Jazz

News

The Brno Cultural Newsletter brings you an overview of events and opportunities in the coming period concerning theatres, clubs, festivals, and cultural events in Brno.   more

The Brno cultural newsletter brings you an overview of events and opportunities in the coming period concerning theatres, clubs, festivals, and cultural events in Brno.  more

In mid-May, a festival will take place on the outskirts of Brno, attracting music, theatre, slam poetry, and books. It aims to celebrate female authorship across musical genres and artistic types.  more

Anděl Award winner and acclaimed double bassist Jiří Slavík introduces a new international trio. Paul Clarvis, the percussionist of the legendary Abbey Road studio, will be on drums, and Clarvis’ long-time collaborator, the leading English pianist Liam Noble, will be the third. The Noble-Slavík-Clarvis trio released the album Nostalgia on the Bivak Records label of the JazzFestBrno festival, which they will present today at the Cabaret des Péchés club in Brno.  more

The Brno cultural newsletter brings you an overview of events and opportunities in the coming period concerning theatres, clubs, festivals, and cultural events in Brno.  more

The Brno Marathon of Music 2023 festival presented the first part of its programme today. In August, Omar Sosa as the festival’s resident pianist, the band Dubioza Kolektiv, and the Estonian duo Puuluup will perform in Brno.  more

In the new single Magnum, the big band B-Side Band tackles the hectic pace of everyday life. The clip also features actors Michal Isteník and Jakub Uličník alongside the musicians. The as yet untitled album will be released in autumn this year. The band will start touring in early 2024.  more

The annual meeting of UNESCO Cities of Music is currently taking place in Norrköping, Sweden. The host city is the cultural capital of the Östergötland region, 130 kilometres south of Stockholm. Like Brno, Norrköping has been a UNESCO Creative Cities Network City of Music since 2017.  more

The Brno cultural newsletter brings you an overview of events and opportunities in the coming period concerning theatres, clubs, festivals, and cultural events in Brno.  more

The programme of the 22nd JazzFestBrno is now complete. In addition to the previously announced personalities, more important names of the contemporary jazz scene have been added. These include, among others, singer Kurt Elling, drummer Simon Phillips, saxophonist Donny McCaslin, pianist Emmet Cohen, guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, saxophonist Melissa Aldana, and the newly formed English-Czech trio Noble-Slavík-Clarvis to visit Brno. Also performing will be the Poogie Bell – Juraj Griglak Band, drummer Udi Shlomo, and bassist and vocalist Chris Morrissey. These artists join previously announced musicians Diana Krall, Kronos Quartet, Dave Holland, John Scofield, and Tigran Hamasyan. This year’s edition of the Brno JazzFest will offer 16 concerts during the main part of the festival over 13 nights.  more

Feature articles

Armenian jazz pianist Tigran Hamasyan has long been dedicated to either his own work or to the inspiration of Armenian folklore. It wasn't until his tenth album, StandArt, that he decided to work with jazz standards, compositions that work for most jazz musicians as basic preparation and as material that players from all over the world agree on when jamming together. The pianist will present his current album on Friday 24 March 2023 at the Sono Centre in Brno as part of the JazzFestBrno festival. more

“We did it as a session, sitting opposite each other, so that the viewer would have the experience of coming to a rehearsal,” says singer Dan Bárta, describing how his current album, In One Breath (Jedním dechem), was recorded together with the jazz Robert Balzar Trio and Hungarian trumpeter Kornél Fekete-Kovács. The jazziest album in Dan Bárta’s rich discography was released on the Brno label Bivak Records and was recorded in the Brno studio of Czech Television.  more

Nikol Bóková, a native of Ostrava, has long been considered a unique talent in the field of classical music. At the age of nine, she played as a solo pianist with the Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra, and studying at the conservatory and then at the JAMU was a matter of course. But already during her studies of classical music, another of her talents, that of composition, took shape and gradually manifested itself. Together with her trio (Nikol Bóková-piano, Martin Kocián-contrabass, Michal Wierzgoń-drums), she recorded her debut album Inner Place in 2019 and immediately established herself among the Czech (and indeed European) jazz elite. Two more projects followed during the cover – Unravel (2020) for the same named line-up and last year’s Prometheus, recorded with extraordinary commitment by a remarkable studio line-up. Out of this and several subsequent concerts (among others during JazzFest Brno last autumn) crystallized also the quite logical expansion of her trio with the versatile and empathetic guitarist David Dorůžka, the Nikol Bóková Quartet. This line-up was also the birthplace of the latest album Elements, with which a new creative phase opens for Nikol and her partner and co-creator Jan Vala.  more

