Safety Magic

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. You can download one of the recent SM live recordings HERE
Safety Magic process’s style can be referred to as the world music. World music — the definition wipes away limits of styles and includes everything that cannot be designated with the canonized labels like ‘rock’, ‘jazz’, ‘ethno’ (art-rock, new-jazz and ethno-punk are also considered here). Energy of rock, sensuality of jazz and sacrality of ethno are so mixed in Safety Magic that Australian didgereedoo, Cuban tres and Gypsy violin speak the same language.
Apparently that’s what is called world music.
Safety magic is called a “process”, because at various times all new and new people are involved in it, giving to it different shades. There can be on stage either 3 musicians or 12, each of them is a professional, and it looks like playing in SM allowed them to reach a new level. Their joint creative work has given birth to the most powerful sound, which can maybe only compared to the projects King Crimson and Can.
Not without reason Damo Suzuki (the vocalist of the earlier well-known and now cult group Can) & Safety Magic performed a joint concert in club “DOM” within the frames of his project Damo Suzuki’s Network in May, 2005.) Maîtres of jazz — Anatoly Gerasimov and Vladimir Chekasin, Yury Dementyev (saaz, sitar), Inna Zhelannaya (vocals), Nickolay Oorzhak (Tuva’s throat singing) , Ilya "Prool" and Alexey "Mixer"(percussion), Pravin (Santur, Tabla, Bansuri, Sitar), NAZAAR (Electric Violin), Konstantin Kulikov (Trumpet, Fluegelhorn), Ramil Shamsutdinov(Trombone), Arkady Marto(Electronics) and many other musicians — took part in Safety Magic as invited guests.
Though the process started not so long ago, in 2002, the group’s life was quickly enough filled with lots of concerts:
Since 2003 the group has taken part in different festivals: “Ethnolife”, “Mysterious India”, International festival “BASE Jumping”. At festival “VDOKH” SM performed together with such famous Russian groups, as W.K.?, Markscheider Kunst, 5’NIZZA.
In 2004 maestro V. Chekasin’s paid attention to Safety Magic & invited them to take part in his project Ethnic Process. SM was invited to a series of the airs on radio & TV in Moscow & S-Petersburg.
They recorded their first disc. The presentation, went off in February, 2005, had a good press & Internet reviews.
“One of these days the presentation of the first disc of super group Safety Magic — the most powerful ethno-jazz-rock group on today’s rock-stage — took place in club “In Brestskaya”. In the over-crowded club the well-known saxophonists Vladimir Chekasin and Anatoly Gerasimov soloed as special guests, Anna Korolyova sang. To support Safety Magic have arrived Pep-See, Markscheider Kunst, Pelageya, and Karl Khlamkin. Quite a serious scope… The central event of the presentation became performance of Safety Magic with Chekasin, Gerasimov and Korolyova. They so sensitively heard each other, that true pleasure from their shining performance entered the audience literally into a stupor. Video performance from Boris Berger (“Emergency Exit”) created an additional semantic layer to the masters’ world-action…”
NEWSmusic.ru
Safety Magic was invited to a number of eminent International festivals: “SKIF” (Moscow & S-Petersburg), “Usad’ba Jazz” in Arkhangelskoe (Safety Magic’s soundtrack was included to the festival’s anthology), International Festival of World Music “Sayanskoe Kol’co”, festival “Art Pleasure” (Chesterfield), where SM performed together with Nino Katamadze and Tony Allen on the same stage.
Inna Zhelannaya joined Safety Magic process in the autumn, 2005. The singer had taken part in a great number of European and world festivals during her creative activities: from jazz to world music, from Finland to Spain; her disc was awarded with “Radio France International” Grand-Prix; she had a joint project with Trey Gunn and Pat Mastelotto – musicians of the legendary supergroup “King Crimson”. After several joint concerts in Moscow it was decided to keep on the cooperation, which turned out to be a successful project. They were invited to participate the Russian rock- & ethno-festivals:
“Folk-around-the-clock” in Chernogolovka, “Ethnotrip 2005” in Nizhnij Novgorod, “Nashestvie 2006”.
At the same time, SM cooperated with devoted Tuva shaman Nickolay Oorzhak. A videofilm with him was shot at their joint concert at the action “Manuscripts don’t burn’, held in M.Bulgakov’s Birthday.
In 2006 SafetyMagic had a joint concert with Kristian Vare (JYOTI) – a recognized world master of playing unique ethnic instruments (didgereedoo, sitar, percussion) & a composer of a sound track to the cult film “Blueberry”.
In 2007 Safety Magic released their second album "Voices", where the musicians combined several unreleased live and studio recordings, including all the vocalists that had participated in the SM process, such as Nikolay Oorzhak, Inna Zhelannaya, Damo Suzuki, Tatyana Mikheeva and others. All of them took part in the presentation, that took place in spring 2007 in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg and looked like more as a big ethnic festival due to "rich" line up and many friendly guest musicians such as PEP-SEE, Vladimir Chekasin, Pelageya, Eject Project, Karl Hlamkin & Ogneopasnorkestr and others...