The best jazz violinist of Canada in 2006 Ed Vokurka a prest. guest to the festival
- Date: 10 Feb, 2008 at 1:56PM,
- He has been a professor at the Toronto Humber College of Applied Arts and Technology for 30 years. Ed Vokurka is a holder of academic title Master of Applied Arts and Scinece (M.Sc.) …
and in 2006 he won the prize The Best Jazz Violinist of the Year in prestigious competition National Jazz Award — 2006.
He was born in Prague and he started to play the violin when he was seven. In the interview with Aleše Březina (Satelite 8/2006) he said he had wanted the piano but his mother being a widow bought him a three-quarter violin and he started to attend the music school. “I hated practising the violin and so I read Kája Mařík on the note stand and I pretended to practice. This was one of the basic steps to improvisation, which is the thing the musicians playing classical music cannot do; while jazzmen play wrong at sight. A classical violinist was Yehudi Mehudin while Grapelli is a swing musician. I can play in one or the other way.”
Ed Vokurka graduated from a conservatory with distinction and in 1957 he won the nation-wide competition in the subject piano/violin, after he had excellently performed the Violin Concert by Charles August de Beriot. Since that time he appeared regularly in the legendary jazz club Reduta where he used to met Jiří Suchý and his team.
In 1967 he emigrated and after eight moths in Austria he travelled via Montreal to Toronto.
It didn’t take long and he found himself on the stage next to such stars like Joe Venuti in the 70s, in former famed Toronto jazz club “Bourbon Street”.
He played several full-lengt
h solo concerts with his band at the world famous Stratford festival.
He has been a professor at the Toronto Humber College of Applied Arts and Technology for 30 years.
At the end of 2003 and beginning of 2004 jazz quintet Violin Swing and Jazz Ensemble was established that attracts the lovers of the Paris tradition of Hot Club from the 30s, especially the fans of legendary guitar player Django Reinhardt or phenomenal swing violinist Stephan Grappelli. He applies his many-sidedness also in his second band The Café Society, which takes repertory from the times of French chansons.
Ed Vokurka is a holder of academic title Master of Applied Arts and Scinece (M.Sc.) and during his rich musical career he was nominated a leading Canadian jazz musician by the nation-wide art committee several times. In 2006 he reached the vintage musiacal credit and won the prize The Best Jazz Violinist of the Year in prestigious competition National Jazz Award 2006.
Redakce: MK