Last year’s 100th anniversary of Gustav Brom’s birth still resonates on the domestic jazz scene. At the very end of 2021, a 4-CD set entitled “Gustav Brom – 100 Years” was released, offering a cross-section of the orchestra’s repertoire, from songwriting to jazz to intersections with contemporary classical music. Alongside this, an album charting the Brom Orchestra’s long-standing collaboration with Karel Velebný has also appeared on the same label (Indies Happy Trails). Radio editor, jazz musician, and teacher Jan Dalecký was one of the producers of both albums.  more

Another in a series of themed “anniversary” orchestral concepts by Jiří Kotača for his big band, this one commemorates the centenary of the birth of Canadian-American jazz pianist, composer, bandleader, and above all, genius arranger Gil Evans and his successful collaboration with legendary trumpeter Miles Davis in the late 1950s.  more

Brno musicians are talented in various genres, and they’re generally long-lived and vital individuals. This was resoundingly clear during the jubilee celebration of Mojmír Bártek, a teacher, composer, arranger, and above all a virtuoso trombone player. The jubilee concert, dubbed Mojda Bártek 80, was prepared by his friends under the direction of B-Side Band trumpeter and bandleader Josef Buchta. Despite the birthday boy’s open and (sometimes emotional) enjoyment of the two and a half hour program, he still remained an active participant of the entire musical production except for brief moments of rest. He performed as the author of many compositions, but above all as a player, trombone in hand and fully committed.  more

One of the few positives of the otherwise tormented musical year 2020 is the unusually rich Czech jazz harvest: sixty (!) albums and projects either purely jazz or significantly affected by jazz were released last year. Many of the most highly acclaimed ones are connected to Brno in various ways – for example, the debut Bigbandová elektronika (Bigband Electronica) by the increasingly prominent Cotatcha Orchestra and the ensemble’s second album Dust in the Groove, testing the boundaries of classical music and jazz through refined improvisation.  more

Anyone who knows the B-Side Band, especially through performing international hit songs with the singer Vojtěch Dyk, or last year’s album Folk Swing, may be surprised by their unique take on a production of Jaromír Hnilička’s Missa Jazz. In fact, the big band’s history is tightly interwoven with the composer’s legendary Jazz Massmore

“It’s absolutely perfect, I play it all the time and it plays in my head all the time,” commented Matěj H., a music studies graduate and Brno politician. In another Facebook debate, a musical editor with a pen name of Max B. depicts it to be “totally horrible stuff.” Few domestic albums recorded in 2020 received such varied responses as Folk Swings, a collection of what were initially contemporary folk songs, re-arranged to become big-band pieces and performed by B-Side Band with Josef Buchta as the bandmaster.  more

The album Folk Swings of the Brno-based B-Side Band is being vividly discussed on social networks. Can a big band take the liberty of to playing the "sacred" songs of Czech folk? And what if these compositions are sung along with the band directly by their authors such as Jaromír Nohavica, Vlasta Redl or Slávek Janoušek? However, while the above might have been able to have their say concerning the arrangements, Karel Kryl, Zuzana Navarová or Wabi Ryvola could no longer make any comments regarding the makeovers of their songs… We talked to Petr Kovařík and Pavel Zlámal, members of the orchestra, about how the album was created, why Ryvola's song 'Tereza' sounds like a Cuban dance, and why 'Podvod' ('Scam') by Honza Nedvěd is played only as an instrumental piece. The two guys have actually created new arrangements for widely famed as well as less well-known folk songs, which now appear on this album.  more


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Upcoming events

FINE jazz - blues - chanson

09/06/23, 20:00 / Jazz bar U kouřícího králíka

MORAVIA BRASS BAND IN OPERA

15/06/23, 19:00 / Biskupský dvůr

Rickie Persson

15/06/23, 20:00 / Jazz bar U kouřícího králíka

AROUND THE CORNER AT THE CHURCH

16/06/23, 17:00 / kostel Nanebevzetí Panny Marie - U jezuitů (Church of the Assumption of Virgin Mary - Jesuits)


Listening Guide: Leoš Janáček's Sinfonietta
with Jakub Hrůša
  more