a rec room or something. And the restaurant area looks like—I dunno, someone described it as a dentist’s office.