Artist: Miroslav Vitous
Genre(s):
New Age
Jazz
Discography:
Universal Syncopations
Year: 2003
Tracks: 9
Bireli Lagrene and Special Guests
Year: 1998
Tracks: 8
Journey's End
Year: 1983
Tracks: 6
Best known as unrivaled of the foremost young bassists in the jazz-rock movement of the late '60s and early '70s, Miroslav Vitous is one of Europe's most versatile imports, equally at home in mainstream idioms and level down music. A sometime leader, his bass dances and skitters around an supporting players as a coequal phallus of the front strain, and he makes very creative use of the bow. He is influenced non simply by bassists like Scott LaFaro, Ron Carter and Gary Peacock, merely too by Czech folk music.
Vitous began his musical studies on the fiddle at eld six-spot, switch to piano from ages nine to fourteen earlier in conclusion settling upon the bass. While studying at the Prague Conservatory, he played with a trio that included his blood brother Alan on drums and Jan Hammer -- some other future jazz-rock mover and shaker -- on piano. After winning a scholarship to Berklee in 1966, he touched to New York the next year and wound up on the job with Art Farmer, Freddie Hubbard, Bob Brookmeyer, Clark Terry, and very briefly, Miles Davis.
Today i of the most highly touted prodigies in jazz, Vitous started playing in a recurring triad with Chick Corea and Roy Haynes on Corea's 1968 album Now He Sings, Now He Sobs. He then joined one of Herbie Mann's most democratic groups from 1968 until 1970, with time out for a turn with Stan Getz; Mann produced his number 1 album, a pioneering series of prolonged jazz-rock workouts called Infinite Search on the flutist's Embryo label. As a creation member of Weather Report, Vitous helped delineate the band's freewheeling initial level, leaving the group in late 1973 as its music began to evolve into more than structured forms. A incite to Los Angeles in 1974 lED to a yearlong session of woodshedding in private with a new custom-made instrument, a double-necked guitar and bass. However, that experimentation did not pan out, and he returned to the bass, ahead sessions for Warner Bros., Arista, and from 1979, a sporadic series of dates for ECM as a leader and in reunions of Corea's bop-to-free Trio Music chemical group.
In the meanwhile, Vitous became immersed in academe, joining the module of the New England Conservatory in 1979 and becoming head of the jazz department in 1983. Although his profile isn't most as highschool as it was at the peak of the jazz-rock geological era, he continued to play at jazz festivals and record into the 1990s.
