Programme
New Jazz Underground
9/4/2024, 19.30
Cabaret des Péchés
The name can act as the name of a new jazz movement or style, or as an expression of an attitude towards the world as we know it from American or, after all, domestic “underground”. There may be some truth in that, but let’s see more of a play on words here. And a bit of irony, too.
Twenty-somethings Abdias Armenteros (saxophone), Sebastian Rios (bass) and TJ Reddick (drums) met at the famous and prestigious Julliard School and, through the institution of Jazz at Lincoln Center, came into a tight circle around musicians and educators as distinguished as Wynton Marsalis, Victor Lewis and Eric Lewis aka ELEW. They couldn’t have picked a better time to start a band: the summer of 2020 was, as we may still remember, a time of worldwide pandemic lockdown. But they were not daunted by the impossibility of playing in clubs and returned in part to the essence of musicianship, namely playing in the streets or parks, while taking full advantage of contemporary technological possibilities. In January 2021, they set up a YouTube channel with two million viewers and over eighty thousand regular subscribers, a truly extraordinary number in the world of jazz, which until then had been played by “no name” musicians. In the sense of an alternative way of disseminating music, they actually lived up to their name so much that even the Czech Underground guru Ivan M. Jirous would probably applaud them…
Musically, the New Jazz Underground capitalize on what they have learned in the fundamentals of their craft. Their music swings and blues, but is built on pure contemporary improvisation and, most importantly, energy. And they’re certainly no snotty introverts, just the titles of their songs like “when you a sad boy but you swingin'”, “modern jazz but good” or “giant steps is not music” suggest that besides great music, we’ll have a lot of fun with them.
Line-up:
Abdias Armenteros – saxophone, Sebastian Rios – bass, TJ Reddick – drums
Samara Joy
13/4/2024, 19.30
Sono Centrum
In 2022, she impressed at a concert in Tišnov, also organized by the crew of JazzFestBrno, and two years later she will be one of the main stars of the festival and will sing in Brno’s Sono Centre. The career of the young New York singer has taken off at rocket speed.
Jazz has returned to the main, or supra-genre, categories of the Grammys in 2023 after years of being in the spotlight, and the unbelievable has happened. It certainly took twenty-four-year-old Best New Artist winner Samara Joy by surprise. The young singer is only the second jazz artist on the roster of female winners in the history of these awards. The first was singer and double bassist Esperanza Spalding in 2011. Samara Joy’s victory is all the more remarkable because, unlike her predecessor, who was more broadly focused and took her cues from funk and pop, the current winner of the category makes no compromises. She is a jazz singer in the most classical sense of the word, following in the footsteps of such ladies as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan – from whose repertoire she chooses the songs she performs in concert and on the two albums she has released so far. The latter, last year’s Linger Awhile, brought the singer her second Grammy this year, this time in the genre category of Best Vocal Jazz Album.
She was born in the Bronx, New York, which, by the way, she still hasn’t left, into a musical family primarily focused on gospel – her grandparents were founders of the gospel group The Savettes, her father played bass guitar in gospel groups, and it is clear that Samara, full name Samara Joy McLendon, gained her first experience in a gospel church choir. Jazz found her in art high school, where Samara’s classmates invited her to join the school band. At a competition at the prestigious Lincoln Center institution, she picked up the award for best high school jazz singer and subsequently enrolled in New York University’s jazz department, made possible by a scholarship awarded by the Ella Fitzgerald Foundation, eventually winning a competition named after another jazz singing star, Sarah Vaughan, but most importantly, she released her first album in collaboration with Matt Pierson, a “heavyweight” among jazz producers, which is truly a worthy launching pad for her career. The influential Jazz Times magazine named Samara as the best new artist for 2021. The singer has launched a very active career both in terms of touring and social media presence, with her YouTube and TikTok clips and recordings starting to rack up incredible “numbers” for the jazz genre. The same continued when she released her second album, Linger Awhile, in the fall of 2022. Before that, she did her first European tour, which included a stop in Tišnov. That its visitors would have suspected that they were about to see a girl who in a few months will be applauded by the world’s celebrities when she goes to receive the Grammy Award, no way. Now, at the Sono Center, we’ll know who we’re dealing with.
Line-up:
Samara Joy – vocals, Felix Moseholm – bass, Cameron Campbell – piano, Evan Sherman – drums
Gretchen Parlato & Lionel Loueke
18/4/2024, 19.30
Cabaret des Péchés
It must be something special when someone gets a nomination for jazz vocal album at the Grammys, there are so many nominees in this category every year that it boggles the mind. But it’s coming from this lovely duo, too. It’s actually incredible that after twenty years, the collaboration was captured in full for the first time on the record called Lean In.
