What made a man in his 18 years, from a good family from Vienna, abandon his bourgeois life and finally settle in the 3000 inhabitants Zakarpattian village of Nyzhnye Selyshche?

This question came to my mind when I knew that Jürgen, from Hudaki Village Band, was an Austrian. Through that question I got to understand that the story of Hudaki Village Band is the story of the synergy, complicity and the love between Jürgen and the music and the people from this Ukranian agricultural land.

Jürgen is now Yuri and Hudaki is a powerful band of local musicians with an international approach and a careful staging, masters of the alchemy of musical-vibrating happiness.

I had the chance to see Hudaki Village Band at the festival 5 Continentes in Martigny, Switzerland, in June 2019. Fortunately, the festival programmed three concerts with them. And if they had been four, I would have seen them four times. Such is the charm of this band, that comes from a little village from Zakarpattia, the oblast on the southwest of Ukraine.

But, back to Jürgen. Let he be himself who explains the steps that took him to unite his path with a bunch of local musicians from Zakarpattia and develop what today is Hudaki Village Band:

I am Jürgen Kräftner, born 1961 in Vienna, from a “good family”. I finished high school in my home country, studied clarinet briefly at the Vienna Conservatory, not very long, but with a very good teacher, solo clarinetist at the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

At the age of 18, it came the foreseeable break with bourgeois life. From 1979 – 1997 I lived mainly in a rural community in Provence. It is called Longo Maï and originated from the 1968 movement: No hierarchies, no pay scale, no individual property, living collectively. Daily life included not only agriculture and handicrafts, mostly for self-sufficiency, but also involvement in socially relevant issues, such as supporting refugees and other socially marginalized groups, running a local radio station, and always – music. Even then I was particularly interested in traditional music from all kinds of countries, especially from Eastern Europe.

The opening of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union broadened our horizons considerably. Meeting people from the Ukraine was exciting. I immediately fell in love with a beautiful Ukrainian woman and went there several times. At the same time, I was interested in exposing our socio-political ambitions to a post-socialist environment. The love broke up, but I stayed. That was not always easy, music helped me a lot.

Those were years of radical change, in which many people lost everything, not only materially, but also the moral value, systems collapsed. The village musicians I met at weddings seemed to survive this stress and merciless opportunism without any harm. Their music has withstood the kitsch of the Soviet period and also withstood the commercial influence of TV shows.

I only gradually realized the emotional density, the absolute independence and colossal power of this music.

In the beginning, we simply played music together for fun, then the first invitations came from abroad. After the first years we realized together that we have potential as a band.

We started to record CDs, set up a website and rehearse more regularly. With time we realized that we are the only ones in Ukraine who are radically committed to authenticity on the one hand, but don’t reproduce rigidly handed down folklore on the other hand. Our musicians are “real”, we don’t have to pretend. That’s also the reason, why we don’t wear traditional costumes, which nobody in this area has been wearing since World War II at the latest.

My task here, even after almost 20 years, remains to strengthen the self-confidence of the band members, to insist again and again on the strength of the traditional music, without compromising on kitsch and commerce. The most important, we still have fun making music together, just like in the beginning. The fact that we have been playing with practically the same line-up since 2001 is probably the clearest indication of this.”

In 19 years of performing in hundreds of festivals and concert halls across Europe, the band has learned to make their archaic, night-time moments of happiness accessible to the uninitiated. Hudaki Village Band has performed in the Sziget Festival in Budapest, Fusion, Rudolstadt and Bardentreffen in Germany, KlezMore in Vienna, Notes d’Equinoxes Delemont and Festival des 5 Continents in Switzerland, Respect-Prague, Balkan Trafik Brussels, Rudolstadt, Les Suds Arles in France and many more.

Ah, and you might wonder what does hudaki mean: in the Maramures region, a mountainous area of South-west Ukraine on the border with Romania and Hungary, village musicians are called hudaki. Enjoy this delighting bunch of hudakis!