Miro Bop

Another day, another sold out concert. Well, almost. The truth is, the first concert of the season for Jazz i Malmo (Tomasz Stanko) was a full house. And so was the second concert, held on Saturday when we had the honour of having one of the greatest double bassists in the house: Miroslav Vitous. He was in town for a seminar at the college of music and Henrik Frisk, a fine sax player and PhD student at the college of music, took the opportunity to invite Mr. Vitous to play in Malmo. I can assure you that everyone who heard Miroslav Vitous perform would agree with me that this was a brilliant idea.



Vitous started by playing a solo set playing his double bass and triggering samples from a tiny keyboard. The samples were courtesy of the bassist himself, since he has spent many years sampling orchestral instruments and later releasing them. For those of you into music software, check out these samples, they are great! Mats uses and likes them, and so should you if you work with orchestral sounds.

It was a true pleasure hearing Miroslav Vitous play and he does so in an astonishing way. Obviously, I was aware of his incredible abilities on his instrument, but his ability to swing like a madman, play with a great sense of humour and work with sounds (sampled and percussive bass sounds) were pleasant surprises.

For the second set, Vitous was joined by Frisk and excellent local drummer Peter Danemo for some improvisations, a blues and "Autumn Leaves".

The man himself was nice and polite, joking and seemingly enjoying himself, even playing a Swedish folk song in his solo set. He is very welcome back to Malmo!

The sound engineer, Svante, was a true hero. He arrived at three o' clock in the afternoon for an early soundcheck (Swedish national radio recorded the concert). After the Miroslav Vitous concert, he stayed on to work his second shift: mixing for a club held at the same place as the concert. When I left just after 11 o' clock, poor Svante was looking forward to going home around four in the morning.

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"Miro Bop" is from - yes, you guessed it - a Miroslav Vitous album, Universal Syncopations. On this track, he is joined by Jan Garbarek, Jack DeJohnette and Chick Corea. To my ears, it sounds like Vitous has given each musician a fair amount of freedom to do their thing, and this makes for some interesting listening. You immediately idetify Garbarek, but you also hear that this is a collective effort. The album also features a somewhat restrained but tasteful John McLaughlin on a couple of tracks.

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NP: Miroslav Vitous - Universal Syncopations