However, this is far from the first nomination for Gretchen Parlato; she has already been shortlisted in the same category with her previous two solo titles Flor (2021) and Live in NYC (2013). And speaking of “music racing”, she has contributed as a guest vocalist not only to the other nominated collections, but also to the four that actually took home the award – Esperanza Spalding was the protagonist of two of them.
Forty-seven-year-old Gretchen Parlato is one of the most acclaimed jazz singers of the middle generation. The daughter of Dave Parlato, bassist for everyone from Barbra Streisand to Frank Zappa, she began her career early in the millennium and has earned a sterling reputation among her peers and older musicians alike, the likes of Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and Marcus Miller among whom we can unquestioningly call her fans – and document it with their collaborations on stage and in the studio.
Three years older, guitarist and vocalist Lionel Loueke is originally from Benin, a student at the Paris conservatory and, naturally, at Berklee in Boston. His journey to the big leagues has been greatly aided by stars Herbie Hancock, who invited him to join his touring band and to play on several studio albums, including the mainstream success of the record River: The Joni Letters, and Terence Blanchard, whom Loueke has played for on numerous albums and in his famous film scores.
Gretchen Parlato and Lionel Loueke met in 2001 while studying at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We started playing more and more together. It was clear to me that we were connected,” Loueke says. They had been performing consistently since 2003, and two years later they captured at least a hint of their chemistry on Gretchen’s debut solo album. The mutual guest appearances were repeated several more times after that, and it wasn’t until last year’s Lean In, on which they were backed by top professionals bassist Burniss Travis and drummer (and Gretchen’s husband) Mark Guiliana, that the duo’s full potential, as well as the richness of its repertoire, which blends classic pop and jazz with Latin, R&B and Afrobeat, as well as English, Portuguese and Benin’s indigenous Fon dialect, was fully revealed.
Line-up:
Gretchen Parlato – vocal, Lionel Loueke – vocal, guitar
J3PO
21/4/2024, 19.30
Cabaret des Péchés
New York’s Timeout said of him that he “balances virtuosity with tenderness”. If you find these evaluative terms hard to square with synth innovation and music built on elements of hip hop and electronica, you’ve come to the right place. You’ll know that this is where you belong.
Virtuosity and tenderness are valuable and rarely perceived commodities. Julian Pollack had an excellent family background to acquire them: his mother is the successful concert pianist Susan Waterfall and his father is the conductor and saxophonist Allan Pollack. Unsurprisingly, young Julian was practicing the piano diligently from the age of five, and soon earned a reputation as a “child prodigy” thanks to his brilliant mastery of pieces that much older and more experienced pianists had cut their teeth on. This, as we know from history, can raise expectations which are not always delivered; many “little Mozarts” did not live up to expectations and took a completely different path. Fortunately, Julian Pollack stayed with music and became enchanted with jazz, which he studied at New York University.
At the age of twenty, he had already recorded two albums with a piano trio, of which the second one, Waves of Albion, was praised to the skies by critics. In parallel, he also composed orchestral and piano “classical” music, but the New York environment and contacts with his peers also focused his interests on electronics, hip hop and contemporary jazz fusion – and he stayed with these. For several years, he was playing weekly gigs with the hip hop-funk-soul band The Lesson GK, which was an invaluable school in all ways: improvisation and musicianship.
In 2019, he enriched his civic name with the moniker J3PO and released the album Small Plates, which completely overturned his previous signature. Electronica, synths, samples, lo-fi beats, the tracks ranged from raw electronic structures to sophisticated compositions for which critics have constructed the label “jazztronica future house”. And in a similar vein, with even more polished means and production, the latest release so far, 2021’s Mains, continues. Especially the sonic side of things J3PO really manages to keep an eye on. He is one of the biggest synth wizards of today and his sound design services are used by many keyboard manufacturers, including Nord, which produces probably the most popular instruments of their kind.
Line-up:
Julian Pollack – piano, keys, Hadrien Feraud – bass, Gianluca Pellerito – drums
Kravchenko Clees Duo
Emmet Cohen Trio
30/4/2024, 19.30
Divadlo Husa na provázku
A unique combination of voice and vibraphone. Definitely not a common combination. And that is what two former classmates from Carl Maria von Weber College of Music in Dresden, Ukrainian singer Kateryna Kravchenko and Luxembourg vibraphonist Arthur Clees, will bring.
