Their numerous performances in Düsseldorf and the surrounding area have already earned them the description of an “emotional roller coaster.”
Alex Kalina, baritone, was born in Moscow. Yiddish songs, Cossack songs, city romances, and the songs of the Russian Roma have accompanied him since childhood, shaping both his personal life and his operatic career. Within the duo, he acts like a tightly wound spring—charged with energy, always ready to be released.
Niko Karrasch, also a baritone, was born in Düsseldorf. His connection to Sinti culture is immediate and deeply rooted: to this day he travels with his family and performs Gipsy concerts alongside his father. In the duo, he is not the spring but the suspension—flexible, grounding, and stabilizing.
The cultural backgrounds of both singers lend the project genuine depth. Katchka does not merely sing about the broader history of “homeless” or displaced peoples—they speak from personal experience and about individuals they know personally, whose songs they carry forward.
Their music resists simple categorization. To label it as folk music would overlook the traces of classic Schlager and the jazz-inflected rhythms within it; to call it Gipsy jazz would ignore its directness and disarming simplicity.
Katchka remains intentionally unclassifiable: performative, authentically folk-inspired yet free of romanticization—a powerful artistic response to antisemitism, anti-Roma racism, xenophobia, and boredom.
