IT WAS JIMI HENDRIX, decides Yuri Bashmet after a moment's reflection, who helped turn him into the best viola player in the world. Like any self-respecting child of the 60s, Bashmet had grown up wanting to be a rock star.
'It was the time of The Beatles. I had a group and I was very famous in my town. I was a virtuoso guitar player,' says Bashmet, describing his early life in Lvov, the westernmost town in Ukraine.
'There were bands from Poland and Hungary who passed through Lvov, and we often bought instruments and other things from them. I managed to get hold of a Vox guitar. That was the same as the one George Harrison from The Beatles played,' says Bashmet, who started playing the guitar at 10 but four years later was also playing the viola, and went to music school to study both.
When Hendrix came along, though, with abstract, psychedelic music vastly different from The Beatles' harmonies and melodies, budding rock star Bashmet was baffled.
'His was very complicated music for me. It was only several years later that I understood he was a genius. It wasn't possible to continue with the Beatles because they were out of fashion so it had to be something new,' he says.
He soon found a new love, American jazz-rock, but in the Ukraine there were difficulties playing it.