Dixie and The Gang

If you follow the domestic development of a genre closely for almost half a century, you gradually form a few wishes: to live to see a home-grown counterpart of something that caught your attention in the genre on the world stage.

I had always wished that our jazz, too, would produce ideas in which progressiveness is married to humour, not merely as a detached stance but as a genuine contribution, though never a cheap one. That is why I enjoy myself, enviously, listening to the albums and above all the concerts of Mike Westbrook or Willem Breuker’s Kollektief. For a time Milan Svoboda’s Kontraband certainly met this expectation in its own way, and I have just been delighted in the same spirit by the new album from the Nusle Art Orchestra (NUO), led by keyboardist and principal composer Jakub Zitko: Dixie and The Gang (Amplión, 2007, 61:53), in whose artwork, by the orchestra’s multi-purpose member Ivan Acher, we find the hidden subtitle “barrel-organ music”. The opening minute, a rough brass band in the spirit of Kmoch, New Orleans and the barrel organ, gives a condensed hint of how far the roots of NUO’s style can reach. Although the pieces are carefully arranged (otherwise, given the variety of events within them, they could not hold together), they feature superb solo and improvised contributions from proven wind soloists Marcel Bárta (alto saxophone, soprano saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet), Pavel Hrubý (tenor saxophone), Oskar Török (trumpet) and Jan Jirucha (trombone). The vocal samples serve mainly as a reminder of the gentle parody inherent in the whole project, whether in Underpop or in Metaxa, perhaps the most jazz-sounding title, rather than turning a piece into a song. Alongside Zitko’s compositions, Marcel Bárta, Jan Jirucha, Jiří Šimek and Ivan Acher each contributed one piece to the album’s repertoire. The last of these has enriched the Czech musical treasury with an action-packed jazz crime story called Tatort. NUO’s music very successfully combines the possibilities of today’s electronics with the acoustic sound of wind instruments. An excess of synthetic sounds in jazz is usually a substitute for a lack of actual music; with NUO it is like the proverbial spice: its purpose is carefully weighed in the context of the other instruments’ sound. Interestingly, the whole album is imbued with a peculiar melancholy, or perhaps rather a desire to put musicality before the sonic experimentation that listeners are so abundantly served today.

The presence of key players from Vertigo Quintet and Limbo, working together with Zitko’s ideas and Acher’s sensibility, confirms the existence of a generational jazz “claque” with its own distinctive view of jazz. May it never be watered down.

Vladimír Kouřil for UNI 2/2008

Catalogue number: AMP07004