150x BAD

Like I wrote in the Hotspots for October, Bohemia After Dark is probably THE Bebop band in the republic, last night at Jazz Dock we got confirmation that I was right, which is nice for a change!  Yesterday’s lineup with Suzanne Higgins – tsax;  Andy Schofield – asax; Martin Jůzl – trp; Libor Šmoldas – g; Taras Voloschuk – b; Ben Hague – dr. was again everything that I and an almost sold out Jazz Dock came to listen to, and as it happened this was the 150th concert BAD have performed since their start in February 2019, so a small celebration evening for the band also.

 

I personally enjoy this group because bandleader Ben Hague stays faithful to his style and tries to reach for the original sound from the 1940s, which is to be the birth of this musical genre. This is probably a harder task than we may realise since bebop is considered a style that demands highly technical skills from its participants due to its complex chord changes and unpredictable melodic lines, among others. And this of course means that you have, like yesterday, five (6) different artistic minds to pay attention to when setting up the evening’s performance. But like I already mentioned a good job done, that was to be heard from the reaction of the Jazz Dock audience yesterday. This was again an evening with brilliant individual performances and excellent teamwork from the band, this completed with Ben’s small historical anecdotes about the tunes played means that we will wait for the next 150 concerts and hopefully have the opportunity to attend as many as possible of them. Thank you Bohemia After Dark