Free Jazz Trio: the cultural history of Czechoslovak Free Jazz during the Time of Normalization (1969-1989)

This article, written by Czech musicologist Jan Blüml, was originally published in 2014.

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Free Jazz Trio: the cultural history of Czechoslovak Free Jazz during the Time of Normalization (1969–1989)¹

One of the important factors that determine the shape of musical history in a particular country is its state cultural policy. It influences, to a large extent, not only the nature of the style spectrum in a given music environment, but also the social reception, functions and connotations of individual styles. With this fact in mind, the present study examines modes of existence of ‘free thinking’ free jazz style during the ‘unfree’ period of communist Czechoslovakia in 1969–1989. The study observes specific cultural and cultural-political reasons for the non-acceptance of free jazz music on the Czechoslovak music scene. It also reflects on the genre identity of free jazz music within the environment of a totalitarian state. The situation is described using the example of the only long-term representative of Czechoslovak free jazz – the Free Jazz Trio band.²

The Free Jazz Trio was found by three co-players of one of the most prominent representatives of Czech modern jazz, Emil Viklický³, in late 1971 in Olomouc. Despite its personnel,⁴as well as institutional and organizational ties to ‘regional’ Olomouc, the Free Jazz Trio at numerous stages of its long existence caused a shakeup in national jazz traditionalism and mainstream. During the 1970s and 1980s, the band performed at the most important national music festivals, such as Prague Jazz Days, organized by The Jazz Section of the Czechoslovak Musicians’ Union in the Lucerna Palace.⁵ Here, the relatively unusual and, for many, the eccentric artistic expression of the band, drawing on the music of John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and John Surman, absorbed thousands of jazz and popular music listeners from all over Czechoslovakia.⁶ Despite its success with young rock audiences, this music, based on creative destruction of traditional music parameters such as melody, harmony or rhythm in the name of creative freedom that nevertheless does not end in ‘chaos’ but in a musical order of a different kind and quality, was never accepted by the representatives and listeners of domestic jazz music.⁷

A number of factors can be seen to have caused this situation. During the 1960s, a dominant and influential style sometimes referred to as ‘classical mainstream’ formed in Czechoslovakia. One of its main leaders and tireless promoters was multi-instrumentalist, composer and pedagogue Karel Velebný, who followed the post-bop jazz mainstream and artists like John Lewis and Gerry Mulligan. Velebný, as well as other jazz icons of that time who shared the same artistic credo, had great influence on fixation of aesthetic ideals, interpretive and compositional rules and approaches viewed as mandatory for this type of music expression. The deeper cause of this ‘conservation’ process undoubtedly lay in the relatively small size of Czechoslovak scene which was thus easily influenced by the authorities. But the causes can also be found in the general cultural and political situation, characterised by the lack of information and international contacts, the limited musical, personnel and institutional background, the all-pervading element of centralisation and, as a result, absence of a mature competitive environment that would encourage artistic, cultural or stylistic pluralism.

The historian Vladimír Kouřil in his suggestive essay "Mommy, ghost: free jazz!" says: “In the 1960s, our cool jazz and hard bop were part of the permitted minority entertainment and at the same time, the fighting position protecting against ‘eccentricities’ of jazz experiments, i.e. free jazz. When it came to free jazz, the opinions of ideologues and the majority of musicians and fans agreed, which was rare: it’s musical anarchy, impossible to listen to, they must be joking, it’s a playground for jacklegs. […] Here, other forces entered the game: the mentality of the natives, the declining musical education of schoolchildren, ignorance and general reluctance to bother with unintelligible ‘novelties’ which need an effort to be grasped. For the expectancy theory is the cultural environment in a totalitarian state a real blessing: I only like what I know, what is familiar to me.”⁸

At the beginning of the 1970s, a strong jazz-rock wave carried by a generation of young jazzmen, enchanted by the rock sound of the Sixties, caused most discussions of this kind. The situation is well exemplified by the dispute between the committee members of The Jazz Section of the Czechoslovak Musicians’ Union after, in the mid-seventies, one of them – future chairman Karel Srp – decided to organize, under the auspices of the organization, a solo concert of jazz-rock bands called the Jazz-Rock Workshop.

