Day by day (in memoriam, the 3rd)

Stano Táska & Strawberry Jam – Day By Day
from a demo recording 1997

This is simply unbelievable! The series of friends of mine passing away just doesn’t want to stop! Yesterday I’ve received an e-mail message that Stano Táska has tragically died last Saturday while kayaking in a creek near Adelboden, Switzerland. He was only 37 years old.

Stanislav “Stano” Táska was a goodhearted Slovak guy who came to Switzerland in the early 1990s. We met in March 1997 in Berne when I was looking for a new flatmate. Quickly we became good friends and so we were sharing the flat for more than a year. Stano used to live with Bobina, his Slovak girlfriend at that time, in one large room, while me and my cat were occupying the other two tiny rooms. He was originally an agronomist by profession, but also a very talented saxophonist. In Switzerland he began to play as a street musician, later he studied at the Swiss Jazz School Berne and gigged with various jazz, funk and party combos all over the country. In the recent years he concentrated on his other passion though, working as a co-leader and cook of the Bernese restaurant Im Juli. And last but not least, Stano was also a passionate sportsman in all available elements: on earth, in the air and in the water. (Yes, it’s both him in action on those images!)


Stano at his wedding party in 2004 (photo borrowed from www.imjuli.ch)

In my archives I have found several tracks featuring Stano on the tenor sax. My favorite one is the dynamic soul-jazz flavored tune Day By Day. It was recorded by the Strawberry Jam quartet in a rehearsal room in Solothurn on June 15th 1997 with my analogue 8 track mobile studio (yes, the one I once bought from Hannes Lange who passed away in April). Although I was the recording and mixing engineer of the session, I can only recall that the drummer’s name was Pascal Aeby.

Unfortunately, the guitarist and the bass player are unknown to me ten years later. And I’m not even sure if the tune was an original composition or a cover; to me it actually doesn’t sound like that known old standard as interpreted e.g. by Sinatra and many others.
A Swiss party group called Strawberry Jam seems to be active these days in the Solothurn area again. So it’s quite likely that there’s some kind of a connection to the above jazz quartet of the same name from 1997. (I can check it out later, although it’s quite beyond the scope of this blog.)

Update 26.9.2007:
Pascal Aeby, the drummer of the original Strawberry Jam jazz combo, has written in the comments yesterday, that he’s the composer of this tune and that the other two musicians were Sven Rieger on guitar and Cosimo Staffieri on bass. The band broke up after Rieger had to return to Germany. He also stated that the Strawberry Jam party group mentioned above obviously has nothing to do with Stano’s and Pascal’s original group whatsoever.

Also in the late nineties, Stano used to be a member of the acid jazz combo Da Groove Yard from Burgdorf near Berne. They have released an EP entitled Good Talk then. Low quality audio examples as well as old photos with Stano on saxophone are still available on their web site. Since the group would also qualify for my Half Czech-In series, I might return to them in a future post. Their sound was nothing really earth-shaking though and even Stano didn’t blow his solos with as much juice as usual. I remember that he wasn’t very happy about playing with Da Groove Yard in general and eventually he quitted by the end of the decade.

Although we were in sporadic e-mail contact lately, I didn’t see Stano for over five years. Last summer I went to visit him in his restaurant during one of my very rare trips to Berne, but unfortunately he wasn’t there on that afternoon...

Rest in peace, Stano. You will be sorely missed by way too many!

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Appendix

Impuls - Apendix [sample]
from compilation "Jazzrocková dílna 2", 1976, Panton 110598
produced by Karel Srp


original LP sleeve, designed by Joska Skalník

There was a time in the 1970s when the closest you could get to progressive Czechoslovak rock music was to buy a jazz record. If it wasn't already sold out, that is. Instrumental jazz-rock was not just en vogue, it was also the safest way for Czechoslovak rock groups to obtain a licence for performing in public and - at least in some cases - to appear on records: they could impress the responsible committees with musicianship and there were no lyrics to rouse the censors. Luboš Andršt's Energit was one of the best known examples for this strategy. On the other hand, some of established jazzmen decided to jump on the jazz-rock (in the widest sense) bandwagon as well, in order to gain additional audience, particularly among young listeners; a trend that actually happened all over the world. And then there was a young generation of unbiased musicians who already began to mix rock and jazz as a matter of course from the beginning.