Kateryna Kravchenko’s musical journey began at the age of four when she started playing the piano and later singing in her hometown of Balta, Ukraine. At eleven, she discovered jazz thanks to her teacher, who immediately influenced her. From the age of fourteen, she received intensive musical training in Odessa and continued her musical training in Dresden at the Carl Maria von Weber Colledge of Music. There she also formed her first jazz quartet and released her first recordings on the EP Stories. She expanded her musical horizons and met inventive colleagues as a member of the National Youth Jazz Orchestra of Germany, of which she was a member between 2020 and 2022, and then founded her still “heartfelt” project Short Collection of Tales.
In 2022, Kateryna Kravchenko was awarded a one-year scholarship to the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, Sweden, and participated in the prestigious Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead residency program in Washington, DC. She is the author not only of songs, but also of a suite for large ensemble dedicated to the Ukrainian artist Maria Prymachenko, in which the author’s reflection on the difficult ordeal her native country is going through is vicariously mediated. “I wanted to create a project where jazz and classical musicians could improvise and collaborate to create something unique,” says Kateryna Kravchenko. “I was working with paintings by the great artist Maria Prymachenko, whose museum was destroyed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The project is extremely important to me, I want to contribute to the culture of my homeland, which is currently suffering from the war unleashed by Russia.”
The duo with the Luxembourg vibraphonist Arthur Cleese is currently the most chamber music project Kateryna Kravchenko is involved in and for which she writes her songs. “It’s a space for experimentation for me. We write music together and explore the colours of our unusual combination of instruments – vibraphone and vocals. Thinking about this project always puts a smile on my face,” says one half of the duo, which has already managed to win the Grand Prix from the International Jazz Junior Competition in Krakow, Poland.
Line-up:
Kateryna Kravchenko – vocal, Arthur Clees – vibraphone
Perhaps there is no musician in the world today who so perfectly bridges musical generations and their associated playing styles. Emmet Cohen is in his Christ years, and in that time, he has managed to do more for the jazz scene than legions of others. And on top of that, he’s still driving the broad highway of his own career.
He started working on his future musical vocation at the age of three as a piano student and worked his way up to a university diploma. Of course, this is not unusual in the music scene today. The admirable range that Emmet Cohen possesses, whether he plays piano or the classic “hammond” B-3, which includes a mastery of the most classic styles of stride piano, bebop and current trends in modern jazz, as well as a studied and, most importantly, under-the-skin classical music that slips through his fingers now and then during jazz improvisations, is not so common anymore.
The crucial thing to talk about in relation to Emmet Cohen is the ability he handles to work with his talent. He is one of the most typical examples of how music, even jazz music, is nowadays aided by the internet. He founded the video stream Live from Emmet’s Place, where week after week he and his trio played jazz and hosted interesting other musicians, both of the older generation, like Joe Lovano, and new discoveries, including Samara Joy. He started with a few dozen followers and over time, ironically aided by the pandemic and the ban on live performances, the numbers jumped into the incredible millions. Over time, the video concerts were followed by master classes for jazz adepts by guests and Emmet Cohen himself. He says he feels teaching is his passion – and pursues it extensively not only through videos, but also through “live” master classes and lectures at art schools.
Cohen’s desire to connect the “jazz nation” of the world is also linked to his other series, the Master Legacy Series. Or, an edition of albums on which he plays with deserving veterans of American jazz such as Jimmy Cobb, Ron Carter, Benny Golson, Albert “Tootie” Heath, George Coleman and Houston Person. He calls it an intergenerational passing of the torch, and it works out – between the “young guys” and the “old gents” their collaboration can light a fire and build them up to great things. With a band like this behind them, it’s no wonder.
Line-up:
Emmet Cohen – piano, Philip Norris – bass, Kyle Poole – drums
Snarky Puppy
1/5/2024, 19.30
Sono Centrum
At their Brno premiere in October 2022 at the Sono Centre, they deservedly caused a big stir. On May 1, The Lover’s Day, including those in love with jazz, Snarky Puppy will celebrate their twentieth anniversary at the same venue and present their latest album Empire Central, which earned them a Grammy Award in the Best Contemporary Instrumental Album category. It’s their fifth in a row.
