The Prague Post Online: Tempo: Still playing the body electric

October 14th, 2008

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Still playing the body electric

A conversation with Czech jazz superstar Miroslav Vitouš

By Darrell Jonsson
For The Prague Post
April 4th, 2007 issue

KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST

Vitouš is exploring new ideas in his ongoing performances with improv master Jaroslav Dušek at Archa Theatre.

Internationally, Miroslav Vitouš is a name that will rest securely in any jazz history book.

Born in Prague in 1947, Vitouš took passionately to music studies at the age of 6. While training at the Prague Conservatory in the 1960s, he played bass in a trio that included another seminal Czech jazz-fusion artist, Jan Hammer.

In 1966, a scholarship to the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston catapulted Vitouš from Central Europe to the East Coast of the United States. Vitouš did not last long at Berklee — according to legend, the administration just could not advance him fast enough. Instead, he took job offers from Herbie Mann and Miles Davis that initially placed him in the jazz spotlight.

In 1969 he recorded his first solo LP, Infinite Search, along with John McLaughlin, Jack DeJohnette and Joe Henderson. At that time, Vitouš, who was in still in his early 20s, represented the new wave of jazz known as “fusion.”

In the late ’60s, Vitouš and his peers entered the new jazz genre leveraging all they knew from their individual musical origins, drawing on sources ancient, classical and modern. In the case of the fusion group Weather Report, co-founded in 1970 by Vitouš, keyboard player Joe Zawinul and saxophonist Wayne Shorter, the initial efforts were downright futuristic. The group included Brazilian percussion visionary Airto Moreira and the Afro-French-Blackfoot Indian Alphonse Mouzon on drums, with Vitouš, Zawinul and Shorter contributing their combined American jazz and Slavonic music legacies. Their eponymous debut and their second masterpiece, I Sing the Body Electric, both recorded for Columbia in 1971, remain seminal works of the genre.

Vitouš stayed with Weather Report for five successful LPs. But, in 1975, when the group’s dynamism began slipping into a calculated groove, he left to pursue his original vision in a series of solo and ad hoc projects with John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Jack DeJohnette, Jon Hassell and others.

In the ’80s Vitouš worked as chairman of the New England Conservatory of Music’s jazz department while continuing to tour and record. His work since then has ranged from collaborations with the Norwegian-born saxophonist Jan Garbarek to his creation of a patented digital device, the ILIO “Miroslav Vitouš — Symphonic Orchestra Samples.”

With a residence in northern Italy, Vitouš is spending more time in Europe these days. Last October, he could be seen playing at the Rudolfinum with the Czech Philharmonic, performing his own compositions.

The Prague Post caught up with Vitouš before his recent bass, electronics and spoken word performance with Jaroslav Dušek at Archa Theatre. Over a beer in the theater café, Vitouš discussed his work with much of the same humor and intensity that his music is known for.

The Prague Post: How exactly did you leave the Czech Republic?

Miroslav Vitouš: I won a competition in Vienna and I had a scholarship. So I was allowed legally to fly to Paris and directly to New York.

TPP: As an expatriate of the communist bloc, were you treated any differently in the West?

MV: No, I was in the musicians’ world; there was no difference. They were just more friendly. They tried to help me stay in America and all that.

TPP: You played with a lot of famous people, including Miles Davis, who is known for his blasts of verbal abuse and musical wit. Any particular moments that you recall with him?

MV: I was playing with Miles at the Village Gate one Saturday night. I’m just walking upstairs toward the bar, and Miles is standing at the bar, and he says, “C’mere, you white motherfucker.” And I’m like, “Well, OK.” And he says, “You go downstairs and tell Ornette Coleman to get the fuck off the bandstand so we can play and go home.” I didn’t know what to say — I was only 19 years old and hadn’t had any conversation with Miles before that. So I turned to the bartender and said, “Cognac, please.” And Miles said, “Don’t pull no Paul Chambers shit on me!” Because Chambers used to drink all the time.

TPP: Jazz fans and critics alike consider the first Weather Report albums especially magical. Was that a special time for you?

MV: It was magical, because it was created by the three of us — Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul and myself — and we put it together very creatively. Nobody wrote the music, or nobody really arranged the music beforehand. We did it together, so everybody got involved. This is a much better way of doing things, rather than having one guy write the stuff at home and everybody tries to play it, because then you are not using the full potential of the other musicians.

The most important point, though, to the question you are asking, is that there was no interest in doing anything commercial — we just wanted to do something new. But art and music only, we were not thinking about commercial success. Later, Zawinul started thinking about commercial success, which is when I left. They turned it into a funk, halfway-commercial sort of thing so that the band would make it big and famous.

Ironically enough, if they would have just waited and played the complete true music, a year later European festivals opened up and they were paying musicians like us $40,000 for one concert.

TPP: How did Wayne Shorter react to this?

MV: During those years he couldn’t really play next to Zawinul, because Zawinul was so overpowering and everything had to be his way. Shorter is not an aggressive person, so he didn’t fight for his position. It got to the point, I heard, that Zawinul was playing saxophone samples on the keyboard and Shorter was standing in the corner. You know, you’ve got the best saxophone player in the world, and you’re going to play some stupid saxophone samples. You have to be crazy to do that.

TPP: Do you feel that Central European musicians such as yourself and Zawinul made a distinct contribution to jazz?

MV: I would say it is the European melody, especially the Slavic kind of melody, which was a big contribution to jazz that reached its height around the end of the ’60s and beginning of the ’70s. It’s a cultural form that comes from Europe, and is much more alive here than in the States. It comes from the musicians, because you are practically born with it here … well, some of us, anyway. It’s from the general Slavic territory: Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic, partly Austria and Yugoslavia. Hungary is different, it’s as if they just flew out of the sky and into the middle of this.

TPP: From your point of view, is there a new post-fusion style happening in jazz?

MV: I don’t know what’s happening lately. I know one thing: I don’t hear anything new in music. Everything is sort of repeating. They either try to play bebop, or they try to play one branch of the jazz tree as some kind of project. But nobody has really come up with anything new since the late ’70s.

TPP: With your projects here in Prague with Jaroslav Dušek, do you feel you’re doing something new?

MV: Yes, I like it very much. I’m learning to speak with the bass, because on stage I’m talking with him. And so I’m getting a little bit of an education about speaking with the instrument better, and also about artistic self and energy — because, as you can see, at our performances we have an excellent, energetic rapport on an art level. Jaroslav makes people laugh like hell, but, at the same time, what we do together is a very high art.

TPP: Is your work with Jaroslav improvised, structured or based on motifs?

MV: I’ve some set pieces I play, but when and how is all created on the spot.

TPP: How would you describe your current work in general?

MV: In my current work, I’m combining the classical sounds with the creative force. Not with jazz, because jazz is gone. I’m focusing on improvisation and the creative force, because music comes from above. This is what comes to you after you become a master. Some musicians never get there, because they are not ready to let go of their ego. You have to let go of the ego and understand you are the instrument of the above. You are just part of it, it is not you who makes this music. And some musicians can never accept that, for one reason or another.

So I’m trying to do this because I personally believe that music, in order to go forward and progress, can only do one thing: take the creative force, improvisation, and put it together with the classical sound, culture and form. Not the forms known in the past — a sonata, fugue or something like that. Just the idea of the culture and the classical sound combined with the creative force.

Darrell Jonsson can be reached at tempo@praguepost.com

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