RIP Czech singing legend Pavel Bobek

Pavel Bobek at the gala Prague concert in 2012 celebrating his 75th birthday

By Ruth Ellen Gruber


Sad news in the Czech music world....the singing legend Pavel Bobek died in Prague today (Nov. 20). He was 76, and had been in declining health for some time.

I got to know his music -- and him, a little -- in recent years as he performed frequently with Druha Trava and with Lubos Malina, who also produced Bobek's last CDs. Last year, he was inducted into the Czech popular music award "Andel"'s hall of fame.

Bobek got his start in the late 50s/early 60s as  the Communist era's "Mister Rock and Roll," and also became a star in the Czech country scene. He had big hits with covers of American songs by Kris Kristofferson, Jon Denver, Bruce Springsteen and more -- like this Buddy Holly cover, very early on.




Another early clip -- a Czech version of "Sunday Morning Coming Down"




And here he sings another of his big hits -- a Czech version of Springsteen's "My Home Town." The video sets it against the bleakness of a Czech Communist-era "panel house" apartment complex...




Bobek's duet with DT's Robert Krestan of "Jeste Neni Tma," Robert's Czech version of Bob Dylan's "It's Not Dark Yet"  from the 2007 Dylanovky CD, is one of my favorites. Here they are, performing it in 2010 during a concert  in Prague.

As I wrote at the time, the concert was very poignant, as his health problems were evident even then, three years ago -- but the packed audience gave him thunderous applause.

Last year, I attended a gala concert marking his 75th birthday. Again, it was a very poignant, very moving experience, as he appeared very frail onstage. Again, he performed for a full, enthusiastic audience.

Another Czech singing legend, Karel Gott, joined Bobek on stage at the birthday concert.

I have to close with Bobek's Czech version of "Country Roads"....

Interview with me on Czech Radio

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Czech Radio’s English language service recently interview me, along with banjoist-multi-instrumentalist Lubos Malina, about the great “Czechgrass” band Druha Trava’s new double live CD.

You can access the interview by CLICKING HERE.

We talk about the new CD set — one CD was recorded during the annual summer festival in the beautiful town of Telc, and the other is a compilation of performances last year with guests Peter Rowan, Charlie McCoy and Katia Garcia.

We also spoke about my role in DT’s previous CD, Shuttle to Bethlehem, which mainly features my English language translations of DT singer-songwriter-frontman Robert Krestan’s songs. (I've written about that experience on this blog).

After the interview, Lubos and I stopped to visit the new museum devoted to pioneering Czech animator Karel Zeman, and then went on to a concert by Kris Kristofferson.

Photo © Ruth Ellen Gruber

Bluegrassing in Germany and Czech Republic

Banjo Camp Merch. Photo © RuthEllen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The remarkable attraction of bluegrass music in parts of Europe/segments of Europeans was brought home to me this month when I attended -- albeit briefly -- two bluegrass workshops, one in Germany, near Munich, and the other in the Czech Republic.

The two events, which were held on successive weekends, had similarities and differences.

The annual Banjo Camp Munich, a workshop founded in 2007,  took place Oct. 5-7 at Aschau, near Chiemsee in Bavaria, in a sprawling country hotel complex. Dozens of people attended -- I don't know the full number, but there were a lot! Far from just being banjo, there were classes and workshops on mandolin, guitar, dobro, fiddle, singing and harmony, and more. Teachers came from Germany and other countries and included American banjo player Bill Evans, British banjo player John Dowling, American dobro player Jimmy Heffernan and a list of others.

Information for next year's Banjo Camp -- Oct. 4-6, 2013 -- is already online.

I got in too late (on a rainy afternoon) to observe any of the classes, but you can see photos from this year and from previous editions by clicking HERE.

I did get to see the concert Saturday night. The various workshop teachers performed the first half and then the second half was given over to a German "nouveau bluegrass" group called 54 Idaho -- one of whose leaders is one of the organizers of the Banjo Camp. I thought they gave a great show -- very iconoclastic, giving a slightly ironic bluegrass take on pop/rock tunes, with a charismatic singer fronting the band.

54 Idaho. Photo © Ruth Ellen Gruber

My friend Willie Jones, an American based in Germany who is one of the first people I met in the country music/western scene in Europe, taught singing and harmony. Willie now plays with groups in Germany (the Huckleberry Five) and Slovakia (Neznami).

He got me jamming, of sorts -- for the first time ever -- on my uke....