“The committee of the Jazz Section, which consisted mostly of professional musicians or officials, opposed the Jazz-Rock Workshop. Namely: Dvořák, Benda, Smékal, Hulan, Velebný, Titzl, Mácha; only Dorůžka refrained from invectives. The officials showed political fear, and professional jazzmen envy that ‘those jacklegs’, as they called them, will get more applause. The well-known professional musician Luděk Hulan even went to the Ministry of Culture to warn them that there will be disturbances. Srp broke up with the committee (It happened at the Amateur National Jazz Festival in Mladá Boleslav. As he was walking away, they shouted at him: “You are alone in this...”) and fought with the authorities until they agreed to allow the concert to be performed as part of the Prague Jazz Days.”⁹

However, the above citation needs some explanation. The majority of Prague and non-Prague jazzmen rejected the incoming rock influences accompanied by increased political attention simply because of the protection of the original purpose of The Jazz Section, which was to promote their beloved music, jazz. The growing orientation towards rock as well as the gradual politicisation of the activity led in 1984 to the end of the organization and criminalisation of its leading members. A number of jazzmen had feared that this would happen.¹⁰

As was mentioned earlier, in our environment free jazz had a similar position to jazz rock – in terms of the a priori rejection by the conservative audience. However, the situation with free jazz was more complicated for historical reasons. This type of music as a style and genre originated in the 1950s and thus at the turn of the 1960s and the 1970s did not constitute novelty, as was the case with jazz rock. On this basis, part of the jazz fanbase perceived it even as something obsolete, in addition to being stylistically unproductive. The way in which a considerable part of the older generation of musicians and listeners perceived free jazz in 1970s Czechoslovakia is aptly illustrated by a letter to the editor as it appeared in the fifth issue of the bulletin Jazz in 1973: “I am appalled by the Polish Jamboree and its mostly free jazz. How can it have any audience? It’s nothing but pseudo art. Our foundation was hard upbeat swing, perfect rhythm. We sought a synthesis of cool and hard bop, and that’s where we came to a full stop, where we drew the line. Whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.”¹¹

Besides revealing a totalitarian mindset within the music fans themselves, the citation also offers an interesting comparison of the conservative Czechoslovak scene with a converse situation in neighbouring Poland which was, thanks to the more liberal conception of state cultural policy, much more open to the modern or avant-garde currents, not only in jazz but in music and art generally. The members of Free Jazz Trio would often mention Poland as an example of ‘healthy’ music taste within the Eastern Bloc. The artistic director of the band Milan Opravil said in the bulletin of The Jazz Section in 1975: “It is very difficult to promote jazz in Czechoslovakia. It is evident from the choice of bands for festivals – traditional jazz groups prevail. Because the listeners don’t have the opportunity to listen to free jazz as plentifully as they can, for example, in Poland, they judge each gig more from the visual rather than the auditory perspective and always with a certain amount of irony. They cannot absorb the music without external influences.”¹²

In light of the mentioned facts, the negative reactions that the newly formed Free Jazz Trio were receiving in the early 1970s come as no surprise. The band’s second saxophonist Josef Bláha realistically summed up the situation: “Playing free jazz, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, meant a lot of uncertainty and fumbling about. Our jazz scene at the time (and the situation hasn’t changed) recognized and was partial to ‘modern classic’, or better, ‘mainstream’ jazz. In this regard, the immortalized Karel Velebný had an enormous influence. […] To a lot of people, the stuff we and Milan Opravil played was a mess. To Velebný, it was an outright assault to the ear. The reviews (of course the Prague ones) were shattering during the first years.”¹³

But we can also say that the new artistic and sound quality the Free Jazz Trio brought to the domestic scene during normalisation, despite its musical and performative spontaneity and ‘shagginess’ or perhaps precisely because of it, radically appealed to a specific domain of music fans. For example, a recollection of Václav Seyfert, an associate of Tišnov jazz club, bears witness to this: “Sometime in the course of 1981, I and other music fans from Tišnov went to a jazz event in Brno called Jazz Forum. The star was supposed to be the renowned orchestra of Gustav Brom [one of the artistically most prominent bands of Czechoslovak jazz], but we just loved absolutely everything about a completely different band, the Olomouc Free Jazz Trio. If I am to speak for myself, I have always been more of a rock music fan – our generation considered big beat, as we called it, the means of expressing artistic freedom, and jazz was after all decisively more academic. Maybe that’s why the Free Jazz Trio had such enormous appeal to me.”¹⁴

