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Traveling troubadour

Justin Lavash crosses boundaries and genres

By Darrell Jonsson
For The Prague Post
April 25th, 2007 issue

KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST
Lavash, on guitar, and Homuta draw a foot-stompin' crowd to St. Nicholas Café.
There are moments when all the thunder of orchestras and rock groups can’t come close to what one singer and a guitar can do. Case in point: Justin Lavash, who brought his timeless troubadour magic to Prague two years ago. Since then, at places such as The Globe, Metropole, Taki Tiki and St. Nicholas Café, Lavash and his friends have been raising the local high-water mark of blue-jeans café sessions.
By day Lavash is a professional music transcriber, taking songs originally composed for orchestra and paring them down for smaller ensembles. Such precision may be seem too studied for someone seeking to champion the organic expression of more “down-home” styles. Yet, wherever Lavash and his guitar go at night, the passion and humor of rustic music is unleashed.
Justin Lavash

Solo
When: Friday, April 27, at 8
Where: Café Metropole
When: Saturday, April 28, at 8
Where: Taki Tiki
When: Sunday, April 29, at 8
Where: The Globe
Under the Influence with Tomáš Homuta
When: Every Thursday at 8
Where: St. Nicholas Café
Free admission to all the
performances

Speaking of his mixed heritage, the UK-born Lavash says, “My mother is Irish and my father is American, but my family never spent more than two generations in the same country.” Lavash’s North American ancestry is where he gets his typical Quebecois name. This Francophile past has helped Lavash’s cultivated feel for Chanson Francaise and Acadian music, which he demonstrated at a recent Friday-night performance at The Globe. Accompanied by a mandolin player, Lavash sounded as if he could have been playing in a back alley of Ville de Québec.
Over the course of the evening, Lavash’s music traveled far and wide, ranging from jumpy blues numbers to foot-stomping, folk-style originals. Closing the evening with a hypnotic interpretation of Dylan’s “Don’t Look Back,” Lavash left no question that the deep-voiced guitarist at the microphone was a master of nuance. During the break, he stopped at our table and said, “If you like this, you should go over to St. Nicholas in Malá Strana, because nobody in town is doing anything like what we’re doing over there.”
Nearly every Thursday at St. Nicholas over the past year, Lavash and keyboardist Tomáš Homuta have been developing a full-bodied approach to joyous blues. Known as “Under the Influence,” Lavash and Homuta create a thick musical exchange that’s closer to the sound of a quartet than a duo. As Homuta explains, “When I started playing with Justin, it was a considerable upgrade, because we both could play all the parts.” Speaking of this artful combination, Lavash adds, “But we are not just playing the same lines; they interweave, as we are both percussive players.”
Homuta’s hometown of Jeliník seems an unlikely origin for a master of blues piano, but his father was an avid blues-record collector who schooled his son from the cradle in musical appreciation. At the age of 15, Homuta began his first musical residency at Jeleník’s Díra bar, an experience he says was the best music school he ever attended.  
A recent Thursday at St. Nicholas offered a taste of Homuta’s rural musical training. One table was filled with his home-town friends and relatives. Not only could the Jeleník folks clap with precise timing, on selected tunes they pushed the room’s infectious excitement by encouraging Homuta’s best keyboard efforts with loud whistles and catcalls.
In a situation like that, it’s hard to deny that boogie-woogie blues magic is afoot. “We speak different languages, and we come from different cultures, but we talk in another language, and that’s the language of music,” Lavash says of his work with Homuta. “It’s notes and it’s songs, and it’s about delivering a message to people. Even though it’s not an especially intellectual message, you are saying something to people.”
The message is a happy, infectious one, and when the duo enters the recording studio in May, the results will be a blend that Lavash describes as crossing the boundaries of musical genres. But you need not wait for Under the Influence’s June CD release to catch Lavash and crew at a nearby café or bar. From what we’ve seen and heard, most of the audience members can hardly believe their lucky ears.

Darrell Jonsson can be reached at features@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (25/04/2007):

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