Trumpeter Jiří Kotača founded the big band Cotatcha Orchestra ten years ago. Nowadays, he performs a variety of programmes ranging from the most traditional jazz to a visionary fusion of jazz and electronica. We chatted with Jiří Kotača about how the orchestra has gradually developed, how the original repertoire is blurring the boundaries between jazz and electronica, and also about what fans can expect from the November concert to celebrate the orchestra's 10th anniversary. We also talk about Kotača's International Quartet, as well as how the trumpet and flugelhorn can be enriched with effects.
Your Cotatcha Orchestra is continuously working on its own repertoire, which it presented in 2020 on the album Bigbandová elektronika, but it also hosts various themed concerts, often with guests. Did you start the orchestra with the idea that its reach would be this wide?
In the beginning I wanted to play big band music with people close to me here in Moravia, whether they were my classmates or JAMU teachers. The aim was to focus on the young jazz scene, on people with whom I couldn't play music of my own choice anywhere else. And I didn't just want to play Glenn Miller or Count Basie or anything like that. So we started with the repertoire of The Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra and gradually added more numbers. In the early years we started to give the first commissions for music specifically for us, either from inside the orchestra or from outside. And since sometime around 2017 or 2018, we've been following our current concept of the three dramaturgical series that we regularly present in Brno. For example, I decided that we'd do one series of concerts dedicated to famous names on the jazz scene, usually the ones that get "played" less. The main criterion is some jubilee anniversary. And as up to now we've focused on people who are already dead, it's usually a hundred years or more since their birth. This concept usually includes a foreign guest, either an instrumentalist or a singer; the last time it was dancers. In this series I include pieces we wouldn't otherwise play. For example, we played songs from albums that Gil Evans arranged for Miles Davis in the 1950s, such as Miles Ahead and Porgy and Bess. We performed Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto, which we premièred in Brno. This year it was a concert to celebrate the 120th anniversary of the birth of Count Basie, with dancers from Swing Wings. We're always trying to add some extra value to the programme.
So that's one series. What about the others?
The second series is actually our non-traditional Christmas programme. Here, we play Czech Baroque carols and our guest is always a singer from a European country, and we also do carols from that country. So far we've performed Christmas songs from Bulgaria, Spain and Slovenia. This makes these concerts something special for the listeners - after all, who here knows Bulgarian or Slovenian carols? And the third dramaturgical series consists of concerts where we play our current genre-spanning repertoire. Lenka Dusilová has been a fairly regular guest in recent years. We'll be showing how far we've come over the years at our anniversary concert on 26 November at the Goose on a String Theatre, where the band will be celebrating its 10th anniversary.
That's interesting. On the one hand, concerts with music by composers born a century or more ago, and on the other, modern compositions by contemporary composers, with jazz intertwined with electronic music. It's like they're actually two different orchestras. For you, as an insider, do these series have anything in common?
Actually just the band and its distinctive acoustic sound, otherwise probably not. But what we put most emphasis on, especially when we play outside Brno, like at a festival, is our original work. That means what was released on our début album Bigbandova elektronika, plus of course new songs, as it's been a while since that album was released. So this is our current repertoire that we play the most during the year. All the other programmes are mostly prepared just for Brno. We're a Brno orchestra and I like to play other things at least occasionally. After all, playing original music that can't be played anywhere else is one of the original goals, and it encompasses those other series as well.
But when all these programmes are played by the same band, it requires a certain versatility from the players. They must be able to play Basie as well as fusion with electronica.
Yes, that's true, but jazz musicians are trained for it, and few jazz musicians, I think, play only a certain slice of this small genre. So it's a fairly natural thing.
Is management of the orchestra any different when it comes to original compositions as compared to your "old" repertoire?
Definitely. With Count Basie we played the original arrangements, so there are clear reference recordings and everyone knows what it should sound like. The same goes for Gil Evans and Miles Davis. It was different with the Ebony Concerto, which is actually a classical piece, which made it all the more challenging for us. Even though Stravinsky did flirt with jazz, in the end it's not jazz, so it required a different approach. Pavel Šnajdr from the Brno Contemporary Orchestra conducted us for that, and we were accompanied by a few other people from the classical scene. It's like that with original stuff; only the composer knows exactly how it's supposed to sound, and sometimes it takes a while for the band to grasp how to approach the tune. This makes it a bit harder to rehearse original numbers, or it takes some time before it comes together and gets exactly the expression it should have.
Your album Bigbandová elektronika was released during the Covid outbreak in 2020. How was it affected by the pandemic?
We had a shoot scheduled long in advance for March 2020. But the first restrictions came just two or three days before it was supposed to happen. If we'd booked the studio just a week earlier, we could have had a finished record. Instead, we recorded just one song, or rather only the first part of it, by each of us recording our bit at home on our mobile phones. We posted the result on YouTube in cooperation with Jan Košulič, who edited the tracks together and did a great job; we organised a crowdfunding campaign and it wasn't until the first days of the holidays that we went into the studio. The album was released in November of that year, which was actually a relatively good time in terms of album releases. We couldn't perform, but people were mostly at home on the internet, and our music reached quite a wide audience.
How much new repertoire has been added since then?
