Working in the coal mine

Blue Swede – Working In The Coal Mine [sample]
from album “Hooked On A Feeling”, 1973, EMI ST-11286
produced by Bengt Palmers


original LP sleeve (front/back)

As you might have noticed, I have created a new label exclusively for this post, named Obscure Czech-In. That wasn’t without a reason because the other secondary label of this entry, Half Czech-In, is pure speculation on my part. To explain: I’ve found Hooked On A Feeling last year in a second hand record store (coincidentally it was in Prague, but that doesn’t matter here) and at first I thought, “well, yet another cheap one hit wonder from the seventies, nothing of interest for me.” On the second sight, however, there were three things that caught my attention: 1) the group had a “built-in” horn section (often a good sign), 2) they covered an Allen Toussaint song (they had taste!), and finally 3) the guy who’s credited to play clavinet and organ had a surprisingly Czechoslovak-sounding name – Ladislav Balaz [sic]. Well, to make a short story shorter, in the end I bought the record but except for a few tracks I was rather disappointed when I heard it at home. In the meantime I sold it again already.

Blue Swede were better known as Björn Skifs & Blåblus in their home country Sweden. Their international breakthrough came with a cover of B. J. Thomas’ hit Hooked On A Feeling, the title track of this album, which climbed up to no. 1 on the U.S. pop charts in 1974. The group’s style was kind of on the edge between early 70s pop and soulful brass-rock. At times they sounded almost like Chicago, for example, but still more on the pop side of things. The musicians who participated on this recording were, besides of Skifs, Jan Guldbäck (dr), Bo Liljedahl (b), Mikael Areklew (g), Tommy Berglund (tp), Hinke Ekestubbe (ts) and on keyboards the aforementioned Baláž (as the name should be spelled correctly in Czech or in Slovak).

Really, I surfed the word wild web for many long hours but I coudn’t find any other trace of a keyboarder named Ladislav Baláž except that he was playing on this particular record; I don’t think that he could be this guy, though. And interestingly enough, I can’t even hear much keyboards on this particular track either, unless it’s a clavinet and not a guitar in the centre of the stereo panorama when the verse is playing. Nevermind, whatever, Working In The Coal Mine is still my personal highlight of the album, despite the “Czech connection” perhaps being only a mirage. And besides of that, I’m definitely a fool for any Allen Toussaint song. Hence this is the first of only two opportunities known to me to post a Toussaint cover on this very blog in the first place…

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Day by day (in memoriam, the 3rd)

Stano Táska & Strawberry Jam – Day By Day [sample]
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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Half Czech-in, part 2: Zulu Stomp

Steve Grossman - Zulu Stomp [sample]
from album "Some Shapes To Come", 1974, P.M. Records PMR-002
produced by Gene Perla


original LP sleeve

The second entry in my Half Czech-In sub-series introduces the first solo album by the U.S. saxophonist Steve Grossman (1951) who was at this young age already an ex-Miles Davis soloist. The Czech part belongs to his pianist Jan Hammer jr. (1948), probably the commercially most successful Czech musician of the late 20th century worldwide. Two words: Miami Vice. (I can't add much more to that topic anyway. I disliked the series 20 years ago and I'm pretty sure they didn't become any better over the years. Let alone the horrible soundtrack. Now pardon me while I'm off to the bathroom...)

Hammer jr. was already considered a huge talent in the 1960s Czechoslovakia. His father Jan Hammer sr. was a well known jazz musicians and his mother Vlasta Průchová was an even better known singer, in fact she was the grande dame of Czechoslovak jazz. Junior's first record appearance was on a 1964 Supraphon jazz compilation, a live recording from 1962 (!) with the Junior Trio, his bandmates were then the teenage brothers Miroslav and Alan Vitouš on double bass and drums respectively. In 1967 he composed the soundtrack for the "pop fairy-tale" Šíleně smutná princezna (The Princess Sad Like Crazy) with singers Helena Vondráčková and Václav Neckář in the main roles. In 1968 Hammer jr. emigrated to West Germany, released his first solo album Maliny Maliny on MPS and soon thereafter he headed over to the U.S. where he studied on the Berklee College of Music. In the early seventies he began to work as a sideman, for example for drummer Elvin Jones where he met Grossman, Gene Perla and Don Alias. In 1971 he joined the famous Mahavishnu Orchestra led by John McLaughlin, later he played on Billy Cobham's classic Spectrum, he also recorded with Jeff Beck, Stanley Clarke, Carlos Santana and many others. The ex-Jones rhythm section continued to work together through the seventies as well, they played e.g. with the flutist Jeremy Steig on Energy (a.k.a. Fusion). To make a long story short, Hammer jr. became a busy guy.

