A personal crisis can be a curse or a blessing, either plummeting the victim into despair or forcing them into making change for the good. After years as a successful businessman, mathematician and physicist, Eduard Shyfrin had a crisis that prompted a life-changing revelation. A whole new way of thinking was born as the award-winning scientist embarked on a steadfast pursuit of meanings and purpose, research and writing bestselling books – all of which has culminated now in his debut album, Shyfrin Alliance.

In this album of intoxicating rock, blues and romantic balladry, written entirely by Eduard himself, you won’t find songs devoid of meaning. These 12 tracks brim with the messages of unconditional love and antiwar – themes which resonate on a timeless level but no more so than today.

“I try not to write meaningless lyrics without a message – I’m not interested in that,” Eduard says with a dismissive flick of the hand. “For me the message – the lyric – is very important.”

In 1960, Eduard was born into a semi-underground one-bedroom apartment in Ukraine, his parents and grandparents crammed into one room. And when his parents took a new bigger apartment a few years later, the first thing they bought for their newfound space was a piano. Eduard’s father insisted that he learn and at the age of seven, he was sent to a school of music, from which he graduated at 14, having trained classically on piano, and studied the history and theory of music, and choral singing.

Back home, jazz was the music of choice. Since childhood, Eduard remembers the sounds playing in the family apartment: Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald. His parents bought him sheet music so he could play along.

Music-playing would lay dormant for a few decades. Yet, even when Eduard emerged from the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys with a degree in Metallurgy and a profound understanding of physics (he gained his PhD after university, when working at the metallurgical mill in Ukraine), despite having not played an instrument for 30-something years, music had always been there.

“Actually, I never parted with music,” he says. “I was listening to all these popular groups, hard rock, blues, soul, classical, jazz, rock, disco, Italian, French… All my life, I never stopped listening.” Ask him his favourite music, and he’ll simply say: “Good music.”

Later on he would play guitar and sing. But before that, the crisis: in 2002, a combination of adverse events led Eduard to suffer something of a breakdown.

“I got through and continued working, but I realised that something inside me had radically changed. I started asking myself questions which I’d never asked before: Why are we here? Why must we die? What’s after death? I realised that unless I found answers, I wouldn’t be able to continue living a normal life.”

He started exploring the deep world of Kabbalah and science, and the result of his research was the publishing of his book, the Amazon bestseller ‘From Infinity to Man: The Fundamental Ideas of Kabbalah Within the Framework of Information Theory and Quantum Physics’ – and a radically changed mindset. On everything. “Most importantly, it changed my attitude to the world, my understanding of the meaning of life, of our mission,” he says.

Several years later Eduard returned to playing music, when the 2020 lockdown afforded him the time. He and his wife of 41 years, Olga, with whom he has three children, had moved to the south of France where he resumed lessons in piano, guitar and vocals, and went to weekly karaoke sessions to practice. (He also took part in Alpine skiing, power yoga and martial arts…) The guitar and piano-playing came back very quickly. “I’m a man of action,” he explains. “If I do something, I do something regularly, otherwise it doesn’t make sense. It’s my approach in life.”

It was the beginning of his musical journey, but it never crossed Eduard’s mind that he would compose songs. His first experience of writing lyrics – in Russian for family and friends – was inspired by lockdown and its unsettling uncertainty, not knowing what was around the corner. A contact suggested finding someone to write music for his lyrics, and the resulting song garnered two million views on social media.

But this wasn’t enough for this man of action. With the firm belief that “life must be fun”, he thought ‘why not create a band, and play for family and friends?’ His music teachers introduced him to distinguished local musicians from the Paris Opera Orchestra, and soon they were playing summer gigs, with Eduard on rhythm guitar and vocals.

He also immersed himself in music, exploring the vast offerings of blues tracks on Spotify over a short period of time. With his impeccable memory, he loaded his brain with musical information – not with any ambition to compose, but just to enjoy the music.

“I’ve listened to rock blues, soul blues, jazz blues, acoustic blues – I don’t think there are any blues songs on Spotify which I didn’t listen to. It was a very intense charge of information.”

Then he began to learn jazz chords. As a mathematician and physician, he quickly understood all these ninths, elevenths, thirteenths, and he practiced piano and guitar daily.

But all that did not spark the magic of creativity. He cites Curie’s Principle in physics, which states that in order to initiate a physical process, the symmetry must be broken. “I mean the symmetry of the soul, of the state of mind,” he explains. “Due to certain events, my symmetries were broken.” And in September 2022, once everything had aligned to ignite that creativity, he wrote his first song, ‘I See Your Eyes’. He thought it was a one-off, but his vocal teacher told him that he would continue to compose. And she was right.

