Nilufar Usmonova is a popular contemporary Uzbek pop singer. She is perhaps best known as the daughter of legendary Uzbek singer Yulduz Usmonova; another of her major achievements (if it can be called that) is that she has never fallen out of favor with the Uzbek authorities, as is common for Uzbek pop singers. Usmonova […]
Bravo (Браво) is a classic Russian rock band formed in the 1980s. Like the popular Soviet band Secret, its style and image was inspired by Western rock, including the Beatles. Evgeniy Khavtan (Евгений Хавтан) founded Bravo in 1983, when he was a student at the Moscow Institute of Railway Engineers. The first configuration of the […]
Grigory Leps (Григорий Лепс) is a Russian singer best known for his contributions to shanson (a genre of Russian music that often tells stories about the criminal underworld). Leps is from Sochi and started playing music when he was young, which initially competed with soccer in his affections—but luckily for us, music won. He studied […]
Maciej Maleńczuk is a Polish singer and songwriter who has been active in a wide variety of bands in many different styles—rock, jazz, dance pop—since the 1980s. Maleńczuk grew up in Wojcieszów, Poland, where he attended a sports school and was apparently a far from stellar student. He spent more time listening to American rock […]
Bartosz (Bartas) Szymoniak is a Polish solo singer. For many years he was also the vocalist for Sztywny Pal Azji, a Polish classic rock band that has been around since the mid-1980s. Szymoniak was born in Kalisz, Poland, toward the tail end of the Communist era. He has become a musical figure with a range of […]
Organek (also known as Ørganek) is a Polish contemporary classic-style rock band. It was started in 2013 in the Polish city Torun by singer Tomasz Organek. Organek, who grew up in Suwałki, is a composer and songwriter in addition to a singer—and he studied English philology at university. Organek’s music education was at the Katowice Music […]
Quest Pistols Show (simply Quest Pistols until 2014) is a unique and unusual Russian/Ukrainian … band, for lack of a better word. They often refer to themselves as a “show” (шоу) instead, and in their own words have, over the course of their existence, transformed from an “amateur ballet and freak boy band to a […]
Sogdiana (real name Oksana Nechitaylo, Оксана Нечитайло) is a Russian-Uzbek pop singer. She sings in Uzbek, Russian, and Chechen, though most often in Uzbek. Sogdiana’s family is Chechen, but she grew up in Uzbekistan—she was born in 1984 in Tashkent. She studied the piano in school and studied at a conservatory at the same time, […]
Jasur Gaipov is a young Uzbek pop singer. He sings mainly in Uzbek, but he knows several other languages—Russian, English, Turkish, and Azerbaijani, and Tadjik. In addition to singing, he writes poetry, dances, and acts in films, and has trained as a lawyer and worked as an entrepreneur. He has said that his biggest musical influence […]
Yulduz Usmonova is an Uzbek singer who has been beloved in Uzbekistan and surrounding countries for several decades. She sings mainly in Uzbek, but her repertoire includes songs in Russian, English, Uighur, Turkish, Kazakh, and Tatar. Her genre is considered pop, but her songs also include traditional Uzbek instruments and are not typical pop tunes. […]
Tamila (real name Esmeralda Rahmatova) is an Uzbek pop singer who has most recently been best known for a series of scandals that resulted in her losing her performance license in Uzbekistan. Tamila was born in 1988 in Qarshi, in the southwest of Uzbekistan. She began performing in 2011 and had a good few years […]
25/17 is a Russian alternative rock and hip-hop group that was formed in 2002 in Omsk, a Siberian city. The group initially went by the name Ezekiel 25:17 (Иезекииль 25:17)—the quotation reads “I will carry out great vengeance on them and punish them in my wrath,” otherwise known as Samuel L. Jackson’s most famous line from […]