The very next weekend found in me the village of Male Svatonovice, in the north of the Czech Republic near the Polish border, for the 17th annual autumn Bluegrass Dilna (workshop). There were a lot of top Czech bluegrass musicians taking part as teachers -- from banjoist Petr Brandejs and members of the band Bluegrass CWRKOT, to fiddler Jiri Kralik, to my friend the banjoist Lubos Malina, of Druha Trava and other groups, who got me to go there.

Petr told me that there were about 120 students and 11 instructors, at classes featuring banjo, bass, guitar, mandolin.....It all took place in a big school building (we all had to take off shoes and put on sandals to enter). I sat in on Lubos's banjo class, which had 10 students and ran simultaneously with about three other banjo classes.

Photo © Ruth Ellen Gruber

You can see a lot of pictures of the workshop by clicking HERE

I also got there in time Saturday night to attend the big concert given by Bluegrass CWRKOT and all the instructors -- all men, BTW.

Petr Bandejs on Banjo. Photo © Ruth Ellen Gruber

Photo © Ruth Ellen Gruber

The concert was streamed live on internet and now can be seen in its entirety on YouTube.

Czech Bluegrass Documentary Project News

Last summer, when I went into the studio in Prague to help with the recording of Druha Trava's CD Shuttle to Bethlehem, I ended up hanging out and traveling a bit with Lee Bidgood, an American fiddler and mandolinist who teaches at East Tennessee State University, which has a Bluegrass, Old-Time and Country Music Studies program -- and his colleague from ETSU, the documentary filmmaker Shara Lange.

Lee did his PhD on Czech Bluegrass (we met in 2004 at the Caslav Bluegrass Festival in CZ) and he and Shara are making a documentary film on Czech Bluegrass music and musicians -- I am thrilled to be onboard as a sort of consultant or production assistant....

The film now has a web site -- you can click HERE to find out information, see some video, hear some music and find out more about the project, screenings, events, etc.

One upcoming event is a concert August 8, in Johnson City, TN, at which Lee and fellow musicians will perform Czech translations of bluegrass classics as well as original material by Czech bluegrass musicians, in both Czech and English.

Here's a clip I took of Lee jamming late a night with Lubos Malina, of Druha Trava.

During out brief travels last summer, we also visited Marko Cermak, the godfather of five-string banjo playing in  CZ, at his cabin in the woods. 

Interviewing Marko Cermak. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

According to his own and other accounts, Cermak, who was active in the Czech tramp music scene, built his own long-necked, five-string banjo by studying photographs taken of Pete Seeger at Seeger's seminal 1964 concert in Prague concert. Cermak went on to become one of Czechoslovakia's first banjo virtuosi.

Marko Cermak. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Among other things, Cermak founded one of Czechoslovakia's first American-style country and bluegrass groups, the Greenhorns. The Greenhorns became extremely influential by playing Czech language versions of American folk songs, copying arrangements they heard on American Forces Radio.  In doing so, they, and similar groups, brought these songs firmly into the local musical tradition, fostering a total assimilation of many songs into the Czech repertoire. 

After visiting Marko, we went on to spend the night at the home of banjoist and banjo-maker Zdenek Roh, near Jihlava, where I had visited the previous year with Lubos Malina and Robert Krestan of Druha Trava.

Zdenek Roh. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

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.

Czech Republic -- Banjo Men

Czech banjo player/maker Zdenek Roh, Robert Krestan, and Lubos Malina's hands and foot. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The Czech Republic is (reliably) said to have the highest per capita percentage of banjo players (and bluegrass bands) in the world. Or at least in Europe. It all goes back to the Tramp Movement, which spawned Tramp Music; which was influenced by Country Music and American Folk (during the Communist era via forbidden Armed Forces Radio and Radio Free Europe); and had a Seminal Moment with Pete Seeger's tour of CZ in 1964 when he played the five-string, long-necked guitar and sparked a musical revolution as eager Tramp and Folk musicians built their own instruments based on photos of Seeger's.... and the rest is history....

Last week in Brno I attended a concert of the Traperi, the country band that Druha Trava's Robert Krestan formed when he was a teenager....the band (now grizzled) played a reunion gig to a packed house at a Brno club. American country and folk songs with Czech lyrics that Robert wrote as a teen. Onstage, Robert (who played the banjo in the original Traperi) spoke about how what they had had to do to get their instruments way back then -- like using a tambourine as the basis for making a banjo.

The next day, I joined Robert and DT banjo-player Lubos Malina on an excursion into the Moravian countryside. One of the stops was at the workshop of Zdenek Roh, near the town of Jihlava. Zdenek is a great banjo-player (he plays among others with the group Roll's Boys) and also makes the instruments, and Lubos needed to drop off two banjos to have them repaired.

Lubos Malina and Zdenek Roh. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

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.