“All of a sudden, I decided the purpose of this project and my research, and the books which I published. The purpose is to send a message to the world, of love and of anti-war. It could be sent in different ways: through the articles, through the books, through the music and lyrics.”

Theatrical rock number ‘The Cage’ is as strong an anti-war song as any, imparting the message that the more we give in to war and senseless anger, the further away utopia becomes. “Spiders in the cage/ the breath is filled with rage/ blood is in the eyes/ So who the first to hell or paradise?” he sings.

‘Bridges of Paris’ sounds like a classic blues-rock number, Eduard’s effortless rich and distinctive authoritative bass voice against blues guitar licks. It’s a track to listen to on a relaxed coastal drive with the sunroof off. But the message is there.

“The bridge connects,” he explains. “It could be a bridge between the people, between two minds, two hearts. A bridge could be physical, it could be mental – our directions in life. If we want to change something, we need the bridge to go there. Where do we want to go?”

His blues knowledge courses through Shyfrin Alliance, with rock-blues songs ‘God’s Number Blues’, ‘Shakespeare Blues’, ‘Whiskey Blues’, and ‘Upside Down Blues’. The upbeat ‘Shakespeare Blues’, with its gospel-blues chorus and bursts of saxophone and hammond organ, is the writer’s playful aim at expressing a universal concept in as few words as possible. “I look at my baby, my baby doesn’t look at me. But then I don’t look at my baby, she looks at me” he sings, capturing an almost universally experienced tale of romantic dramas in just two lines. “That is the essence of all the love dramas in the world,” says the songwriter. “I love you, you don’t love me, but then I don’t love you and suddenly you love me. That’s it!”

When it came to the vocals, he had tried to find a singer who could convey the emotions and messages of his songs, but failed. “There are a lot of people with a very good voice, but it is most important to produce an emotion that touches people’s hearts, not the ears. If you manage to touch the heart – the soul – that’s success. My lyrics and my music came from my soul, from my life experience.”

He sought the advice of the manager of his music project, the Cannes-based jazz singer Lizzy Parks, who suggested that he apply his own distinctive bass baritone to his songs. Eduard followed her advice, and started practising. After some training, he can sing notes which usually only operatic basses can reach. Of the record’s 12 tracks – recorded at Paris studios Barillet, Ferber and Grand Armee – he sings nine.

One song in particular harks back to his early exposure to jazz: the gorgeous piano and saxophone-drenched sultry number ‘Cheval Blanc Blues’. And there is balladry in ‘I See Your Eyes’, ‘Unconditional’, ‘To Your Soul’ and ‘Conversation with Love’. The cabaret jazz-infused latter – intended as a Frank Sinatra-style ballad, and featuring the honeyed vocals of Lizzy Parks – is about someone who has not felt love for a long time and is grappling with whether or not to trust it. “It’s about the nature of love,” explains its writer. “Love can kill, and love can heal, love can be from hell or from paradise.”

‘Unconditional’ was inspired by the love of his grandmothers, with whom he grew up in the small apartment. It was the fastest song Eduard ever wrote. He had decided to take some lessons in public speaking to ease the tenseness he could feel when lecturing on Kabbalah and science, and in one exercise was asked to imagine the place where he was born.

“Then my soul went to the apartment where I grew up, 60-something years ago. I had a fantastic feeling of warmth and happiness. It was a happy place where I was loved unconditionally.” He came back home from the session and wrote the music and lyrics in a few minutes.

Meanwhile, ‘To Your Soul’ encapsulates the inevitable obstacles to romantic love, and the innate drive to reach it.

That the songs span such broad genres is down to Eduard’s life-long thirst for music, but also his scientific mind. After all, he says, Pythagoras discovered that music was intrinsically linked to mathematics, and could be used to manipulate and create moods. “So I realised that any kind of music is for a purpose. There is music for dancing. If you’re at a disco, you want to hear popular songs. If you want to meditate you might want nice jazz…”

The goal was simply to write good music – and nothing predictable. For this mathematician is all too aware of the science of writing a song and the obvious chord combinations. And everything, he says, must be bigger than the sum of its parts, in line with the scientific concept of holism. “The composition is an indivisible whole between music, lyrics and vocals. If you’ve managed to strike bingo and great holism, then it will strike people,” he says.

Eduard hopes that Shyfrin Alliance will strike that bingo. “I have behind me a Miro painting on the wall. I can stand in front of this painting for hours and I cannot explain why. My attitude to art is that souls should talk, not the ears or the eyes, and that the primary emotion comes from soul to soul. If you take a fine painting, it’s not just a collection of atoms on the canvas. If they’ve managed to put soul into this creation, then this soul radiates forever from the painting. And it goes into your soul.”

There is one thing that’s clear: Eduard Shyfrin is a singular talent, and one that will get under your skin and into your soul.