The band’s story began in the Texas town of Denton, where the first-ever college jazz department has been in operation since 1947. Bassist Michael League, who founded Snarky Puppy as a ten-piece for a school project, is an alumnus of the school. After premiering at J&J Pizza on the Square and performing journeyman duties at other, often obscure, venues in Denton, the bandleader decided to record a debut album on the low budget while executing the first-ever tour of small clubs and student parties. The band’s entire first decade of operation was similar – they repeatedly crisscrossed the States, playing any hole-in-the-wall venue where a promoter dared to risk their involvement.
Meanwhile, the bandleader and a few of his contemporaries moved to nearby Dallas to gain a foothold in the local gospel and R ́n ́B scene. A turning point turned out to be the 2010 album Tell Your Friends. During recording it, the band not only harnessed the power of performing live in front of audiences, but also mastered their marketing method and their music finally reached a wider audience. The first European tour didn’t take long to get underway and the band jumped on a wave of interest that continues to this day. Another significant step up the popularity ladder came in 2013, when Snarky Puppy’s collaboration with singer Lalah Hathaway earned them their first Grammy Award for Best R ́n ́B Performance. Another Grammy Award they eraned for the albums Sylva, Culcha Vulcha and Live at the Royal Albert Hall.
The year 2022 was the Snarky Puppy’s year of a great comeback – they returned to the concert stages and released their fourteenth album, Empire Central, which was once again rewarded with a Grammy Award. “The individual players and personalities on stage are constantly pushing the songs in new directions, which is the main magic of touring for me. I love seeing the songs grow,” says bandleader Michael League. We’ll see him, by the way, on February 17 at the Besední dům, where he’ll present his all-acoustic project with longtime Snarky Puppy pianist Bill Lauranco in a separate concert.
Line-up:
Michael League – bass, Nate Werth – percussion, Larnell Lewis – drums, Bob Lanzetti – guitar, Justin Stanton – keyboards, trumpet, Bobby Sparks – keyboards, Mike ‘Maz’ Maher – trumpet, flugelhorn, Chris Bullock – saxophone, flute, Jay Jennings – trumpet
Chris Botti
12/5/2024, 19.30
Janáčkovo divadlo
Probably everyone has trumpeter Chris Botti associated with Sting, with whom he worked both in concert and on recordings. But Botti’s career is influenced by a long line of other stars in various genres. Now, in his late sixties, he has returned to the beginning and released an eventful chamber album on the extremely prestigious jazz label Blue Note.
He started playing the trumpet at the age of nine, but fell completely in love with it three years later when he heard Miles Davis play. He devoted his entire life to the trumpet – his high school and college studies, and all his free time during them. During his final year at university he entered the jazz league, touring with Frank Sinatra and Buddy Rich. At the same time, he never wanted to be confined to a purely jazz box, playing standards in clubs, attracted by big stages and audiences of thousands of people. But he was never going to compromise on the quality of the music he would play. Throughout the 1990s, he collaborated with Paul Simon, and another important musicians like Aretha Franklin, Joni Mitchell or Roger Daltrey.
At the end of the decade, Botti was noticed by Sting, invited to appear on his later highly successful album Brand New Day, and for a few years he was also invited to join his touring band, where he became the lead soloist. Botti recorded many other albums with Sting and his parts always complemented the mood of the singer’s songs.
In the following years, Botti continued to collaborate with many stars of popular music, but he increasingly confirmed that he would make his career on his own, with his own name and his own skills not only as an instrumentalist but also as a composer. He had already recorded solo albums in the 1990s, but it was Night Sessions in 2001 that was the real breakthrough, on which Botti was able to combine jazz playing with a sound that appealed to a wide pop audience in an unprecedentedly tasteful way, creating a unique form of so-called smooth jazz. The definitive confirmation of the right path was the album Impressions, which not only reached number one on Billboard’s jazz chart, but more importantly brought its author his first Grammy Award, in the category of Best Pop Instrumental Album.
In the year of his sixtieth birthday, Chris Botti reached another imaginary peak: he was signed by the legendary Blue Note label. “Anyone lucky enough to say out loud that they record for Blue Note Records should pinch themselves,” he says. “It’s a fantastic honor.” He wanted to bring something really special to the environment of the label that made jazz history. So he decided to offer his music in the most concentrated form possible. “I wanted to get rid of all the orchestral arrangements and special guests and focus more on my playing, my band’s playing and the jazz classics we love to play on stage,” says Chris Botti about his current album, which has been given the brief but very promising title Vol. 1.
