Remember the movie "Field of Dreams" and it's catchy slogan "If you build it, they will come." An impressario in Brno in the Czech Republic had a similar idea in 2008: A Blues festival in the courtyard of a rustic, 13th century castle in Moravia, running from dusk to dawn. It conjures images of blues pilgrims trekking great distances, pitching tents, building campfires, drinking local wine and beer and digging the best local blues, plus some talent brought from afar.

The castle is real enough. [For more on castle Veveri go here: Hrad Veveri].    So was the festival, though in its website [www.azdoranablues.cz] you can see the tattered edge of its reality principal in the complete absence of any language but Czech. The schedule put the first band onstage around 9:00PM on the longest day in the year (another fine concept), just before sundown on the shortest night of the year. Brno, the biggest town near the castle, is the second largest city in the Czech Republic. [Czechoslovia is no more — the Czechs and Slovaks followed the Velvet Revolution of 1989 with the Velvet Divorce which became official New Year's Day 1993.] My slot on the schedule was covetted, I was told, namely 1:00AM, just when the festival was expected to hit full stride.

Finding the way to the castle from the highway was an exercise in careful sign-reading and dead reckoning. As we came close we saw the cars on the roadside but by the time we got to the castle entry it was clear that no more than 30-odd cars were parked and, most ominous, there was no sign of any campgrounds.

Our car passed through two extremely narrow, bumpy, steep passageways made for wagons not cars, leading straight into the courtyard, where we saw an impressive stage nestled beside mammoth castle walls, crowned with flood-lit towers. A few concession stands lined the back walls of the courtyard, and bench seating for, perhaps, 100+ spectators faced the stage, where a Czech blues duo (guitar and harmonica) was playing and singing original blues in Czech.

We got out of our car, which was crammed with two amps, a guitar, a full drum kit and four people, and stretched after 3 hours on the road from Prague. The only lighting in the open space, came from bare bulbs at the food and T-shirt concessions.

Looking around, trying to take in all of this, straining to make sense of it gave me an eerie sense of being in a dream where everything is strange, yet people behave as if things are perfectly normal. The ground was lumpy, sloping, hard-packed dirt, and walking around in the dim light my feet never seemed to know where the ground was. Even a few steps one way or the other felt weird, like I was loaded.

Franta, Impressario.       I was introduced to Franta (short for Frantisek), the festival manager. He was a gnome-like character, with a stubble of a beard, a small-brimmed leather hat and bermuda shorts. Franta offered big greetings, hearty welcomes, and assurances that many more people were expected to arrive around midnight to join the 50 or so people on the benches. He offered free beer behind the stage, and ample slivovitz in due time.

We were listed on the program simply as "Charlie Sawyer." The performers badges for the band read "SAWYER." In fact the band was Jenik Korinek and Groove, a long-standing Prague-based acid jazz band of formidable players, including one genuine Czech musical legend, bassist "Guma" Kolhanek. Just the chance to hear Guma play the blues, some said, was enough to draw people out in the night. [At 65 Guma played three gigs that day, starting in Plzin, plus performances two with of the bands in this festival.]

The rest of our band arrived and we stood together in the eerie light while a blues trio replaced the duo on stage. This new band, lead by a native of southern Moravia named Honza, played urban blues standards, with feeling and great fidelity to the musical idiom of Son Seals, Muddy Waters and others. I was genuinely moved to hear American blues played by Czechs in this improbable setting.

Hard Rock Turn Off Highway 61     Then the dream took a darker turn, musically, as the stage changed for the midnight slot. Originally a Czech band called "Highway 61" was to play the midnight slot, but they cancelled on short notice. The replacement band was not a blues band at all, but rather a big decible rock band. The clash of styles could not have been much bigger and the aesthetic of this replacement was the antithesis of blues music. It could have been a marching band or a bagpipe band and not have set us into greater paroxysms of disdain. I took a philosophical attitude to listening. What made it so offensive to our tastes, I wondered? If I could give a good account of that, I might know something useful about both genres, ours and theirs on stage.

Pile Drivers vs. Time Twisters     First, I noted that the band was polished and musicians very proficient. The sound was built on a thick blanket of thundering bass and shattering drums. On top of this blanket a guitar played intricate riffs with a modest application of effects. Oddly, the guitarist, whose musical production was the most prominent and individualistic component, was barely seen. He stood stationary, at the back and to the side, outside the bath of light at stage center. He wore jeans and a black sweatshirt and had ordinary-length grey hair. A keyboard player added drama.

I decided that the problem with the music was not the musicians, at least not their competence. Whatever it was that turned us off so was in the very nature of the genre. Was it the harmony, the scales, the chords? Defintely not — the musical structure was conventional rock and roll. After all, this was rock, not jazz. Was it the sheer volume? They were loud but I didn't reach for my earplugs. No, the problem with the volume was its uniformity. They had no dynamics, and hence no rise and fall of tension. However you might describe the emotional color of their music, it was monochromatic. Red anger, maybe, or day-glo frenzy, but whatever it was it was uniform, almost entirely unmodulated.

The biggest musical difference, however, was the utterly uniformity of the way they rendered time. The full extent of their time-play was to use the backbeat, i.e. emphasis on the 2 and 4. Otherwise it was thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud like a piledriver. In contrast, blues is, more than anything else, musically, a time twister, a clock squeezer, a time-machine that slices the beat this way and that until your inner metronome is swinging. And there is the range of emotion blues musicians convey through dynamics and sheer personal expression. If the rock on display was emotionally monochrome, then the emotions of blues are rendered in saturated Kodachrome.

