Music preview: Ivan Gutiérrez

Ivan Gutiérrez has been in the spotlight as a Latin-folk guitarist, singer and songwriter on the Czech alternative scene since the early 1990s. With his newest self-released album, Jardín Amurallado (A Walled-in Garden), Gutiérrez and his group Madera are heading to a new horizon.

Gutiérrez, born in 1967 in New York to Colombian parents, first came to Prague in 1993 with a Czech girlfriend from university and immediately began looking for musicians to perform with.

"I only wanted to play with people who knew the Latin idiom," Gutiérrez tells The Prague Post.

He was soon told about leading Czech folk singer, songwriter and lyricist Zuzana Navarová (1959-2004), who had just released an ambitious Czech Latin-folk project Caribe, and as Gutiérrez explains it, "I got her number and called."

Gutiérrez was merely hoping Navarová could put him in touch with local musicians, but soon after meeting him at the old Agharta Jazz Club on Krakovská, she invited him to play as a guest with her and her group Nerez. The rest is history - at least for the contemporary Czech ethno-folk scene.

Navarová was already a well-established performer, having formed her alternative-folk group Nerez in 1980. But soon after meeting Gutiérrez, she left Nerez and set up a new group called Trés with Gutiérrez on acoustic guitar and an array of other instruments, and Karel Cába on bass, playing mainly songs written by Gutiérrez. Their poetic songs were sung in Spanish alternately by Navarová or Gutiérrez, and their debut recording was released locally on a major label, Sony-Columbia, in 1995.

"Trés was a happy convergence of lots of things, and it came out well. It was fresh," Gutiérrez says.

Gutiérrez played exclusively with Navarová and Trés until 1997, when she formed yet another group, KOA, including the blind Roma musician Mario Bihari playing accordion, piano and clarinet. They recorded and performed as Navarová & Gutiérrez & KOA for another three years.

Gutiérrez moved to Madrid in 2000 for two years, never again recording with Navarová, who passed away in 2004 after a struggle with cancer. Since 2003, Gutiérrez has led his Prague-based group, Madera, with veteran bassist Tadeáš Mesany and drummer David Landštof. It is this group he brings to Jazz Dock.

Gutiérrez started performing as a musician while he was a B.A. student at Binghamton College in upstate New York in the mid- to late '80s. His earliest band, A Couple of Boxes, was alternative rock influenced by indie bands of that time like The Replacements, Husker Du, Violent Femmes and R.E.M.

But the guitarist says he abandoned rock in Wisconsin and picked up the Spanish nylon-string guitar, essentially returning to the music of his early high-school years living in Bogotá, Colombia: "La Nueva Cancion," a folk-inspired music with a social conscience, and "trova," the term for itinerant Cuban guitarists since the 19th century, which evolved into a more political-minded "Nueva Trova" in the '70s. Gutiérrez lived in Colombia on and off from the age of 6 until he returned to the United States to graduate from high school.    

"It was a new Latin American scene of modern troubadours. Imagine Bob Dylan in Spanish," Gutiérrez says.

Gutiérrez also studied briefly at a conservatory in Veracruz, Mexico, as a teenager but is essentially a self-taught musician.

For his newest recording, Jardin Amurallado, Gutiérrez has brought back a prior influence, which he had shunned since he started playing in the Czech Republic: the musical vitality of American indie bands of the '80s.

"This is an amalgam of what I was doing with Trés and what I was doing in college, but in an acoustic way. It's Nueva Cancion meets R.E.M., Husker Du and The Replacements," he says.  

Madera brought in a young keyboardist, Ondřej Kabrna, a rising star on the Czech jazz scene, to record on the album. As a result, the quartet has a new spark and fuller sound, giving Gutiérrez more room to soar vocally. Gutiérrez's voice has matured over the years into a deeper, almost yearning plea, if not a holler. The mellower sound of earlier Madera is gone, as Gutiérrez has gone back to unleash more of his wild side.

Following Gutiérrez and Madera's early-evening concert, American jazz guitarist Steve Walsh will take the stage, perhaps hoping for the same type of local fame Gutiérrez has achieved through collaborations with Czech musicians. The Steve Walsh Band with a number of Czech jazz players will have a record release party for their new album, Daily Specials, for the Czech label Animal Music.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at
features@praguepost.com