Emil Viklický: Patriarch of Czech Jazz

by Victor Verney

Emil Viklicky, jazz pianist and composer extraordinaire, was born in the former Czechoslovakia in 1948 -- just as that country was taken over by the communists. A math prodigy during his schoolboy days, Emil abruptly abandoned his dream of becoming a professor when he was told that in graduate school, under communism, Marxist dialectics were more important than synchronous polynomials. He'd already begun playing jazz piano around Prague, and after his talent was recognized in Europe, he came to the U.S. to study jazz at Boston's prestigious Berklee School of Music.
Returning home to Prague, he established a preeminent position as "The Patriarch of Czech Jazz" while becoming renowned for his use of Czech and Moravian folk music, earning him a second nickname, "The Janacek of Jazz" -- a flattering comparison to Leos Janacek, a 19th Century Czech composer who used Czech folk songs as inspirational themes for classical music.
This would have been a notable achievement in any case, but Emil did so under the smothering presence of communist totalitarianism, which pervaded Czech jazz clubs as much as its university campuses. Emil shares some personal anecdotes of life as a jazz musician behind the Iron Curtain and comments on the storyline of a 2009 Czech film, "Rytmus v patach" ("The Rhythm on the Heels"), built around this subject, to which he contributed a musical score. (3,100 words with 26 illustrations)

55 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 28, 2014