Mishka Ziganoff

Mishka Ziganoff ( Odessa , 15 January 1889 - New York , February 1967 ) was a Ukrainian naturalized American musician.^[1]

Biography[]

Misha Demitro Tsiganoff better known as Mishka Ziganoff (sometimes also spelled as Tziganoff), son of Yanchie Demitro Tsiganoff and Vorgja Nickolama, was a gypsy musician originally from Odessa , a city in Ukraine , who moved to New York at the beginning of the last century, where he opened a restaurant.

Virtuoso accordionist, Mishka Ziganoff, despite being a Christian, was well versed in Yiddish and Klezmer music.

In 1919 he recorded a disc that contained the song "Koilen", whose melody, as reported by the research by the scholar Fausto Giovannardi, would be very similar and probably would have inspired a part of the melody of the famous Italian partisan song "Bella Ciao".^[2]

According to the scholar Rod Hamilton, of The British Library in London , "Kolien" would be a version of "Dus Zekele Koilen" ( Two bags of coal ), of which there are various versions dating back to the 1920s.

He died in New York in February 1967 and was buried in Linden's Rosedale Cemetery.

Ziganoff is mentioned in the 1983 film Angelo, my love, written and directed by Robert Duvall.

References[]