Programme
Joel Ross – Good Vibes
21/10/2024, 19.30
ZUŠ Letovice
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 expression out of them. But that’s the challenge for him, the fuel for everything he does. And he’s damn good at it.
Perhaps Joel Ross should have been a bluesman, since he was born in 1995 on Chicago’s South Side, a former black ghetto that has been the place for which electric blues is most typical since the 1940s. His father was what was known in our milieu in centuries past as a regenschori, in the local church, the leader of the choir and its accompanying band. In it, along with his twin brother Josh, Joel had been playing drums since the age of three, and the gospel rhythm that is so central to all black music as far as the memory can see got deep under his skin. But alongside that, modern jazz from family-owned recordings came to him at a very early age. In addition to geniuses of the calibre of Davis, Monk and Coltrane, Milt Jackson, undoubtedly the most important vibraphonist of the fifties and sixties, a member of the famous Modern Jazz Quartet and a close collaborator of all three of the above and many, many others, did not escape his radar. An ideal idol for a young boy who, at ten, actually by sheer coincidence in the school band, moved from the drums (which were taken over by his brother) to the xylophone, the wooden predecessor of the vibraphone.
Ross’s serious immersion in jazz music began at an arts-oriented high school that had a partnership with the Jazz Institute of Chicago, the organization that organizes the famed Chicago Jazz Festival – and that shortcut brought Joel Ross into close proximity to both living classics like Herbie Hancock and younger artists like Gerald Clayton and Robert Glasper. And during further studies, this time at the Brubeck Institute in California, he was mentored by the excellent vibraphonist Stefon Harris.
Ross’s reputation has begun to spread through the jazz landscape, and this has allowed him to enter 2019 recording his debut album with a real swagger, namely with the prestigious Blue Note label at his back. The album KingMaker has been followed by three more, including this year’s nublues, hinting at what character Ross’s own compositions and a few reworked standards are likely to have. Well, we did get to the blues after all…
Robert Balzar Trio
Matej Benko Quintet
22/10/2024, 19.30
Cabaret des Péchés
The Robert Balzar Trio has been talked about for many years as one of the finest home jazz bands. This is despite the fact that the only member who runs through its entire history is the one who gave the trio its name. While the Robert Balzar Trio’s music has certainly changed over time, depending on its members, the foundation around which everything revolves remains the same.
Double bassist and bassist Robert Balzar, a very prominent follower of the so-called Czech double bass school, has been on the Czech music scene since the second half of the 1980s. He has never been a strict and dogmatic follower of one musical style. He has accompanied pop singers, formed the backbone of chansonnier Hana Hegerova’s backing band for over twenty years, has been a member of the funk band J.A.R. since 1998 and co-founded the great fusion project Illustratosphere with Dan Bárta in 2000.
For Robert Balzar, however, jazz is the most intimate genre in which he devotes himself. Throughout his career he has had the honour of backing such luminaries as Kurt Elling, John Abercrombie, Raul Midon, Benny Golson, Arturo Sandoval and others. He founded the Robert Balzar Trio in 1996, toured halfway around the world with it (USA, UK, Turkey, Sweden, Hungary, Cyprus, Israel, etc.) and recorded nine albums. The last one was released at the very end of last year under the title Conversation. Most of the trio’s repertoire consists of their own compositions or arrangements of not only jazz standards. The trio’s side project is devoted to these, working in collaboration with Dan Bárta, who reveals his improvisational and jazz skills even more than in Illustratosphere.
In addition to the bandleader, the current members of the Robert Balzar Trio are pianist Vít Křišt’an and drummer Kamil Slezák, both extremely experienced musicians with extensive international musical training and a large portfolio of contemporary musical engagements.
Line-up:
Vít Křišťan – piano, Robert Balzar – double bass, Kamil Slezák – drums
The scope of pianist and composer Matej Benek’s work is extremely broad, not only in the field of jazz. Even in his quintet, he has gathered musicians who like to cross borders, but basically belong to the top of domestic jazz.
