JazzFestBrno has announced the names of the main stars of the next edition. The main announcements of the festival’s headliners will be the singer and pianist Diana Krall, and for the first time ever the iconic string ensemble Kronos Quartet, celebrating 50 years on the scene, will perform at the festival. Other personalities of the 22nd edition of the festival will include guitarist John Scofield, pianist Tigran Hamasyan, and double bassist Dave Holland.
Singer and pianist Diana Krall showed in her festival debut in 2017 that she can create the atmosphere of a spontaneous and immediate party even in a sports hall. “We look forward to making the experience of this charismatic Canadian’s concert on 19 May at the Bobycentrum even more intense,” says Vilém Spilka, the festival’s artistic director. Diana Krall has released two albums since her last visit to Brno, confirming that her artistic bar is still set high. Her album Love Is Here to Stay, which she recorded together with singer Tony Bennett, earned her her tenth Grammy nomination.
The renowned string ensemble Kronos Quartet celebrates its anniversary in 2023. It has been on the music scene for an incredible 50 years. Music journalists usually classify the Kronos Quartet, whose strings are also heard in cult films and TV series such as Requiem for a Dream, La grande bellezza, and The Young Pope, under the genre heading of “contemporary music”. “But the Kronos Quartet can also swing, as they proved in the 1980s on the album Music of Bill Evans. The jazz enfant terrible Thelonious Monk, who inspired them to record the Monk Suite, did not escape the attention of the quartet,” Spilka recalls. Visitors will find out that the music of the Kronos Quartet has much more in common with jazz than it might seem at first glance during its festival premiere and the only Czech concert of this special tour on 9 May at the Sono Center.
Double bassist Dave Holland is already a jazz mogul but still in top artistic form. He was once plucked from the UK by Miles Davis in the middle of an engagement at the famous Ronnie Scott’s club, where Dave Holland sharpened his jazz spurs as a “house bassist” in the late 1960s. He soon became part of jazz history for the first time. He recorded three immortal classics with Davis, Filles de Kilimanjaro, In a Silent Way, and Bitches Brew. He has since gone on to make many more contributions to the history of the genre, both as a collaborator and as a bandleader. For his Brno premiere on 7 March at the Sono Center, he chose a trio with his favorite long-time bandmates Eric Harland and Kevin Eubanks.
Guitarist John Scofield sold out the Sono Center years ago and will return to the venue on Thursday, March 9 with fresh repertoire from his Yankee Go Home project, in which he takes on familiar musical burnouts from his youth. Neil Young, Stevie Wonder, the Grateful Dead, Sting, and Leonard Bernstein are just a glimpse of Scofield’s inspirations. “The name Yankee Go Home is a bit of a pun for me in that we ‘Yankees’ are taking over the music of our homeland. This band plays Roots-Rock-Jazz, which is one way of defining it, although, to be honest, I don’t like doing it!” says the three-time Grammy Award winner.
Pianist Tigran Hamasyan spent formative years in the Los Angeles and New York scenes, but he has never denied his Armenian roots in his music. On the contrary. Now, for the first time ever, he embarks on a conceptual interpretation of the legendary works of the Great American Songbook. “It seems to me that singers and jazz instrumentalists often approach these songs with a sense that they are sacred, untouchable. It’s as if everyone has signed a non-aggression pact and promised to only tread lightly among the cornerstones of these songs,” says Hamasyan. On his new album, StandArt, these familiar melodies bubbling up only subtly, while every other aspect of the music undergoes vivid and surprising transformations. Visitors to his March 24 concert at the Sono Center will find out what Hamasyan’s take on American classics sounds like live.
JAZZFESTBRNO 2023
(full program to be announced in late January / early February 2023)
7 March, Sono Centrum
Dave Holland Trio
9 March, Sono Centrum
John Scofield: Yankee Go Home
24 March, Sono Centrum
Tigran Hamasyan Trio
9 May, Sono Centrum
Kronos Quartet: 50 let na scéně
19 May, Bobycentrum
Diana Krall
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