Music always tells a story.

But sometimes this is particularly haunting.

Like on this album.

The tones fall like snowflakes, as if it were an impromptu by Robert Schumann, the piece is called "Winter in Odessa".

Then again, the number is called "Central Station", a beat drives powerfully forward, you can hear trains arriving and departing, although it's all just solo piano.

It doesn't matter whether you love classical music or jazz or chanson or ragtime - all of this becomes one here.

Some passages are a little reminiscent of the pieces by Charlie Chaplin, who also composed, or George Gershwin, especially the "Americans in Paris" - powerful music, very intellectual, but still full of swing.

And then comes a solo, an improvisation so striking and clear that effortlessly reaches the pinnacle of contemporary jazz.

The man who plays the piano so brilliantly is called Vadim Neselovskyi.

He has a German and a Ukrainian passport.

He is a professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, the best music school in the world.

He plays with the greats of jazz.

Hardly anyone in this country knows the 44-year-old.

That should change - now with his album "Odesa".

What is meant is Odessa, the metropolis on the Black Sea, which is currently being hit by rockets.

Neselovskyi had no idea of ​​this when he recorded it, he worked on the album for two years and it was ready shortly before the outbreak of war.

This should actually be a story about a clever and highly talented musician who is recognized in international jazz and could also be discovered in Germany.

But because the war overshadows everything, it is suddenly a story about how art, too, has become politicized.

"Unfortunately, I can't think of anything else," says Neselovskyi.

"We thought of this world that there would be no more wars, we instead work on issues such as equal rights for women and men, environmental protection, and now everything is reduced to one question again.

Evil and good, black and white.

That changes art, that changes everything for us artists.”

War changes art

As a music professor, he teaches people from all over the world.

Two Russians are also in his courses.

They are now demonstrating with him against the war.

"Since February 24 I've been thinking: everyone is lost.

The world will not be the same as it was before,” says Neselovskyi.

And: "Can you still say: Let's groove?" He also says that he sees the war in Syria differently now.

It is painful for him that we have so hidden the situation.

"How many times have I carried on as normal when bombs were falling in Syria?"

War, migration, system change - all this is closely connected with Odessa and also with Neselovskyi's own life.

In 1995 he came to Germany as a Jewish quota refugee, the word meant refugees who, by direct order of the Ministry of the Interior, were allowed to live in Germany without an examination.

From 1991 onwards, people with Jewish ancestors were able to emigrate from the disintegrating USSR.

With good reason, Neselovskyi thinks: "Anti-Semitism was completely normal in the former Soviet Union." As a child he often heard "Go to Israel!", his father's career at the university was made difficult, there were so-called "Jewish quotas". given.

The occupation of Odessa by Romanian fascists was never discussed at school.

There is now a track on his album called "October 1941 Prayer" which refers to a mass murder of the Jews in Odessa and Transnistria in October 1941.

Escape from Russian anti-Semitism

In Germany, Neselovskyi and his family found safety.

He said he "always felt very good" here.

He lived in Unna and studied in Detmold.

Right-wing demos were also unpleasant for him.

But the bottom line, he says, is that the country remains a role model for how different ethnic groups live together.

“In Russia's sphere of influence, it was never like that.

There is also no coming to terms with the past like the Germans had.

Now you can see what happens if that doesn't happen."