A gdzie są te drogi, w powietrzu, na lądzie ?
And where are these roads, in the air, on land ?

Welcome to my website! I am Iouri Grankin, a singer specializing in improvised music and jazz.

The creation of this website was a spontaneous decision. My special thanks go to Anton Mukomela and Konstantin Kolodnitsky from the Cherkassy Sunrise Quintet from Ukraine – without their dedicated support this project would not have been possible. I know them both personally, as I lived in Cherkassy, Ukraine, before moving to Germany.

A big thank you goes to Natalia Zaspa from Cherkassy for her many years of active support in maintaining and designing this website.

The inclusion of “jazz” in the title is a deliberate choice: This music – especially jazz and improvisational singing – has always been with me and has had a significant influence on my life.

My passion for jazz began in the 1970s while I was studying mechanics and mathematics at the University of Kharkov in Ukraine. I was particularly influenced by Polish and American jazz. Miraculously, this enthusiasm has remained alive to this day. In mathematical terms, you could say: “With jazz through life” is an axiom for me.

I owe a lot to jazz – including my family and my second hometown. This music is my source of inspiration and joy, a motor for creativity and self-realization. It stands for creative heights, but also for challenges and overcoming one’s own limits. Jazz has given me numerous encounters with people who keep this music alive – people who are connected through jazz, but who also drift apart again. For me, playing jazz is like a competitive sport that I have practiced for many years and that has taught me perseverance, resilience and how to deal with success and defeat.

If you ask me what my life would be like without jazz, my answer is short: much poorer.