Some Shapes To Come is a fine little fusion album on the edge between funk, jazz-rock and free-jazz. The recordings were made on three days in September 1973, their spirit is pretty raw and dirty. Zulu Stomp, the third track of the album, kicks off with a nasty and funky drum groove. No wonder, the tune was composed by the drummer and percussionist Don Alias. In comes Hammer's Moog and Perla's bass playing a catchy unisono riff, followed by a straight and simple saxophon theme. Hammer then takes off with a spaced out Moog solo. Yeah, that's the classic modal funk jazz mood of the early seventies. Gettin' down with the Zulu stomp... baby!

Some Shapes To Come is for sale in my record store right now; for my personal taste there's just a little too much free-jazz on the album. I'm also selling other Jan Hammer albums: one from 1979 called simply Hammer which is a straight pop-rock record (audio samples); once someone gave it to me and unlike the Grossman LP you can have it really cheap. Then there are also Lenny White and Joni Mitchell LPs with Hammer's participation. Czech them out, just search for "hammer" (you may ignore Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer popping up along).

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Half Czech-in, part 1

Emil Viklický - Trochu funky (The Funky Way) [sample]
from album "Okno", 1980, Supraphon 11152754
composed & arranged by Emil Viklický, produced by Antonín Matzner


original LP sleeve (front/back)

Welcome to the Half Czech-In, an irregular "sub-series" of Funky Czech-In posts, devoted to international funky outings with some sort of Czech or Slovak participation - or vice versa. There are quite a lot of records to choose from, so besides of less known or even absolutely obscure names (Gyulli Chokheli, anyone?) you can also expect to meet renown artists like Jan Hammer jr. or Miroslav Vitouš as well as a couple of their even more famous international colleagues.

This first example comes from the second solo album by jazz pianist Emil Viklický. You might have already seen that name on this blog, he was the keyboard player on Energit's first record. He played with Karel Velebný's SHQ and was a member of the legendary Klávesová konkláva (The Keyboard Conclave); both groups will be covered in future posts. For more details check out Viklický's English biography. Besides of that, he was also one of those few lucky guys who were allowed to study in the U.S. in the seventies, where he spent a year at the Berklee College of Music. Back in Prague, in the summer of 1979 some of his new friends from the States dropped by to say hello: guitarist Bill Frisell, bass player Kermit Driscoll and the ex-Stark Reality drummer Vinton Johnson. The result of that short visit was the album Okno (The Window).

"Trochu funky" actually means "A little bit funky". But I'd say that the track is funky a lot, thus the English title The Funky Way seems more appropriate. One highlight is certainly Johnson's extensive drumming. Watch out for two long breaks which should please all samplaficionados out there. On the other hand, Viklický's melodies borrow a lot from Moravian ethnic music and that joyous nature fits quite well with the disco beat. And although I don't find the tune arrangement and structure as exciting as it could have possibly been, this kind of fusion makes it still quite distinguishable from similar international disco-jazz productions of that era. The rest of album continues in a similar funky fusion vein, except for one ballad.

The record doesn't fall behind if you compare it with its more famous western competition, although at some points it sounds slightly "underproduced" to me. You should check out this Bill Frisell discography page, it tells Viklický's background story why the recording sessions had to be finished in less than two days; it may sound quite absurd to you, but those things that he's talking about were typical for the era of normalized socialism... Anyway, some more clever arrangements or perhaps a horn section here and there wouldn't have hurt. Because in fact, Trochu funky has been re-recorded by Kamil Hála with the Czechoslovak Radio Jazz Orchestra (JOČR) in 1982, entitled Quasi opus pro big band č. 17, released by Panton on the obscure compilation series Matiné populární hudby (a.k.a. Týden nové tvorby). The big band arrangement definitely works, although in that tune the JOČR rhythm section sounds really tired in direct comparison to the original raw drive of the Johnson/Driscoll funk machine.

Okno is without doubt one of the funkiest original albums that ever came out on a Czechoslovak record label. The recordings have been reissued on CD in 1997, but as you might have guessed: deleted from the catalogues, not available for order, out of print. Sometimes it's still available on eBay though. I've also seen second hand vinyl quite cheap from Slovakia.