Evidence of the “thriving” improv music scene in Czech and Slovak regions can be found, we are told, on the sprawling double-LP Hotel Spojár (CIRCUM-DISC microcidi033 / RIEKA RI004), credited to the quartet Škvíry & Spoje.
This one failed to light much of an electrical basking tiger under my toes on first spin, but by end of side two the team of Dalibor Kocian, Jozef Krupa, Michal Matejka and Petr Vrba were managing a decent halfway stick-rub in the campfires of Kuchyna and Cerovo, through their mildly titillating combinations of free jazz elements with electronic noodling. But by sides three and four, all the tension in the playing has dissipated again and we’re left with a rather limp soggy piece of canvas, when what we need is a firm, erect tentpole thrusting into the brass ring. Well, the instrumentation choice is good – combination of vibraphone, drums, electric guitar with clarinet or trumpet or live electronics (depending on which of his many tentacles Vrba is deploying at the time) has much promise, but somehow the damp has gotten into the box of fireworks and nothing quite erupts with the full force of a stream of hot sparks. Too much discursive preliminary burbling, not enough getting to the main bullet point of the lecture. Even the band name is rather workaday and nondescript; it translates as “Cracks and Joints” referring to things a builder might say when he’s about to survey your home and start a programme of works that takes 18 months and achieves absolutely nothing, except making him richer by a few thousand shekels.
Our well-meaning friends would like us to see this name as a metaphor for the way they “construct” their music, which for me triggers a memory of when Derek Bailey used a similar metaphor for describing how Company Week worked. Vrba himself is an OK gaffer, and has done a couple of not-bad things for the Mikroton label in Russia, and you can also hear him as one third of the Banausoi trio which we heard in 2021. I kept hoping for more moments of sizzle and shine from the guitarist Matejka, member of Fats Jazz Band and sometime player with the Prague Improvisation Orchestra, but he never quite reaches the heights scaled by Reggie Lucas. From 01 August 2023.