Seyfert’s quote suggests interesting connotations, given the criticism of the time. One of them, anti-academism, was a potential reason for negative reviews of the band by the professional public. The band shared this anti-academism with rock and, to a certain extent, jazz rock. As mentioned earlier, the conservative jazz public (often somewhat ahistorically) rejected jazz rock for its dilettantism, musical primitivism and banality, inability to ‘swing’ properly, limited harmonic thinking etc. Although the musical expression of the Olomouc band, with its structural asymmetries and Opravil’s speculative and intellectual approach was, at least in the first stage of its existence, relatively far from the succinct rock rhythm and the primary opposing viewpoints of the ‘rock youth’, it shared many common features with rock music, both at the level of higher aesthetic, artistic and ideological principles and social functions.

This raises an interesting question of the genre identity of individual musical expressions, or more precisely, the question of the extent to which such identity is conditioned by the specific cultural environment in which the music arises. Czech musicologist Aleš Opekar defined rock music in 1989 on the basis of several criteria. In addition to stylistic aspects of specific metro-rhythmics and sonicity, it was particularly the presence of an opinion, or if you like, the presence of a specific factor of ‘self-definition’.¹⁵ This affirms, apart from other things, an ideology sustained by the influential American magazine Rolling Stone, that the quintessence of rock has always been defiance, rebellion or revolt.¹⁶ These could be realized in different ways, whether by means of musical style or verbal and gestural expressions. Despite the fact that the Free Jazz Trio was drawing on jazz music tradition and its members were not politically active in any way, within the context of 1970s and 1980s communist Czechoslovakia, the music expression of the band fitted perfectly into the ideal of ‘rock opposition’, which soon became evident by a spontaneous integration of the band into unofficial circles, with all its consequences.¹⁷ The improvised and formally unrestrained music of the Free Jazz Trio was, in the contemporary cultural or cultural-political context, a revolt simply in its anti-conformist style. As seen from the memories of eyewitnesses and contemporary prints, the listeners profoundly felt the symbolism of ‘free-thinking music’ in ‘unfree times’.

Although the Free Jazz Trio continued on their musical path after the Velvet Revolution, 1989 concluded the key era of its existence. The historian Vladimír Kouřil notes: “The Free Jazz Trio is a Czechoslovak jazz legend, because its history strongly reflects the specifics of our cultural life during the normalisation years.”¹⁸ But it is not just cultural and historical significance that can be attributed to the band today. The undisputedly most prominent domestic expert on jazz, Lubomír Dorůžka (who in the seventies also questioned the artistic direction of the Free Jazz Trio), in 2011 in connection with the release of the Free Jazz Trio’s archival audio recording called Tišnovsko wrote the following: “Today’s technology enables us to make use of former samizdat editions, offering an – almost revelatory – perspective on our relatively recent jazz history. […] What comes as the biggest surprise today is what could be heard from the stage in times of meticulous supervision of normalisation regime and what mostly brought classics of its music genre. […] The overall impression confirms that the orientation of the Free Jazz Trio, being more explosive and less ‘disciplined’ had, even thirty years ago, a lot in common with the endeavour of today’s generation of musicians in their thirties. […] Those who follow the yearning of our young jazz in all its breath can find the encounter with the samizdat editions of the Free Jazz Trio both interesting and informative.”¹⁹

The debt to Czechoslovak jazz history has been repaid.

