Usein Bekirov — Honored Artist of Ukraine, Grammy-Nominated Pianist, PhD, and Composer of the First Crimean Tatar Opera in History — the Crimean Tatar Nation’s Soul in New York

At the Ukrainian Museum in New York, Usein Bekirov Revived the Soul of Crimea and Ukraine Through Music

March 22, 2026

MANHATTAN — East 6th Street, a grand piano spoke in a language that no violent, illegal occupation of Crimea can silence. And the central hero of this resistance is Usein Bekirov — Honored Artist of Ukraine, Doctor of Philosophy in Musical Arts, whose scholarly commitment runs as deep as his artistry: he defended his dissertation on “Crimean Tatar Song Folklore in Academic and Jazz Compositional Practice,” authored a monograph on the influence of folklore on contemporary music, and beyond his jazz projects, incorporates folk elements into his academic works including concertos for piano and orchestra — and is currently completing what will be the first Crimean Tatar opera ever written. He is also a pianist three times nominated for the Grammy Award, a composer, and the most celebrated jazz musician in Ukraine.

Dr.Bekirov took the stage at the Ukrainian Museum to perform a program of Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian jazz. The audience listened in near-reverent silence, many leaning forward as though afraid to miss something fragile dissolving in the air.

“This is what the cultural strengthening of subjecthood looks like, this is what the cultural resilience for the preservation of subjectivity looks like,” said Zera Mustafaieva, President and Co-Founder of the Crimean Tatar Foundation USA. “When Dr.Bekirov plays, you hear three thousand years of Crimean Tatar history on their autochthonous land. No Russian occupying regime of Crimea can erase that.”

Bekirov’s story begins where the stories of so many Crimean Tatar survivors begin — far from their ancestral homeland, by the deliberate and sinister crime of the highest leadership of the communist totalitarian regime.

Usein Bekirov was born in 1982 in Fergana, Uzbekistan — one of the Soviet republics to which the genocide of 1944 scattered the survivors. His father, Riza Bekirov, is a distinguished composer and pianist of Crimea, who began his path with the founding of the Crimean Tatar ensemble “Sato” — the only jazz collective in the entire Soviet Union that performed arrangements of Crimean Tatar national music. In a system of communist totalitarian rule that sought to suppress every expression of Crimean Tatar identity, that ensemble was an act of strengthening cultural survival.

In 1990, as the communist totalitarian regime began to collapse, the Bekirov family did what up to half a million Crimean Tatars did: they returned home. To Crimea — to the autochthonous land on which their ancestors had lived for three millennia.
Usein Bekirov received a rigorous classical education at the Simferopol Music College, and later at the National Music Academy of Ukraine in Kyiv, where in 2023 he defended his doctoral dissertation in the field of musical arts. But from the very beginning, he was drawn to jazz — as a form of expressing truth.

“Jazz is a people’s music, and in it, the Crimean Tatar sound found its voice.”

Usein Bekirov

A Cultural Ambassador of Crimean Tatar Nation

Since Russia’s illegal occupation of Crimea in 2014, Bekirov has become far more than a jazz musician. He is the cultural ambassador of the Crimean Tatar autochthonous nation — the indigenous people of Ukraine of temporarily occupied Crimea — carrying their voice across the world, bearing witness to a nation under occupation and to the ongoing erasure of its nation on their own ancestral land.

Because folk music is harmonically simple, Bekirov saturates it with jazz harmonies in a way that preserves the structure and emotional essence of the original.
In the album “Taterrium” — whose title is an anagram of the words “Tatar” and “Terra,” meaning “Tatar Land” — he presented jazz arrangements he had been developing for ten years. The album weaves Crimean Tatar national melodies into jazz structures so that the music feels simultaneously deeply rooted and sharply contemporary. In the later album Hands (2021), folk motifs are combined with the vocabulary of fusion and funk, the recording featured world jazz stars Mike Stern and Ibrahim Maalouf and Dennis Chambers. The release Free Way Deluxe goes deeper into the synthesis of ethno-jazz and funk, embodying what Bekirov himself calls the Crimean Tatar sound, a modal, haunting, profoundly melodic heritage.
Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine in February 2022, Bekirov has performed at dozens of benefit concerts in support of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, transforming his instrument into a declaration of cultural diplomacy — sharing with the entire world the story of the ongoing war in Ukraine and the violent occupation of Crimea, where genocide against its autochthonous nation continues.

Saturday evening’s concert at the Ukrainian Museum was conceived as an intimate gathering. The hall was full. But it became something greater — an assembly, and a testimony.
From the stage, Bekirov radiated the quiet authority of a man who has spent decades learning to transform history into beauty. The audience — representatives of the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar diasporas, human rights advocates, and New Yorkers — were visibly moved.
“What struck me,” said one of those present, a woman of Ukrainian origin who gave her name only as Olya, “was how through the composer, his notes became living stories of Crimea and Ukraine — an ancient land, a thousand years deep. The music painted. It was magic.”