V4 Jazz Festival
23-24 February 2018
The aim of V4 Jazz Festival is to connect the outstanding jazz formations of the ‘Visegrád Four’. Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian clubs and bands nowadays have more intense relationships with American or Western-European organizations and bands than with each other. With this festival, we would like to change this situation, and, of course, we would like to introduce the audience to the most exciting performances.
23rd February
20:00 Alan & Štefan Bartuš Trio-COLLECTIVITY (SK)
The Trio was founded on the internal complaint of Stefan and Alan Bartus, presenting and pursuing their own musical ideas. The compositions are the results of the author's experience in various genres and styles of music. In particular, classical music, ethnic music and world music. Modern fusion of latin, classical and freemusic melodies combined firm is the result of composition, each member of the body has room for improvisation in the form of actual implementation. Cooperation of father and son bring this trio to another point of view, they are playing own compositions and arranging with passion, with one of the best drummers from Slovakia.
Alan Bartuš – piano, Stefan Pišta Bartuš – bass, Marian Ševčík – drum
21:30 Krzysztof Ścierański & Bernard Maseli Duo (PL)
Krzysztof Ścierańsk appeared in the '70s in the band Laboratorium and immediately becamse Poland's no.1 bass guitar player. He traveled the world with String Connection and Zbigniew Namysłowski's Air Condition band. From the '80s, he started developing his unique style with the help of different technical devices.
He has amazed the audience in Hungary several times with his band Colors, and on the side of Bernard Maseli.
Maseli is one of the most excellent Polish jazz musicians in the past three decades, and the most popular vibraphone player in Europe.
He has played with the most influental Polish jazz musicians, and has played on stage before Miles Davis. In the past years, he has been playing in Dean Brown's quartet.
24th February
20:00 László Attila - Oláh Kálmán Quartet (H)
The band is the latest stage in the twenty year-long cooperation between the two soloist-composers. Most of their refi ned repertoire consists of originals but they play jazz standards as well.
21:30 Kristina Barta Trio (CZ)
In 2015, Kristina Barta founded her own trio with Jan Feco on bass and Marek Urbanek on the drums. The trio won the competition Jazz Prix 2015. The international jury composed of R. Dombrowski (German music journalist), G. Schroder (The US Attorney Kurland Agency ) and Rudy Linka (Czech jazz guitarist) took her distinctive and fresh approach to the arrangements, and to her own compositions.
The trio was chosen by European Commission of EBU among the four finalists of Euroradio Jazz Competition 2016. Kristina Barta Trio performed at the legendary concert hall Bimhuis in Amsterdam.
“Their music is a combination of jazz tradition and efforts to explore something new. The band sounds optimistic, after the periods of nervous or depressive modern jazz, perhaps, this is a new trend. Helped by the fact they are the young musicians who do not stick to the surface, but go directly to the essence of musical magic”, says the editor of Czech Radio Vltava Vaclav Vrany.
Kristina Barta won the OSA composer’s competition, her song becomes the best Czech jazz composition in 2016. She is also the finalist of Pianist of year 2016 in Czech Republic.
EMA29 debut album was released in 2017 by Kristina Barta at the Austrian Alessa Records in cooperation with the Austrian promoter Peter Guschelbauer (among others in the years 2002 - 2007 he was the promoter of the Austrian Joe Zawinul).
The steady trio Barta, Feco, Urbanek on the album expanded with distinguished guests. Trumpeter and composer Miroslav Hloucal, guitarist Krystof Tomecek, saxophonist and producer Karel Ruzicka jr. and American vibraphonist David Friedman, a professor at the Jazz Institute in Berlin (David Friedman worked with musicians such as Wayne Shorter, Horace Silver and Chet Baker. He was a member of the New York Philharmonic and also taught at the Manhattan School of Music in New York).
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