Notes

1. With the term normalization in this study we generally mean the period after the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw pact armies in August 1968, ended by the so-called Velvet Revolution in November 1989. Compare for example Otáhal, Milan: Normalizace, 1969–1989: příspěvek ke stavu bádání [Normalization, 1969–1989: contribution to the research], Praha: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 2002.
2. Apart from the Free Jazz Trio, only Jiří Stivín, a significant Czech flautist, systematically pursued free jazz in 1970s and 1980s Czechoslovakia. For more about him see Poledňák, Ivan: Mně všechno dvakrát, aneb O Jiřím Stivínovi [For me everything twice or, about Jiří Stivín], Praha: Panton, 1989.
3. For more on the history and music of Free Jazz Trio see Blüml, Jan – Košulič, Jan: Free Jazz Trio: kapitola z dějin českého jazzu [Free Jazz Trio: a chapter from the history of Czech jazz], Olomouc: VUP, 2014.
4. With minor changes in personnel, before 1989 the Free Jazz Trio performed mostly as a quartet (Milan Opravil – saxophones, Josef Bláha – saxophones, violin, Zdeněk Mahdal – double bass, bass guitar, Petr Večeřa – percussion).
5. The Jazz Section was established in 1971. In the years that followed, it became a key platform for the presentation of Czechoslovak jazz as well as alternative rock and unofficial culture. See Kouřil, Vladimír: Jazzová sekce v čase a nečase: 1971–1987 [The Jazz Section in good and bad times: 1971–1987], Praha: Torst, 1999.
6. Ibid.
7. In this regard, Czechoslovakia differed from the neighbouring countries of the so-called Eastern Bloc, namely East Germany and Poland, where free jazz found space for growth.
8. Kouřil, Vladimír: Mámo, strašidlo: free jazz! Nálezy jednoho hudebního žánru na našem území [Mommy, ghost: free jazz! The findings of one musical genre in our country], A2, 2009, č. 21, s. 22–23.
9. Srp, Karel: Jazzová sekce – kultura po roce 1968 [The Jazz Section – culture after 1968], in: Radiohortus.cz [online], [cit. 6. 7. 2014], accesible at: http://www.radiohortus.cz/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=68:test-beat generation&catid=3:newsflash
10. Compare Srp, Karel: Výjimečné stavy: povolání Jazzová sekce [States of emergency: profession The Jazz Section], Praha: Pragma, 1994; Kouřil, Vladimír: Jazzová sekce v čase a nečase: 1971–1987 [The Jazz Section in good and bad times: 1971–1987], Praha: Torst, 1999; Tomek, Oldřich: Akce jazz [Operation jazz], Securitas imperii, 2003, č. 10, s. 235– 329; Bugge, Peter: Boj magické moci razítka s magickou mocí lidovou: případ Jazzové sekce [The struggle between the magical power of the stamp and magical power of the folk: the case of The Jazz Section], Soudobé dějiny, 2011, č. 3, s. 346– 382; Dorůžka, Lubomír: Český jazz mezi tanky a klíči: 1968–1989 [Czech jazz between tanks and keys: 1968–1989], Praha: Torst, 2002.
11. Cited by Kouřil, V.: Jazzová sekce v čase a nečase 1971–1987 [The Jazz Section in good and bad times 1971– 1987], Praha: Torst, 1999, s. 44.
12. [Anonym]: Free Jazz Trio Olomouc, Jazz, 1975, č. 14, without page numbers.
13. Electronic letter of J. Bláha addressed to Ing. Pavel Šimek to France, dated 29 Dec 2012, private archive of J. Blüml. To the problem of Prague’s reception Bláha also notes: “Following such condemnations (in the 1970s), when for the Prague jazz scene, the decisively important one, we were an epigone of something obsolete, two real smashers came in the 1980s at International Jazz Festivals in Lucerna: the gigs of Cecil Taylor and Yamashita. And the news and magazines headlines said: (I can still see it clearly): ‘Prague discovered free jazz!’ That is of course ridiculous but what else could they write? I believe that the history of the Prague jazz scene (and it applies to the history of art and other fields as well) will be, among others, the history of discovering free jazz’.“ Electronic letter of J. Bláha dated 2 Feb 2014, private archive of J. Blüml.
14. Seyfert, Václav: Personal memories of the Free Jazz Trio [handwriting, 8 pages], written in the spring of 2013, private archive of J. Blüml.
15. Opekar, Aleš: Hodnotová orientace v rockové hudbě [Value orientation in rock music], Opus musicum, 1989, č. 2, s. 105–115, č. 5, s. XIII–XV.
16. See Rolling Stone Cover to Cover: The First 40 Years [digital archive, DVD], Bondi Digital Publishing, 2007.
17. The Free Jazz Trio could not, for example, publish records officially.
18. Electronic letter of V. Kouřil dated 20 January 2014, private archive of J. Blüml.
19. Dorůžka, Lubomír: To byste neřekli, co také znělo před třiceti lety na českých pódiích [ You would never have imagined what resounded on Czech stages thirty years ago], iDNES.cz [online], 5. srpna 2011 [cit. 1. 7. 2014], accessible at : http://zpravy.idnes.cz/to-byste-nerekli-co-take-znelo-pred-triceti-lety-na-ceskych-podiich-1dm- /zpr_archiv.aspx?c=A110726_134647_kavarna_chu]