When the proprietor of an underground membership in Kyiv reached out to Western musicians to play in Ukraine, lengthy earlier than the struggle, there weren’t so many takers.
However an American from Boston, Mirza Ramic, accepted the invitation, spawning an enduring friendship with the membership’s proprietor, Taras Khimchak.
“I kept coming back,” Mr. Ramic, 40, mentioned in an interview on the membership, Mezzanine, the place he was getting ready for a efficiency throughout a latest tour of Ukraine.
The nation, he mentioned “is one of the places that has welcomed me most and been the most supportive of my music.” And so particularly after the Russian invasion two years in the past, he added, “I wanted to come now, to show my support in these hard times.”
Mr. Ramic, born in Bosnia, is a toddler of struggle himself. At 11, he misplaced his father within the shelling of his hometown, Mostar, and spent years as a refugee, transferring from nation to nation together with his mom as she struggled to discover a solution to survive.
They lived in Zagreb, Croatia; Tunis; and Prague, earlier than transferring to america, first to Arizona, and ultimately Boston. There, he completed his schooling and commenced a profession as a musician, forming an digital band, Arms and Sleepers, with a school buddy, Max Lewis.
Now a solo musician, he was again taking part in in Kyiv and two different cities within the fall, undeterred by the specter of missile strikes, giving free concert events in a private dedication to face alongside his Ukrainian followers.
“Arts and culture during war are one of the most important things that keeps people going because it gives them a sense of human dignity,” Mr. Ramic mentioned. “They are also entitled to this in difficult times.”
Mr. Ramic has many Russian followers too — in addition to Russian pals, together with his promoter in Moscow, who left their house nation in protest on the struggle in Ukraine. He mentioned he has tried to think about the dilemma in his personal context, how he as a Bosnian would have felt towards a Serb who was towards the struggle. However for the reason that invasion, he mentioned, he had determined to not play in Russia out of respect for Ukrainians.
“To go there, symbolically, at this moment, would not be right,” he mentioned.
The one fixed in his life has been music, and it has change into his fundamental instrument in navigating his traumatic life experiences. Within the interview, he spoke eloquently of his life as a refugee and an immigrant, of the lack of his father, and of his sense of alienation and never belonging anyplace.
“For me music is a way to deal with these difficult core memories,” he mentioned. “At the root, it is that.”
His mom, Selma, a piano trainer, taught him classical piano all through their odyssey as refugees, and hoped Mr. Ramic would change into a live performance pianist. However in his teenagers, he gave up the each day 4 hours of piano observe to deal with his research, and turned to taking part in piano and keyboards in bands by means of highschool and faculty as an alternative.
He studied Japanese European historical past and politics at Bowdoin School, in Maine, and worldwide relations in a masters’ program on the Fletcher College at Tufts College, pushed by a want to grasp the geopolitics that’s the backdrop to his life.
But he got here to confront his personal ache within the course of. In “To Tell a Ghost,” a brief documentary movie he made a number of years in the past, he described the shock he felt when the category dialogue turned to the wars of the previous Yugoslavia.
“I remember sitting in class, drinking my coffee — like everyone else — and suddenly freezing on the inside,” he associated within the movie. He couldn’t take part within the dialogue, he mentioned.
In between programs, he performed in a rock band, and in 2006 he fashioned Arms and Sleepers with Mr. Lewis. It was a particular partnership, he mentioned, between Mr. Ramic, born a Muslim, and Mr. Lewis who’s Jewish, and now educating ethics at Yale College. The band’s title displays Mr. Ramic’s view of the struggle in Bosnia, referring to the numerous who wielded weapons, and others, who did little to cease it. “The world was sleeping,” he mentioned.
He was 9 when struggle broke out in Mostar as Serbian forces fought Croatian and Bosnian fighters for management of town. His reminiscences are visceral.
“Skies filled with rockets,” he mentioned within the interview. “We had a tank that rolled into our street, by our house.” He remembers watching the tank from the kitchen window. “That was terror.”
Because the preventing intensified, his father, Ibrica, a dentist, despatched his spouse and son out in a refugee convoy for ladies and kids. He stayed in Mostar to take care of their property and was killed the following yr, in September 1993, when a mortar shell landed on the street outdoors their home.
Shedding his father, with whom he was very shut, stays a defining trauma for Mr. Ramic. It wrenched him away from his homeland, and he’s nonetheless wrestling with a deep disappointment and typically despair, he mentioned.
It led him not too long ago to advise a few Ukrainian pals towards enlisting within the military. “You are going to be more useful to your country alive,” he advised them. “And for the next generation of people, like your child, they are going to be in a much healthier and stronger state to make a difference, if you stay alive.”
If his father had survived, he would in all probability have gone again to Bosnia, Mr. Ramic mentioned. His finest buddy from childhood survived the struggle in Bosnia and nonetheless lives in Mostar, working and elevating a household, however Mr. Ramic, an American citizen, mentioned he doubted he would return to dwell there.
“It’s too difficult emotionally,” he mentioned. “I am sort of in between. I don’t really feel American, I don’t feel Bosnian.”
He and his mom have returned to Mostar for visits, together with in September for the thirtieth anniversary of his father’s loss of life. A lot of town nonetheless stands in ruins, he mentioned, and so they have by no means restored their household house. The roof was fastened with European help, however his father’s dentistry gear and different possessions lie untouched, coated in mud, because it was the day he died.
Mr. Ramic moved to Berlin in 2020, and spends time in different European nations — composing in Latvia throughout the pandemic, and in Spain organizing assist for Ukraine in February 2022 in the beginning of the invasion. Europe feels nearer to his roots than America, he mentioned.
“A lot of the music that I create — and perhaps that’s why it does resonate with people in places like Ukraine — is that it is kind of in-between,” he mentioned. “It’s about belonging, or not belonging and figuring out who you are, and maybe coming to the realization that it’s just you and that’s it.”
His music is digital, accompanied by cinematic movies that blend documentary movie footage with kaleidoscopic, computer-generated digital visuals, typically with a powerful political message. He regularly confronts the violence and tragedy round him — from his time working with at-risk youth on the South Aspect of Chicago, to the Black Lives Matter protests, to the struggle in Ukraine since its first beginnings in 2014 when separatists seized energy in elements of the jap area of the nation.
With 13 albums produced, he has a devoted following and has discovered a solution to dwell off his music. He carried out, dancing intensely over his keyboards, earlier than a crowd of 200 individuals on the Mezzanine, a membership set in an previous Soviet textile manufacturing unit in Kyiv. A number of the viewers have been followers of his on Fb and knew his music, however others got here alongside to see a uncommon American keen to play in wartime Ukraine.
His music is pressing and intense, however there are additionally calm, ambient-influenced tracks. One fan on the Kyiv live performance, an I.T. engineer who solely gave her first title, Yana, mentioned she listened to his music when out strolling to overlook the stress of the struggle.
“It takes you to some moment where you are neither sad nor happy but just in balance,” she mentioned.
Oleksandr Chubko contributed reporting from Kyiv.
