This Monday, musician and writer Vlastimil Třešňák presented the vinyl of his last year’s album Kiks in a space called Salón on Prague’s Letná. On that occasion, he played the title song to several dozen listeners, accompanied by his band Temporary Quintet. For the introduction, he added Martin Hermann Böttcher’s melody from the film Vinnetou.
Třešňák has not been giving concerts for several years, painting fills him the most, as he repeated on Monday. “Never say never, many bands have started playing again despite announcing the end of the show, so I say maybe,” sums up the 72-year-old artist.
He released a new album last September, almost ten years after the previous record Alter ego. From the beginning, he collaborated on the compositions with guitarist Josef Štěpánek and keyboardist Jan Steinsdörfer, who in the Temporary Quintet are complemented by bassist Martin Lehký, drummer Miloš Dvořáček, saxophonist Jan Štolba and oboist Pavel Tylšar. Now, about half a year later, Kiks has also been released on vinyl in a limited edition of 300 numbered pieces.
“Kiks is like a cabaret. A dreamy cabaret in which the form of individual performances changes. There is irony, playfulness, theatrical play, but also room for seriousness and poking at problems. Vlastimil Třešňák has the privilege of being able to express himself about society and the world . His words aren’t just critical poems and they don’t turn into empty rants. His new record has power and he knows what he wants to say.” he wrote on Musicserver.cz critic Jiří V. Matýsek.
Seventy-two-year-old Třešňák is a key figure in the former Czechoslovak underground, a signatory of Charter 77 and a subsequent emigrant. He is probably most famous for the album Surveyor from 1979 and the novel The key is under the doormat.
From 1968, he worked as a freelance singer for six years, but he was also an auxiliary worker in a brewery, a gravedigger, a surveyor, a camelot of Večerní Prague, a hired sweeper or a night watchman. The signing of Charter 77 brought him a ban on public speaking. He began to engage in dissent, became close to people around the playwright Václav Havel, played apartment theater with Vlasta Chramostová, Pavel Kohout and Pavel Landovský, and was active in the free singer-songwriter association Šafrán. As part of an action called Asanace, the communist State Security brutal interrogations exiled.
Třešňák started anew in Sweden, then moved to Germany, also traveled to the United States. He moved many times during his emigration, after 1995 he lives again mainly in the Czech Republic. He has Swedish and Czech citizenship. He has been painting and writing since the late 1960s. In the novel Klíč je pod rožkou, which in 1995 won the then-prestigious Book of the Year poll of Lidových noviny, he described the times of emigration and the first impressions after arriving in poly-footprint Prague. In 2003, he also wrote the text for the musical Excalibur with music by Michal Pavlíček. He also provided the lyrics to the female trio Alo Trio Band, which released their debut album in 2015.
