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.
"Our autumn jazz season is as colourful as the forest in the fall. Al Di Meola fuses jazz with rock, José James with R&B and hip hop, Randy Brecker with funk and Jiří Slavík with polka," says Vilém Spilka, the festival's artistic director.
"Al Di Meola is a player with astonishing technique, but also a pioneer of jazz fusion with rock and flamenco,” says Spilka. He’s managed to combine jazz with musical elements from the Mediterranean and Latin America to create a completely unique musical language. "In that sense, he’s done something similar for guitar jazz as Carlos Santana did for guitar rock. For most of his career, Al Di Meola has been a very productive and active musician, with around three dozen solo albums alone. Other essential and popular recordings are those featuring Di Meola playing with other musicians - such as John McLaughlin or Paco de Lucía.
The combination of Randy Brecker, a musician who has recorded with Paul Simon, Lou Reed, Joe Cocker, Bruce Springsteen and Ringo Starr, with the Gustav Brom Radio Big Band will launch the JazzFestBrno festival on 29 September at the Sono Centre. "We’ve had a number of successful projects with this orchestra, for whom Brno Radio was its second home for several decades. The concert to celebrate the centenary of this studio is the logical outcome of this. Randy Brecker was born in the same year as Vlado Valovič, the orchestra's bandleader, and they play the same instrument, so he was the obvious choice as soloist for this special event," explains Spilka.
On 13 October, the Goose on a String Theatre will ring to the beat of the polka. Not the style we're all familiar with, but the radically modified rhythms served up by Jiří Slavík and his Polka-boys. “In some compositions by great Czech names such as Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák or Leoš Janáček, as well as many composers from around the world, the polka has changed so much that its original purpose - to get people dancing - has completely disappeared," says Jiří Slavík, explaining why he decided to put the dancing and straightforward boldness back into the polka with humour and flair. "I’ve borrowed themes from polkas by famous Czech composers, but I transform them, add my own flourishes and, as is de rigeur for any jazz musician, improvise on them," he adds. This composer, double bassist and, in this case, accordionist, will be joined by some of the great names on our jazz and classical scene.
American vibraphonist Joel Ross will be bringing his Good Vibes to Letovice on 21 October. In 2019, he recorded his debut album KingMaker on the prestigious Blue Note label. Three more followed, including this year's nublues, hinting at the nature of Ross's own compositions and a few reworked standards. He loves and hates his instrument at the same time. "They're just cold metal bars," says Joel Ross of the vibraphone. And he adds that it's hard to get any real feel out of them. "But that’s the challenge for him, the thing that drives all the action. And he's very good at it," Spilka adds.
American singer, guitarist, composer and producer José James, who will be performing on 20 October in the club setting of Cabaret des Péchés, blurs the boundaries between traditional and modern jazz, hip hop, soul, funk, pop and rock. "He is a truly genre-bending artist. The musical legacy of his predecessors, or rather predecessors' predecessors, which he finds extremely inspiring, taking pleasure in exploring their music, is a testament to his range," says Spilka. His latest album, for example, last year's On & On, is a tribute to singer-songwriter Erykah Badu.
On 22 October, the Cabaret des Péchés will host two stalwarts of the Czech jazz scene - the Robert Balzar Trio and the Matej Benko Quintet. Double bassist and bassist Robert Balzar has been on the Czech music scene since the late 1980s. He founded the Robert Balzar Trio in 1996, toured the world with it and recorded nine albums. Most of the trio's repertoire consists of their own compositions or reworkings of jazz standards. The current members of the Robert Balzar Trio, besides the bandleader, are pianist Vít Krisšt'an and drummer Kamil Slezák. The range of pianist and composer Matej Benko, now forty-four years old, originally from Slovakia and long since settled in Prague, is extremely broad, not only in jazz. His quintet is also made up of musicians who like to cross borders, but who are essentially some of the top names on the Czech jazz scene.
Al Di Meola/ photo festival archive
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