Jazz
News
A gig by hypnotic British trio Mammal Hands combining jazz and electronics will open the twenty-fourth annual JazzFestBrno festival at the Fléda club. Newly additions to the line-up are the May concerts of pianist Nikol Bóková with her trio, double bassist Klára Pudláková with MAOMAH, and guitarist David Dorůžka, who will be launching a new joint album with the Piotr Wyleżoł Quartet entitled When the Child Was a Child. From the beginning of February to May, the festival will offer thirteen gigs by some top world jazz stars, as well as performances with a club atmosphere from the Club Life series in the stylish Cabaret des Péchés. more
Although there are still two concerts left before the end of this year's JazzFestBrno festival, the organisers are already coming up with the line-up for next year. From the beginning of February to May, they’ll be offering a total of thirteen concerts featuring major world jazz stars and intimate performances from the Club Life series in the stylish Cabaret des Péchés. The winner of five Grammys, singer Dianne Reeves, one of the most respected figures in the world of orchestral jazz, nine-time Grammy winner Maria Schneider with the Oslo Jazz Ensemble, jazz piano stars and Grammy winners Kris Davis and Sullivan Fortner, the British trio Mammal Hands combining jazz and electronics, Italian virtuoso guitarist Matteo Mancuso - these and many others will all be coming to Brno. more
The Cotatcha Orchestra big band has been on the music scene for 10 years. They will be celebrating with a spectacular concert at the Goose on a String Theatre together with four guests - singers Lenka Dusilová and Géraldine Schnyder, double bass matador Vincenzo Kummer and trombonist and Latin Grammy winner Ilja Reijngoud. The sixteen-member ensemble nominated for the Anděl Award was founded by trumpeter Jiří Kotača to play original and original big band music. The anniversary concert will feature a selection of their best from past and present, including new works. All accompanied by animations by Magdalena Bláhová. more
The autumn part of the year-long JazzFestBrno festival will open next week at the Sono Centre by Al Di Meola, one of the greatest jazz guitarists of all time. At the end of September, American trumpeter Randy Brecker, winner of seven Grammy Awards and twenty nominations, together with the Gustav Brom Radio Big Band, will celebrate 100 years of Czech Radio's Brno studio in their first ever joint concert at the same venue. The festival will also feature multi-instrumentalist Jiří Slavík and his ten-member ensemble Polka-boys. At the Goose on a String Theatre, as part of the Polkatime project, he will present radical adaptations of the polka that bring back the boldness and humour of this Czech national dance. American vibraphonist Joel Ross will be at the Letovice Elementary Art School Concert Hall. The autumn will also see the continuation of the Club Life series at Cabaret des Péchés. This time with the singer and "jazz artist for the hip hop generation" José James and a double concert featuring two of the Czech Republic’s leading jazz line-ups - the Robert Balzar Trio and the Matej Benko Quintet. The end of the festival will not feature cult American saxophonist Kamasi Washington, who is postponing his entire tour, including the Brno concert, to 18 March 2025 for health reasons. more
The Brno Culture Newsletter presents an overview of what is happening in the city’s theatres, clubs, summer festivals and other cultural events in Brno. more
Brno will once again be hosting ŠTETL FEST, the international festival of Jewish culture
The last weekend of the holiday season will see Brno hosting the 3rd international festival of Jewish culture. The festival will feature some important and lesser-known artists such as Franz Kafka, Hugo and Pavel Haas, Ernst Wiesner, Arnold Schöenberg, Helga Hošková, conductor Alexander Liebreich, photographer Jindřich Štreit and Petr Bureš, and will give an insight into their life stories. The programme will offer more than 110 diverse attractions, more than 50 personalities and ensembles from the Czech Republic and abroad, and many kilometres of walks to explore some notable places and find out more about prominent figures from the Jewish community in Brno. ŠTETL FEST is the Czech Republic’s largest festival of Jewish culture. more
The eighth annual multi-genre In the Middle (Uprostřed) festival has just launched in the centre of Brno. It starts today and runs for two full months, featuring dozens of open-air performances, concerts and other art forms. The entire programme is completely free of charge to attend. more
The Brno Culture Newsletter presents an overview of what is happening in the city’s theatres, clubs, summer festivals and other cultural events in Brno. more
Some of the big names coming to Brno in the autumn include Al Di Meola, one of the greatest ever jazz-rock guitarists, and cult American saxophonist Kamasi Washington. Composer and multi-instrumentalist Jiří Slavík will be appearing with the nine-member ensemble Polka-boys to perform their Polkatime project, radical reworkings on the polka that in places even border on ragtime. The autumn will also see the continuation of the Club Life series at Cabaret des Péchés. This time with the singer and "jazz artist for the hip hop generation" José James and a double concert featuring two of the Czech Republic’s leading jazz line-ups - the Robert Balzar Trio and the Matej Benko Quintet. more
The festival enters its 17th year with a series of concerts that will fill not only the South Moravian metropolis with funky music, but also Prague as part of the "travelling" concerts. The year-long festival programme is starting to take off and the organisers are adding two more names. The previously announced French band Electro Deluxe is now joined by Fun Lovin' Criminals and the most prominent jazz-funk formation from Iceland - Mezzoforte. more
Feature articles
Another of the jazz evenings regularly organised by the Brno Philharmonic was dedicated to the duo Will Vinson (alto saxophone) and Aaron Parks (piano). These musicians have been working together in various formations for twenty years. So they decided that it was time to try the most intimate and, according to many, the most difficult - playing as a mere duo. These mid-generation jazz musicians performed a selection of classical jazz material as well as several of their own compositions on Monday 10 March at the Besední dům. more
Trumpeter Jiří Kotača founded the big band Cotatcha Orchestra ten years ago. Nowadays, he performs a variety of programmes ranging from the most traditional jazz to a visionary fusion of jazz and electronica. We chatted with Jiří Kotača about how the orchestra has gradually developed, how the original repertoire is blurring the boundaries between jazz and electronica, and also about what fans can expect from the November concert to celebrate the orchestra's 10th anniversary. We also talk about Kotača's International Quartet, as well as how the trumpet and flugelhorn can be enriched with effects. more
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 Mass. more
JAMU Jazz Department concert
For almost fifteen years, the jazz department of the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts has boasted not only an excellent teaching staff, but especially talented students. They also get space during the already traditional festival concert.
The Young Pekáč Mojmíra Bártka
A musical group composed of young musicians with a passion for live performance and improvisation. Led by conductor Mojmír Bártek in the rhythm of jazz, swing, Latin and jazz rock.
