Alina Zalozna

Alina Zalozna is a jazz vocalist, composer and a new face of the Ukrainian jazz scene, crafting a front edge blend of improvised jazz and folk in a warm and organic tone. She was the winner of the International Baku jazz competition in 2019 and received a special recognition as a soloist by the jury of Blue Note Poznan jazz competition in 2021.

In 2022 she released her debut album “Ukrainian Melodies” as a response on the full scale Russian-Ukrainian war, featuring the prominent Ukrainian jazz musicians Borys Mohylevskyi, Oleksandr Malyshev, Denys Dontsov, Valentyn Korniienko, Pavlo Halytskyi. The album consists of 10 Ukrainian folk songs presented in Alina’s original jazz arrangements that she had been working on for the past 5 years. Using a common jazz language, she naturally combined authentic melodies with contemporary jazz rhythms and harmonies. The project received positive feedback and was performed live in Ukraine and Malaga, Spain, where she performed charity concerts featuring Ukrainian bassist and composer Illya Alabuzhev and Spanish saxophonist Enrique Oliver in support of Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Alina was born in an artistic family and was exposed to art from her childhood. In her early teens she discovered her interest in music and became passionate about singing and playing guitar. Since the beginning of her formal higher education, Alina started to gravitate towards mainstream jazz, bebop, cool, post-bop and Brazilian music, and graduated from Kherson music college and Kyiv Glier’s music academy as a jazz vocalist, band leader and educator.
 

In 2020 her co-composed song “Alicia’s Song” was featured on the album “Living Room” by Hans Peter Salentin and Hans Fuecker. As a lead singer, she had a mini-tour with the Land Forces jazz orchestra at the end of 2023, dedicated to her favorite jazz singers of all times – Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Dianne Shuur, Carmen McRae, Annie Ross.

As a part of her creative outlet, Alina adds Ukrainian lyrics to famous jazz recordings that influenced her own compositions, such as “Yes or No”, “Armageddon” by Wayne Shorter, “Up and Over” and “Keepsake” by Matt Penman, and many other compositions that speaks to her the most. 

“Apart from using Ukrainian folk songs as a tool to discover the particular sound of Ukrainian jazz as a unique genre, one other essential creative outlet for me is adding Ukrainian lyrics to well-known instrumental jazz tunes. This serves both the purpose of popularizing and making it easier to digest jazz music for the Ukrainian audience, as well as build on an additional layer of meaning with a national flavor.” – Alina says

Currently, Alina is working on her first long-form piece “Intermezzo” as a composer, based on the novel that was written in 1908 by the famous Ukrainian writer Mykhailo Kotsubynskyi. In Ukrainian literature it is the great example of “poetry written in prose form” with some strong characteristics of impressionisminherent to artists of those times. Alina has embodied “Intermezzo” as a music piece which consists of two big parts with 18 different songs or episodes that continuously interchange with a prose declamation. 
 

Awards

1st place winner of Baku Jazz Ccompetition 2019