Milan Svoboda
(b. 1951) founded his quartet twenty years ago, in 1978. At that time, he
was also the leader of the Prague Big Band, which originated four years before
that as a generation manifesto of young Czech jazzmen, subscribing to the
ideals of jazzrock and Don Ellis. Since then, Svoboda has been known as
a biog band fanatic: after Prague Big Band followed the Czech&Polish
Leaders' Big Band (1985) or Kontraband (1988), the orchestra of the pupils
of the Summer jazz workshop. All these bands performed and recorded at home
and abroad.
At the same time,
Milan Svoboda's Quartet has been performing continuously. The trumpet player
Michal Gera has been its member practically sinde the foundation of the group.
Svoboda used to play with him in duets, but he also performed as a piano soloist,
among other appearances also at the Prague festival of solo jazz piano in
1997 where he shared the stage a.o. with Joachim Kühn or Aki Takase /CD
Solo Piano Recital/. Besides, Svoboda works as a much
demanded author of movie and theatre music /musical Foam of the Days,
ballet Mowgli/and, lately, also as a
conductor of big musical stagings - e.g. Jesus Christ, Superstar and
Evita.
Svoboda's piano
style is characterized by his easy transition from jazz to the world of European
contemporary music of the 20th century. At Prague Conservatoire, he graduated
in the organ class, and 1984 he spent 8 months in Boston at Berklee College
of Music. But here he, almost suprisingly, returns back to the straight-ahead,
post bop kind of playing. "For a long time I've wanted to try something
like that, and the meeting with Tony Lakatos was just the right chance,"
says Svoboda.
The Hungarian
tenor-saxophone player Tony Lakatos (b.1958) got acquainted with his
instrument at the age of fifteen. 1976-1979 he studied at the Jazz Department
of the Béla Bartók Music Academy in Budapest, and 1981 he left for Germany,
where he now performs as a soloist of the Radio Big Band in Franfurt/Main.
At the same time, since 1985 he has been a member of the group of the Dutch
pianist Jasper van't Hoff, performing also with his own ensemble, and he
has collaborated on more than 150 LPs or CDs of jazz or pop-jazz style. Among
his partners he can list e.g.the American piano player Joanne Brackeen, the
drummers Al Foster or Terry Line Carrington, or the Czech-American bass player
George Mraz.
Steady members
of Milan Svoboda's Quartet are the trumpet player Michal Gera (b. 1949)
who met with him as early as 1974 in the Prague Big Band, Like Svoboda, he
too is a composer with his own world of inventive phantasy, who works also
in the field of movie and theatre music, and like Svoboda, he too studied
at the Berklee College of Music in Boston in 1988-89.
Both rhythm group
players are members of the Kontraband, an ensemble which Svoboda put together
from his pupils. The drummer Ivan Audes (b. 1961) is a nephew of the
late barytone-sax player Josef Audes, one of the foremost soloists of the
Gustav Brom Bigband; with Milan Svoboda's Quartet he has been performing
for more than eight years. The youngest of the group, 24-year-old bassist
Martin Lehký, also made his appearance at one of the
Jazz Summer Workshops organized by the Czech Jazz Society. In his short career
he took part in the groups of both members of the Stivín Dynasty: He played
with the sax- and flute player Jiří Stivín, one of the perenial stars of
Czech jazz since the sixties, and with his son, the drummer Jiří Stivín Jr.
|