Kevin Hays & Lionel Loueke (USA/BEN)
JAZZ OF FOUR CONTINENTS

Tension in music often leads to some of the most rewarding recordings and performances – when there’s cross-talk around who should take the lead, when someone is pushing and someone else is pulling, when the band isn’t resting in the beat but subjugating it. Duke Ellington’s great 1962 trio recording, Money Jungle, featuring Max Roach and Charles Mingus, was famously tense. You can hear it in the way Roach and Mingus are constantly snapping at each other, but their respect for Ellington takes precedence and leads to one of the finest trio records ever made.

Lionel and Kevin don’t need to find a balance between them because they are both serving something else. Whatever you want to call it – “truth,” “higher power,” “music” – that’s the third party here. I’ve been blessed as a musician and a producer to witness some incredible and even historic music. Lionel Loueke’s home country of Benin in West Africa is a long way from Kevin Hays’ hometown of Greenwich, Connecticut. Is there a deeper truth that they’ve both discovered? The connection between Lionel and Kevin is so clear and warm that it is hard not to try to understand it. For these musicians who grew up across the globe from each other, to pull at the subterranean strands of connection, expose them to the world, and turn them on so they glow and illuminate – this is fundamental to the very idea of “hope.” For whether you find solace in the divine, the spiritual or the human, it’s this sort of communion that we’re all searching for, and relying upon.

Kevin Hays – p, voc; Lionel Loueke – g, voc.

Admission - presale: seating CZK 700, standing CZK 350,

at the door: seating CZK 800, standing CZK 400.

No club discounts. Seats reservation is possible only if you buy a ticket. Thank you for understanding.

Band website: www.lionelloueke.com