The original Impuls initially got together around 1971 as Jazz Nova with trombonist Jindřich Dostál (ex-Framus Five), still with some focus on mainstream jazz. Some time later (the sources differ on the year, so it must have been between 1972 and 1974...) the keyboarder Pavel Kostiuk (1946, not this guy!), guitarist Zdeněk Fišer (1950), bass player Jan Vytrhlík (later with Energit) and drummer Jaromír Helešic (1947) changed both the group name and the sound after hearing the most recent records by Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock or the Mahavishnu Orchestra with compatriot Jan Hammer. The new soloist eventually became Michal Gera (1949) on electric trumpet, but the rhythm section also used to work as live backing group, e.g. for the C&K Vocal sextet. Vytrhlík has been later replaced by Alexander Čihař and finally in 1976 František Uhlíř (1950) joined on double bass.

Impuls's first vinyl appearance was on the legendary Panton compilation Jazzrocková dílna (Jazzrock Workshop) with the Hancock composition Sly and Corea's Crystal Silence, a live recording from the 2nd Prague Jazz Days (PJD) festival in March 1975. The success of the PJD album gave the impuls (pun intended) to the even more legendary Panton seven inch Mini Jazz Klub series, with Impuls playing two original tunes on no. 7.

Gera's composition Apendix (Appendix), one of Impuls's funkiest tunes, comes from the compilation Jazzrocková dílna 2 (Jazzrock Workshop 2). Although that album was still inspired by the PJD, unlike volume 1 it has been produced as a studio recording where Impuls shared the grooves with fellow jazz-rockers Energit and Jazz Q. And although being a compilation, the whole album sounds surprisingly more homogeneous than many other regular records of that genre. Another track worth to point out is Energit's opus magnum Superstimulátor.

Impuls recorded their well known self-titled debut LP in 1977. By then they have refined their original blend of jazz, rock, latin, funk and Slavic melodies even further, making that album one of the jazz-rock masterpieces even in global context. The group disbanded shortly thereafter, but each of the members eventually became a highly respected musician on his own on the European jazz scene. In the 1990s Fišer revived Impuls in almost original line-up and the group is still playing these days.

Jazzrocková dílna 2 is available on the web at various places. I've even seen a copy on Dusty Groove this week. Unfortunately, the LP doesn't seem to get cheaper as time passes by...

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Taiga blues

Marta Kubišová & The Golden Kids Orchestra - Tajga-Blues '69 [sample]
from 7 inch single, 1969, Supraphon 0430646 (mono); also on CD "Tajga blues (Singly 5)", 2000, Bonton 4988602 (stereo version)
produced by Bohuslav Ondráček, conducted by Josef Vobruba


original SP sleeve (actually a generic "Kubišová" sleeve with additional track imprint on the back)

I admit it right away: I've been watching the semi-finale of the Eurovision Song Contest yesterday. Actually my wife did, that is. But I've seen it too. It's been the first time that Czechs participated on this silly contest, and since we're living in Switzerland, we've voted like crazy for the Czech representative, the hard rock group Kabát. Not that their song would mean anything special to us, but I've met those guys a couple of times personally as they are good friends of some good friends of mine from the city of Teplice. Thus I can say that they are really nice guys and actually also great musicians - something that you can't say of many of the other contest participants. Anyway, if you don't know the semi-finale results yet, you'll surely find out soon if it's really of any importance to you. Just as a side note: judging from the results, the Czech Republic obviously doesn't belong to the Eastern Europe anymore (which it never did in geographic sense anyway). And that's actually good news... ;)

Well then, what's left for us - let's have the Taiga blues today. Do I need to say more about Marta Kubišová than I already did in my very first music post last year? Tajga blues '69, written by producer Bohuslav Ondráček (1932-1998) with lyrics from the Golden Kids bass player Zdeněk Rytíř, is yet again a bitter reflection of the Soviet invasion in Czechoslovakia in late summer of 1968. And it is yet another proof what talent has been put to ice for long twenty years while Marta was prohibited from performing and recording by the communist regime.

