interview in Slovakia Today, #25-26/December 1997

Try to compare the jazz scene here with abroad...

I'm a reall jayyfan, I'd like more and more of it. But to look at it soberly, I'd say it's moving in the right direction here as is shown by the number of young people attending the last few Bratislava Jazz Days. When we formed the Slovak Jazz Society in 1990, we decided on the goal of at least one jazz concert a year in each of the regional towns in the country. The growth of interest in playing we can check through the New Faces of Slovak Jazz festival once a year. We invite people here on the basis of applications a panel judges them and we present nine new acts every year. We also run workshops where young people who want to play jazz show up.

(...)

Who inspired you when you were starting out?

Everyone is impressed by the amount of music he listens to. When something of a certain style resonates in you, you've found your music. The singing of American blacks meant the most to me, and I absorbed it all and tried to sing and play it on the guitar. Later when I was playing and singin in a band, we had a concert in Gdansk, Poland and the singer of a local band came up to me and said, "You're close, but you should work more on yourself and study the blues." He was right. I got hold of some more records and found something in each that I liked. I got into music as an amateur, I never studied it. I started singing when I was twenty, before that I was just listening. I had no idea, that one day I'd be a singer.

Janka Rosíková