Now forty-four years old, the musician originally from Slovakia has put down roots in Prague for a long time, and his first major work that made him known in a big way was the thematic song album Planety in 2015, which featured guest appearances by such stars as Richard Müller, Dan Bárta and Michael Kocáb. Matej Benko has collaborated as a studio or concert musician with such disparate greats as the band Mig 21 or the singer-songwriter Xavier Baumaxa, but he has also been a regular participant in the projects of the lyricist and producer Michal Horáček and some of the singers whose repertoire he co-created. A very well-received borderline project, albeit mostly falling into the jazz category, was the collaboration of the Matej Benko Quintet with singer Ondřej Ruml, in which they gave an up-to-date jazz face to the songs of Jaroslav Ježek, Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich through album recordings and concerts.
Line-up:
Miroslav Hloucal – trumpet, flugelhorn, Radek Zapadlo – saxophone, Matej Benko – piano, Rastislav Uhrík – double bass, bass guitar, Pavel Zbořil – drums
Neil Cowley Trio
25/11/2024, 19.30
Cabaret des Péchés
“Unlike the machines of which we are slaves, we represent something that is unmistakably human; flexible, reactive and fallible,” says fifty-one-year-old British pianist Neil Cowley in reference to the release of his fresh September album Entity. He knows a thing or two about “machines”, musical ones.
Like many others, he began with the classics, even to the extent of performing Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto at the venerable Queen Elizabeth Hall when he was only ten years old. As he emerged from adolescence, he became enchanted by the lighter muses, but nothing of his mastery as a player was lost, and he was able to perform with a number of funk and soul bands, including the famous Brand New Heavies, and to venture into jazz-rock fusions until he worked his way up to more or less pure jazz. He chose the pseudonym Diamond Wookie for his solo debut at the age of twenty-five. He also released music under other “aliases” or as part of the Pretz, Fragile State and Green Nuns of the Revolution projects, until in 2006 he realised it was time to stand on his own and, as is customary in the region, formed the Neil Cowley Trio. It has been very successful from the start, winning a BBC Jazz Award for their very first album Displaced and playing on high-profile shows such as Later… with Jools Holland. Alongside his jazz work, Cowley’s notoriety amongst British musicians crossed genre boundaries, and the pianist became a sought-after sideman, with perhaps his most notable notches in his arm being collaborations on the first two records of the highly successful pop singer Adele.
Neil Cowley Trio regularly released albums every two years – until 2018, when the protagonist put the band to sleep in favour of the need to try something on his own once again, in the early days of working with electronics – which brings us to the aforementioned “machines”. The Hall of Mirrors album, actually the first solo and under his own name, was released in 2021 after three years of musical exploration, and was followed in quick succession by three more releases. Until he realised that “it’s always better with a group”, as the greats say. Calling together old partners, bassist Rex Horan and drummer Evan Jenkins, they blew the dust off the old trio collaboration and introduced themselves, first this June with the sparkling single Adam Alphabet and in September with the full-length Entity, which presented the trio at full strength and in a form more than comparable to its position before the hiatus. “It was like a journey home,” says Neil Cowley of the renewed collaboration. “But Entity is neither a return nor a departure from the original sound. It’s the sound of the Neil Cowley Trio with its finger lifted off the button that says ‘Pause’.”
Kamasi Washington
18/3/2025, 19.30
Sono Centrum
One of the most iconic personalities of the contemporary jazz scene, personifying its variability and interconnectedness with other genres, proving that if there is one thing current jazz is not, it is an unexciting soundtrack to the coffee of aunts sitting on spa colonnades.
Kamasi Washington routinely performs not only at jazz festivals, but also at gigantic multi-genre events that predict the direction of musical events, such as Barcelona’s Primavera Sound, England’s Glastonbury or America’s Coachella. He fits the bill perfectly, with his always visually stocky physique and even more robust tenor saxophone tone, leading a brilliantly orchestrated pack of musicians reminiscent of a street gang.
