Dim the lights and get your whisky ready to enjoy the sweet melody of jazz

Jazz not being my cup of tea, I found myself at the Reduta Jazz Club in Prague drinking Tullamore Dew Irish whiskeys punctuated by Becherovka Czech herbal bitters. Situated on the famous Národní t ída (National Street) in central Prague, where the city’s Old Town and New Town literally meet — and where on November 17, 1989, Czechoslovak riot police cracked down on peacefully demonstrating students leading to the Velvet Revolution that ultimately brought down 40 years of communist rule – Reduta is, in the tradition of jazz clubs, more bar than music joint.

Armed with my drinks and ready to bear the music, I was happily shaken and stirred on the rocks sitting in the dark, warm (literally) interiors to find dixieland on full swing. Unlike modern jazz, which I find impossible to listen to without posing in a polo neck, ‘hot jazz’ or ‘trad jazz’ sprung from the revivalist movement of horn-heavy music reacting to (against?) swing-era orchestras and complex chord progressions of bebop — in my book, ‘show-off jazz’. And here was the Dixieland Messengers playing full-steamed New Orleans dixieland.




In Reduta’s wonderful acoustics, Dixieland Messengers were old school cool. Established in 1998 by trombonist Václav Fiala, this ensemble of 60-plus musicians, peppered with a younger lot, providing a heavy goulash of trumpet, clarinet, trombone, double bass, banjo drums, washboard (percussive near-essential for dixieland and skiffle) – and voice.

In between oozing out trumpet heat, Vita Marek’s grit’n’Armstrong vocals in Rosetta—a 1933 dixie classic by pianist Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines and singer Henri Woode — rumbling across from the stage as ‘Rosetta/ My Rosetta/ In my heart dear/ There’s no one but you./ You know me/ That you love me/Never leave me/ for somebody new’, made the foot stomp, the seat creak, the heart bing.



Czech jazz has a long history, and Reduta lies pretty much in the centre of it. Established in 1957 when Czechoslovakia was in the throes of ‘normalisation’ — communist-speak for control of all things including entertainment and culture — this was one oasis for freestyle and improvisation whose ambassador was American jazz. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that even sitting here in 2018, one can understand why a year later in 1958, Reduta regulars Josef Škvorecký made his debut as a novelist with The Cowards, a story about a man interested in jazz and women in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, and playwright and future president Vaclav Havel absurdist plays were first performed.

The Reduta’s cavernous interiors — and the bar a room below — seems protected by time, especially when the Dixieland Messengers, all aged as if in jazz barrels, slow the tempo and let the notes slosh about. Listening to swinging dixieland in Prague not only slows time down a notch or two, but it also gave me a clue on how to listen to jazz — at least, the New Orleans hot jazz — back home: with the lights low and a sweet flow running.