The Tajga blues (Singly 5) double CD is an excellent compilation of the last 1969/1970 single sides by Marta Kubišová before she'd been banned. It also includes some unreleased material as well as a bunch of beautiful Moravian folk songs recorded clandestinely in 1978 with singer/songwriter Jaroslav Hutka in Prague. Ten out of five stars!

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The fountains of cognition

Mahagon - Prameny poznání [sample]
from album "Slunečnice pro Vincenta van Gogha", 1980, Supraphon 11132684
produced by Jan Spálený, Pavel Kühn & Květoslav Rohleder


original LP sleeve, designed by Vladimír Jiránek

Mahagon might already be a known name to more experienced collectors of funk. They were one of the few quite straight Czech funk-jazz fusion groups of the seventies and their self-titled long play album from 1977 rightfully became a sought-after collector's item.

The band was the brainchild of bass player, composer and arranger Petr Klapka (1955) while he studied composition at the Prague Conservatory. In the early 1970s he founded Mahagon initially as a singer/songwriter folk duo (!) with his classmate and future Bohemia keyboarder Jan Hála. But soon they became influenced by popular brass-rock groups like Blood Sweat & Tears or Chicago, thus the line-up logically expanded to a much larger combo. Klapka usually had an excellent taste in choosing his sidemen: one of the first lead singers was "Mr. Soul" himself, Michal Prokop. Unfortunately that period remained undocumented on records. (Once more... It seems to me that Michal Prokop must have had an extraordinarily bad luck through the seventies in that regard, being often in the right place but mostly at the wrong time.) On the Mahagon debut album, recorded in 1977, you can hear for example Klapka's schoolmate Michael Kocáb on keyboards, ETC members Jiří Jelínek on guitar (who died tragically soon thereafter) and violinist Jan Hrubý, as well as a large horn section around jazz saxophonist Jiří Niederle. At that time a significant number of the players were also members of the Prague Big Band (Pražský big band) of keyboarder Milan Svoboda, yet another Klapka's schoolmate from the conservatory.

After adding his wife and ex-C&K Vocal singer Zdena Adamová (1952) to the line-up in 1976, Klapka occasionally began to slip into the pop music genre. He featured Adamová on several Supraphon and Panton seven inch sides between 1976 and 1979. Not all of those singles are a must-have, but I'd still point out the Mahagon debut recording Půlnoční bál/Červené korále. In 1979 Klapka joined the ex-Apollobeat leader, composer and Supraphon producer Jan Spálený for his solo album Signál času (The Signal Of Time), a funky jazz-rock adaptation of poems by Vítězslav Nezval. Although the band name "Mahagon" was used, the studio group had transformed almost completely.

The second and last regular Mahagon album Slunečnice pro Vincenta van Gogha (Sunflowers For Vincent Van Gogh) has been recorded in 1979, too. But yet another transformation happened: what we hear on this record is actually the forthcoming 1980s edition of Pražský výběr, but with Klapka on bass! (The original, jazzy Pražský výběr/Prague Selection combo of the 1970s was in fact the complete rhythm section of the Prague Big Band - hence the band name - and thus the Mahagon connection here isn't all too surprising.) So, Kocáb is back on the keys, ex-Bohemia Michal Pavlíček played guitar and Jiří Hrubeš was drumming. Further musicians were the ex-Elektrobus and ex-Expanze percussionist Naďa Vávrová as well as a seven-piece horn section. And there's of course Zdena Adamová, who sang lyrics by Pavel Vrba on most of the tracks.

Unlike the 1st LP, the album concept is rather uneven though. A little bit of pathetic pop here, a slice of hard rock there, homeopathic traces of jazz all over. Yet Prameny poznání (The Fountains Of Cognition) stands out as one of the only two instrumental tracks and as a straight funk jazz tune in almost Hancockish manner. This is Klapka at his funkiest. My other favorite would be A kámen tu nechám (And I'll Leave The Stone Here), a wicked funk rock song with Adamová's expressive vocals.

Klapka and Adamová emigrated to the U.S. in 1981. They are running a private music school nowadays.

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