New songs are being written all the time, in fact we've got more than half of the next album written. I'm share the writing with Martin Konvička, and we've also composed something together. And in terms of style, there's even more live electronics than before. We draw from all sorts of sources. The new repertoire is loosely based on our first album and I think listeners will probably recognise the sound. Again, it's just original music by the Cotatcha Orchestra.
There are also other jazz orchestras in Brno and some of you play in several ensembles. What do you think of the big band scene in Brno?
Yes, Brno really is a big band city. It may be the second largest city in the country, but I have a feeling that there aren't that many more big bands in Prague. Not to mention that each of the orchestras in Brno specialises in a slightly different genre, so there's not much overlap, although of course some players play in more than one orchestra. What goes for everywhere else goes for Brno too - 20 musicians, 30 bands. (laughs)
Besides the orchestra, you yourself have a band that has recently released a new album, the Alf Carlsson/Jiří Kotača Quartet. I guess it's easier to lead a band like that than a full orchestra?
It's definitely easier. A big band has four times as many members as a quartet, but I'd say the work is more than four times as demanding. Although sometimes even with a small group you can get stuck on something. The second quartet album took us more time than I expected.
In the Quartet, the focus on original work is even more pronounced than in the orchestra. Do you actually play anything other than your own compositions?
No, we don't. Only at the beginning, when the band basically came together by accident, we arranged a few standards. But we soon abandoned those and for the last five or six years we've been playing entirely original compositions. Some are written by Alf Carlsson, others by me, and we also write together.
You say that the band got together "accidentally". What does that mean?
In the jazz scene, it's often the case that musicians meet, play together, and then might never see each other again. In this ecosystem, people often take turns, playing everything imaginable, as they have to rotate. People still tend to picture the idea of a band that meets every Friday in a garage with lots of rehearsals before a gig. In our scene, that's not really the case. Anyway, the decisive thing for us was Alf's first trip to the Czech Republic after we returned from Rotterdam to our home countries. His visit to the Czech Republic wasn't a planned trip, but a short concert tour. We played four concerts together, and because we enjoyed it, we said we'd meet again in six months. And a year later, after three more tours, it was clear that we were going to treat it as a long-term project. We recorded our first album in 2019 and we're still going strong. The band wasn't slowed down by Covid, although there was a longer break.
In this case, you managed to release the album before Covid, but then you had a problem with the gigs, right?
Yes, exactly. So we managed to do one tour, but we still haven't played some of the cancelled concerts originally planned for 2020.
While the Cotatcha Orchestra profiles itself as a Brno big band and some of your gigs are planned specifically for Brno, I don't see the Quartet having such a close link to the city. Or am I wrong?
That's true. We play in various places, mainly in the Czech Republic and Slovakia; we've also done one or two tours in Sweden, as well as a few concerts or shorter tours in Austria, Germany, Bulgaria, Greece and Italy. It's just a regular band that plays wherever there's interest in us. We meet most often in Brno, as most of us live here, and we usually have one or two concerts a year. But otherwise there's no strong link to Brno.
Like the orchestra, the band is gradually incorporating more electronica into your songs, although perhaps in a different way. How do you work with electronica within the Alf Carlsson/Jiří Kotača Quartet?
There's always been electronics there from the very beginning, what with the guitar effects used by Alf Carlsson. It's this work with sound, including the use of many effects, that I've loved about his playing from the beginning. At first, however, we only used the effects on the guitar, although Alf kept asking me if I wanted to try it too. It took me a while to get the hang of it, though. However, I found time during Covid and this was one of the things I got into. I bought some boxes, effects, and tried experimenting. This is how the electronics used on the trumpet came into our sound, and in a similar vein, drummer Kristián Kuruc started to use electronic pads along with his drums. In the end, Peter Korman was the last one to "catch on", and he now plays bass guitar as well as double bass, which is also expanding our repertoire. It was all fairly gradual and natural, but Covid accelerated it.
How common is it for trumpet players to use effects in jazz today?
If you don't play straight acoustic or straight-ahead jazz, it's quite common nowadays. Some people use effects in a "guitar" way, while others work more with software. I do use guitar effects, but I keep them on a stand while playing so I can control them with my left hand and change the settings as I play.
Do you use effects on both the trumpet and the flugelhorn?
I use more effects with the trumpet. The flugelhorn has a "round" sound that lends itself to a lot of reverb and some delay here and there, but I don't use things like octave pedals or harmonisers on it. I tend to use the rather in quieter compositions and count on its natural sound when composing. After all, all these things affect the whole composing process.
Finally, I'd like to return to the Cotatcha Orchestra once more. As we said, you'll be playing your 10th anniversary concert in November. What can listeners look forward to?
When I was preparing the programme, I realised that we've played a lot over the years. And if I could, for various reasons, I'd like to play much of all those programmes again. But that would take about eight hours, so I decided to split the concert into two parts. The first will be a look back at our past with two guests who have collaborated with us many times in the past - Swiss singer Géraldine Schnyder and double bassist Vincenzo Kummer. The second half will be devoted to more recent stuff, including new numbers, i.e. original work. The guests of the second part of the concert will be singer Lenka Dusilová and Dutch trombonist Ilja Reijngoud. The only links between the two sets are our compositions or arrangements. I'm really looking forward to it. And you're cordially invited to come along.
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