Kamasi Washington’s music is unclassifiable; on the one hand, he plays bold and nimble improvisations with a funk edge that could be easily played by Sly And The Family Stone or Miles Davis in their respective eras; on the other hand, he is literally a musical architect who has made use of a massive orchestral sound as well as techniques reminiscent of psychedelic music on his conceptual, mostly three-hour-long album projects The Epic (2015) and Heaven and Earth (2018).
Anyway, Kamasi Washington’s musical roots are basically jazz, but before he literally kicked down the door to the major leagues of the genre, he played with musicians more in the hip hop and electronica realm – he was already friends with progressive black music personality Thundercat during his studies, he has since recorded with the rapper Snoop Dogg and producer Flying Lotus, and the first truly “big album” on which we could notice his name was Kendrick Lamar’s hip-hop masterpiece To Pimp a Butterfly (2015). On the edge of jazz and other subgenres of black music is the “supergroup” Dinner Party, which he formed in 2020 with keyboardist Robert Glasper, multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin and DJ and producer 9th Wonder.
In May this year, Kamasi Washington’s new album Fearless Movement will be released, featuring, among others, the famous rapper André 3000 and the godfather of funk, the eighty-two-year-old George Clinton. Before the release, Washington let the world know that it would be a dance album, which scared some listeners. “When I say dance, I don’t mean it literally. To me, dance is something that expresses the movement of the human spirit, so it’s actually kind of music. And that’s what I’m going for on the album,” the saxophonist put his statement into perspective.
The album was marked by two things – the fact that some of its material was written during the covid pandemic and the protagonist, in his own words, became aware of his own mortality, and on the other hand, the joyous fact that he became a father to a daughter at the same time. At her age of two he was already playing her his favourite masters, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Erik Dolphy. “I wanted to show her the best music,” he says. He adds that he then sat down at the piano with his daughter and based on a motif she kept strumming over and over again, Asha The First was created for the album.
In Kamasi Washington comes to JazzFestBrno another of the key and highly topical personalities who are now and therefore writing the history of jazz and in a few decades they will be the main chapters of every, even the most superficial study of music historians.
Nduduzo Makhathini
Cabaret des Pechés
31/1/2024, 19.30
Béla Fleck
Sono Centrum
15/2/2024, 17.00, 19.30
Bill Laurance & Michael League
Besední dům
17/2/2024, 19.30
Keyon Harrold
Cabaret des Péchés
13/3/2024, 19.30
Lakecia Benjamin
Takuya Kuroda: Midnight Crisp
Divadlo Husa na provázku
21/3/2024, 19.30
Trio Grande
Cabaret des Péchés
26/3/2024, 19.30
New Jazz Underground
Cabaret des Péchés
9/4/2024, 19.30
Samara Joy
Sono Centrum
13/4/2024, 19.30
Gretchen Parlato & Lionel Loueke
Cabaret des Péchés
18/4/2024, 19.30
J3PO
Cabaret des Péchés
21/4/2024, 19.30
Kravchenko Clees Duo
Emmet Cohen Trio
Divadlo Husa na provázku
30/4/2024, 19.30
Snarky Puppy
Sono Centrum
1/5/2024, 19.30
Chris Botti
Janáčkovo divadlo
12/5/2024, 19.30
Slavnosti synkop
Immanuel Wilkins, Kassa Overall, 2in2out, Limbo
Divadlo Husa na provázku
2/6/2024
Al Di Meola
Sono Centrum
17/9/2024, 19.30
Randy Brecker & Rozhlasový Big Band Gustava Broma
Sono Centrum
29/9/2024, 19.30
Jiří Slavík & Polka-Boys: Polkatime
Divadlo Husa na provázku
13/10/2024, 19.30
José James
Cabaret des Péchés
20/10/2024, 19.30