Slovakia -- The annual Peter Dula Tribute Concert

Michael Lonstar and Dorota Krawczyk at the Peter Dula tribute. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

This week I was in Kosice, in far eastern tip of Slovakia, to attend the annual concert and awards event held there to honor the memory of local son Peter Dula, a Slovak country singer who died of cancer in 2009 at the age of only 28. He had been diagnosed ten years earlier while in the U.S. playing hockey for a junior league in Boston, then got into country music while undergoing cancer treatment back in Slovakia.

I never met Dula (though we were friends on Facebook), but he was a friend of several of my friends in the central European country scene. Dula had fronted the band Veslari -- "The Rowers," Slovakia's oldest country music band, since 2004. With Dula singing, the band won a Slovak Grammy and other numerous  awards including the best European country band of 2007. They also played at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville in 2007.


After his death, Dula's friends in the country music scene over here decided to honor his memory by each year passing on his guitar to a chosen artist, who would be its custodian for the following 12-month period, creating a sort of "Wayfaring Guitar" as a living memorial.


The guitar is handed over at a concert event where awards are also handed out, inducting chosen artists into "Peter Dula's Country Music Hall of Fame."


The first two awardees, in 2009, right after Dula's death, were European -- my friends Michael Lonstar, from Poland, and Allan Mikusek, from Slovakia. Last year there were four Americans: songwriter Mark Trail, Billy Yates, Joe Diffie and Buddy Jewell.


This year the awards went to my Czech friends Robert Krestan and Lubos Malina, and their band Druha Trava -- I worked with the band on their latest CD, Shuttle to Bethlehem, which features Robert's original songs sung in my English translations.


The concert -- which lasted four hours -- was held in a big theater-type hall in some sort of anonymous facility (a driving school?) on the southern edge of Kosice. The theater was packed, and the atmosphere was good: not raucous, like a German or Polish country crowd; not "tramp" like the Czech bluegrass crowd can be. There was no bar in the place -- so no one was drunk, either! And the only person in a real cowboy hat was Lonstar. (Several of us wore cowboy boots, though....)

Lonstar, a young Polish singer named Dorota Krawczyk, and a Slovak band led by local singer Laco Sasak performed during the first half of the show. A mix of U.S. songs, and traditional-style originals (sung in English, Polish and Slovak) -- concluding the set with a Slovak version of the song "Cowboy's Gone," which Lonstar wrote in memory of Peter Dula. All the while, pictures of Dula were projected onto the rear of the stage.

Druha Trava was the headline act and played the second half of the show. I've seen them perform a lot, but I've never seen such an enthusiastic audience -- whooping and stomping and cheering, etc. Pretty wild. DT hadn't performed in Kosice in years, and it was as if the audience was just hungry for the music.


At the end of the show, the awards (framed citations) were present, and Peter Dula's wayfaring guitar was handed over into the care of DT.

Then, as the closer, Robert, joined by the other artists, sang the folksong "Wayfaring Stranger", with Dula's picture as a backdrop, which seemed the right way to end the show.

Blah Bluegrass Fest in Bratislava....

So I went to the final day of the 2-day Bluegrass Festival in Bratislava, Slovakia, driving down from Vienna (it's only about 70 km) and driving back afterwards -- getting back to Vienna around 3:40 a.m.

The Festival line-up was great, including many of the best Czech bands (such as Monogram, Relief, Kreni, etc.) I particularly wanted to hear Garcia, the group fronted by the wonderful singer Katka Garcia, with Lubos Malina (it's more Irish music than bluegrass). I also wanted to hear the Slovak country singer Allen Mikusek, and the great Czech-Canadian guitarist Slavek Hanzlik.

Well, the music was all pretty good. But I have to say, alas, I found the whole affair pretty dreary.... Most bluegrass festivals are outdoor events that take place in the summer time -- in Czech Republic a favorite venue is the communist-era "summer cinema" built outside many towns. Even in bad weather, bluegrass fits the great (even not so great) outdoors; you huddle under umbrellas and ponchos or crowd together under concessions tents....but it's like, you know, in Nature; open to the elements. Etc.

The Bratislava festival took place in a venue that was just about as far as you can get from the bluegrass country or rolling hills of rural America (or rural Europe for that matter) -- the concrete "Culture House" of Bratislava's Petrzalka district, one of the communist era's biggest and most anonymous purpose-built suburbs. When i first visited Petrzalka nearly 20 years ago -- friends of mine lived there -- I had a terror of getting lost amid the sea of featureless "panel houses," that is, identical apartment blocks. I believe travel companies now lead "communist tours" through the district to show what it was once like....

As I noted, the festival took place in the culture house. There was a dimly lit lobby, with a lounge and pub attached, a small stand selling CDs, and a bar and snack set-up selling beer and other drinks, plus grilled sausage and chips. Etc. People milled about, downing beer and going out on the steps to smoke. Smoking was barred inside, but somehow it still felt smokey...with the atmosphere rather rather dim and dispiriting. And not too many people turned up --the concert sets took place in the complex's rather nice theater, with red plush rows of seats. It looked like it seated 300-400, but most of the seats remained empty. At its peak, I think only about half were filled, if that.

Still, as I said, the music was generally very good. Allan Mikusek in particular played a strong set, joining the Slovak bluegrass group Grasscountry. Mikusek is more from the country music scene than the bluegrass scene -- he wears a cowboy hat and has "the look" -- and the performance was something of a benefit for Peter Dula of the award-winning Slovak country group The Rowers (Veslari), who is undergoing chemotherapy.

Garcia played last, so I stayed til the bitter end to hear them -- the sound man was obviously wasted by that time, and the sound check took longer than the actual set!



Katka has a wonderful voice and is a remarkably accomplished person. Since I had seen her, she has completed her PhD -- in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) studies, namely Ladino how it was spoken in pre-Holocaust Salonika -- and teaches at Trinity College, Dublin. She said that the college understands about her parallel musical career: she gets Firdays off so she can fly to the Czech Republic (mainly) for weekend gigs! As part of the sound check warm-up she sang a Ladino song!

Note -- I did get some fairly decent video and will try to post some clips.