MILAN SVOBODA
Composer, conductor, band leader, jazz pianist
Milan Svoboda Q & Tony Lakatos
(CD PJ Music 1998 - PJ 014-2)
Tony Lakatos - tenor
sax
Michal Gera - trumpet,
flugelhorn
Milan Svoboda - piano
Martin Lehky - bassguitar
Ivan Audes - drums
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/ except No. 5 composed by Johny Green / Total time 59:11 |
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featuring Tony Lakatos: Produced by
Milan Svoboda and Petr Pylypov |
| 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. |