 

Apart from the musical differenes the style of performance was out of character for a blues festival. The singer was over the top from the gitgo. He jumped, leaped, whooped, screamed and generally carried on, while whacking chords on a guitar. Blues and R & B singers are usually demonstrative but if they are frenetic their movements qualify as dance. James Brown comes to mind. Not this character. Well over an hour after they took the stage, the rock band retired. It seemed right in character that the lead singer did not bother to leave the stage before changing. He stripped down to bare chest and pulled on a festival T-shirt before stepping off the back of the stage.

 

If a tree falls in the forest and there is feedback does the sound make any difference?    It was our turn and the band scrambled to get our gear on stage. The sound engineer raced around in obvious confusion unplugging and pluging microphones, trying, not very successfully sometimes, to communicate with the person at the sound board back beyond the benches. Finally, around 1:50 AM the band struck up an instrumental, "Cold Duck Time," while I scrambled back behind the stage to change into my white suit [why not, it's a festival, after all]. I was still pulling my socks on when Jenik introduced the band. Just as he called my name I stepped up on the stage, stepped to the microphone and greeted the audience in passable Czech, "Good evening, it's time for the blues, right?" [This all but exhausted my entire Czech vocabularity, but if you're going to know a little Czech, what better words than those?] Half way into our first blues number I began noticing persistent, low frequency feedback through the monitors. It came and went, then came more and more. Between numbers nothing, then it would return when we resumed playing. Then the feed back stopped but so did the monitors, which is deadly in its own way. When a singer can't hear his/her self the results may be quite disappointing.

 

We were ripping through our set list in surprising time: Born In Chicago Last Night Mystery Train Next Time You See Me Merry Way Walkin' By Myself Oh, Baby Mojo The feedback returned. I tried everything to avoid it, like standing out front of my vocal microphone when not singing, but it was always there in some form. Jenik left the stage and went to the sound board to complain, while the band kept on playing. It did no good. The audience response was strong and very enthusiastic, but I knew there were less than 20 people left on the benches at that hour. Still, to play the blues on a grand stage in a venerable setting in the dead of night was a unique thrill, and despite the technical troubles the band delivered on the promise to play great music wherever they were called on to perform. I told the audience, "this is a band worth crossing an ocean to play with." Maybe someone, besides the members of the band, understood enough English to know what I was saying. Band members: Jenik Korinek, keyboards Vladimir "Guma" Kolhanek, bass Tomasz Vokurka, drums Jirka Hokes, guitar Charlie Sawyer, harmonica and vocals

At 2:40 AM we played the last round of "Got My Mojo Working." Now Franta, the visionary of the concert, was on the stage at my side with a video camera man recording our encounter.

"Try my Calvados, please," he said giving me a plastic shot glass which he had filled from an unlabled bottle. "I have 12 hectars orchard, pick apples myself, peel, make apple juice, take rest to my own distillery, make Calvados." How could I refuse, not that I had any inclanation?

I left the stage and shed my white suit for jeans and a jacket. The girl at the performers tap drew me a tall beer and I went to hang out with the band.

Then came the singer from the rock band, who greeted me enthusiastically, professing love of blues and Chicago blues, especially. He explained: he has a good friend in Chicago, who has bought 2 kegs of beer. They are using their cell phones to keep score on their beer consumption—each sends the other a message when he finishes another beer.

"Now, I am ahead, 12 to 11, but I think he will win because he has the advantage of time [zones]." We toasted each other and went our separate ways.

The next band was already playing. A barefooted John Belushi look-alike was playing a squeeze box and singing real blues. The guitarist was well-schooled in blues. The sound was no better than it was when we were playing.

The gear for our band was loaded in our two cars and it was time to return to Prague. Jirka, our guitarist and driver, told me, "You won't believe this, but that guy, the one from the rock band before us—you were just talking to him now—he is the principal advisor to our president, the President of the Czech Republic."

I looked into the matter of the presidential adviser cum rocker.    His name is Ladislav Jakl.   He is listed as Director of the Political Department in the Office of the President. Here's the information about him that appears on the President's official website:

 

Political Department The Political Department accumulates, processes and assesses, for the needs of the President, information on the activities of the Chamber of Deputies, Senate, Government, ministries and other administration authorities, self-government bodies, political parties, economical entities, trade union and other social organizations and prepares background documents and recommendations for meetings and speeches of the President. The Political Department receives and handles written and oral petitions of citizens addressed to the President of the Republic and to the Office of the President. The Director of the Political Department organizes coordination of execution of activities of the counsellors of the President of the Republic. The Director of the Political Department holds the position of the President's Secretary at the same time. The President's Secretary is responsible for public relations of the President of the Republic within the extent given by the authorization of the President and on the basis of President's direct instructions. The Public Relation Department is incorporated in the Political Department.

Ladislav Jakl Director Phone: +420 224 372 464 Fax: +420 224 372 462

It makes you wonder if the US would have fared better or worse if Karl Rove had been a real rap artist or hard rocker, not just a spoof "MC Rove." Probably not, but it's a tantalizing thought, nonetheless.

As a public figure Jakl sets tongues to wagging. One Czech told me of his appearance on a TV show where he was asked "What do you do to avoid surrendering to indifference, to giving in to the feeling that nothing can be done to make things better?" His answer is legendary here. "I don't do anything. Why should I, when you consider all those who came before, those revolutionaries who thought they could change the world, make it better? Look at the mess they left behind."

There's something appealing in such honesty. Almost makes you wish you could hear something like that from our leaders. Come to think of it, that political philosophy fits some of them rather well. Maybe I had just met the Czech equivalent of Lee Atwater.

Back on the highway we saw the first sign of dawn, a kind of faint paleness in the cloudless, stary sky. The dream was complete for us, while back at the castle the last band was playing for "four and a half people," according to Guma, who was playing his third gig in 24 hours.

Here are the offical festival photos: Official photos of the festival