Jazz Courtyard: Ghana Dance Ensemble, Jiří Slavík and JAMU Students

18 June 2018, 5:00
Jazz Courtyard: Ghana Dance Ensemble, Jiří Slavík and JAMU Students

The third year of Jazz Courtyard is once more taking place in Prague and Brno. The event is taking place in cooperation with the jazz departments of Prague’s HAMU (Music and Dance Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts) and Brno’s JAMU (Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts). In the courtyard of Brno’s Old Town Hall there will be performances from student ensembles as well as long-term original running projects by selected students. The culmination of the evening will be the concert of the African group Ghana Dance Ensemble. The event is supported by the festivals JazzFestBrno, Tanec Praha and KoresponDance. Entry is free.

There will be performances on stage by talented students and teachers themselves who are among the top Czech jazz musicians. The double bass player and five times Anděl award-winner Jaromír Honzák will be performing in the Steve Swallow Ensemble and will be paying tribute to the legendary bassist and composer whose name he has also borrowed for his group. Jazz arrangements of works by the Icelandic Björk will be performed by the multi-instrumentalist and Anděl award-winner Jiří Slavík.

The last part of the evening will be given over to a joint ensemble of students from both departments and the African group Ghana Dance Ensemble. “African culture takes many forms and even in one country such as Ghana there are dozens of ethnic groups with their own inseparable music and dance traditions,” says Slavík, who has himself visited the country. Musicians from the Ghana Dance Ensemble under his leadership are for the second time getting together with jazz students in a workshop producing an energetic joint programme. The programme of Jazz Courtyard also offers concerts by students such as Marek Kotača, Ondřej Zámečník and Peter Korman, who are already active in the jazz scene.

The event will take place on 21 June from 3 p.m. in the courtyard of the Old Town Hall, Radnická 11.

Jiří Slavík/ photo Martin Zeman

Comments

Reply

No comment added yet..

Connection, unity, contemplation - these words can be used to describe the musical evening of Schola Gregoriana Pragensis under the direction of David Eben and organist Tomáš Thon, which took place yesterday as part of the Easter Festival of Sacred Music at the church of St. Thomas. Not only the singing of a Gregorian chant, but also the works of composer Petr Eben (1929-2007) enlivened the church space with sound and colour for an hour.  more

With a concert called Ensemble Inégal: Yesterday at the church of St. John, Zelenka opened the 31st edition of the Easter Festival of Sacred Music, this time with the suffix Terroir. This slightly mysterious word, which is popularly used in connection with wine, comes from the Latin word for land or soil, and carries the sum of all the influences, especially the natural conditions of a particular location and on the plants grown there. This term is thus metonymically transferred to the programme of this year's VFDH, as it consists exclusively of works by Czech authors, thus complementing the ongoing Year of Czech Musicmore

For the fourth subscription concert of the Philharmonic at Home serieswhich took place on 14 March at the Besední dům and was entitled Mozartiana, the Brno Philharmonic, this time under the direction of Czech-Japanese conductor Chuhei Iwasaki, chose four works from the 18th to 20th centuries. These works are dramaturgically linked either directly through their creation in the Classical period or by inspiration from musical practices typical of that period. The first half of the concert featured Martina Venc Matušínská with a solo flute.  more

The second stop on the short Neues Klavier Trio Dresden's Czech-German tour was at the concert hall of the Janáček Academy of Music on 6 March at 16:00. A programme consisting of world premières by two Czech and two German composers was performed in four cities (Prague, Brno, Leipzig and Dresden).  more

The last opera première of the National Theatre Brno this year was Hurvínek Sells the Bride, which was co-produced with the Spejbl and Hurvínek Theatre. The première continued the thematic focus associated with the Year of Czech Music and took place on 24 November in the large hall of the Reduta Theatre.  more