Line-up:
Chris Botti – trumpet, Lee Pearson – drums, Daniel Chmielinski – bass, Leonardo Amuedo – guitar, Andy Ezrin – piano, Anastasiia Mazurok – violin, Sy Smith – vocals, John Splithoff – vocals
Laufey
14/5/2024, 19.30
Sono Centrum
She is one those who are succeeding in something that seemed impossible just a few years ago: putting jazz music back on the mainstream charts, on social media, just in direct competition with mainstream pop. And certainly not as the poor blood related. Icelandic singer Laufey’s second album is currently nominated for a Grammy in the traditional pop vocal album category.
The story of twenty-four-year-old Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir, as her full name is, combines the exotic with the traditional and the classic with the modern. Her father, an Icelandic, is a convinced jazz fan who has been playing Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Chet Baker records to his two identical twin daughters (Laufey has a sister, Júnia) since they were very young. Her mother is a native Chinese, a classical violinist by talent and profession. No wonder Laufey’s artistic genes were stirring from a young age and her love of music was growing. After piano training from the age of four, she took up the cello at the age of eight, with which she went on to graduate from the Reykjavik Conservatory, where she also studied singing for two years, which is crucial to our story.
So far it sounds ideal, but somehow out of time; any talented artist could have gone through the same development a hundred years ago. Only now, the 21st century is entering our narrative. At the age of 15, Laufey decided to try her luck as the youngest ever contestant on the fashion talent competition Ísland Got Talent and made it to the finals. A year later, she repeated her success on the equally popular show The Voice Island. The word was getting out.
It all came down to the fact that singing, which combines the best of the jazz tradition, but at the same time brings it into the current coordinates of quality pop (which, as we know, is mastered in Iceland), would be Laufey’s destiny. Studying at the famous Berklee in Boston, living more and more frequently in the United States, but also performing on the Old Continent, for example, working with the London Philharmonic, all resulted in the singer’s first highly professional recordings, which were critically acclaimed not only for their interpretative but also for their authorial qualities. And hand in hand with the critical acclaim came enormous listener interest. In this, too, the singer transcends the conventions of the jazz genre: she knows how to use social media well, and her musical posts on TikTok and Instagram have a huge following. She made her album debut with the title Everything I Know About Love in 2022, garnered rave reviews and promptly topped the Billboard alternative debut chart. The second album, Bewitched, was even more successful: it reached gold among jazz albums in the US and was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. We’ll find out whether Laufey turns the nomination into a win on February 4, 2024.
Festival of Syncopation
Immanuel Wilkins, Kassa Overall, 2in2out, Limbo
2/6/2024
Divadlo Husa na provázku
This year’s edition of “the festival at the festival”, which is typical by a rhythmic formation traditionally closely associated with jazz, namely syncopation, will take place on three stages of the CED – Husa na provázku Theatre. This time, for the first time, with a Czech-American program, divided half and half.
The founders of the band 2in2out are saxophonist Nela Dusová and guitarist Jan Lacina, who are also the authors of the repertoire. They invited bassist Klára Pudláková and drummer Adam Sikora to join them. In recent years, the group has developed from a student project into one of the most interesting Czech jazz ensembles. In June 2024 the band will release an album on the Bivak Records label.
The band Limbo, from Prague, celebrates twenty years since its foundation this year. Under the leadership of saxophonist Pavel Hrubý, the band straddles several genres: from pure improvisation it can rise to an indefinable position where we can talk mainly about melodic and somewhat melancholic music. Limbo has won various genre awards and received an Angel nomination in the Jazz & Blues category.
Twenty-seven-year-old saxophonist from Philadelphia Immanuel Wilkins studied music at the prestigious Juilliard School and is one of the great promises of the American scene. With two solo albums on the Blue Note label and nearly two dozen sideman cuts, he boasts collaborations with such exciting names as Wynton Marsalis, Jason Moran, Gerald Clayton and Gretchen Parlato.
Kassa Overall, not only an acclaimed drummer but also a producer and occasional rapper, was born forty-one years ago in Seattle, where, incidentally, he attended the same high school as Quincy Jones and Jimi Hendrix years before him. At the conservatory, he discovered hip-hop rhythms in addition to jazz, which enchanted him and which he still enjoys using today. After moving to New York, he played with Christian McBride, Geri Allen and Ravi Coltrane, among others, but also collaborated with the incorrigible avant-gardist Yoko Ono.
2in2out
Limbo
Immanuel Wilkins
Kassa Overall
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