Rudolf Mihulka

“We were a semi-professional band, so I had to do these mandatory trials, but these were quite unpleasant, let me tell you, there was even this political side to that. As they wanted us to... they would ask questions which like none of the musicians were able to answer. Just consider how absurd it had been. They would examine one of the boys from my band and they would ask him, as they would ask everyone eventually, 'And what do you read?' As they wanted to hear he was reading the Rudé právo (Red Right) newspaper. But we wouldn´t say that in the first place; and Pepa Mýt, a trumpet player, he died already, he would say, believing he was just a musician, 'Well, I read Melodie Music Magazine.' And the comrade who would examine him got so angry that they would take this licence from him, so he couldn´t make money by playing. These things just happened. So after that, I had to go there to meet this Gut, as he was in charge, and I would tell him: 'Well you... we are playing as a band and you are destroying my band by banning this boy from performing.' So these absurdities would happen. The trials were quite unpleasant. As we would study music for years, we were professionals, and they would examine us in music theory, they would ask us how the G major note looked like, the elementary stuff you would learn in the first years at a music school.”

“In 1965, I would start this jazz club in Liberec, as back then there was nothing like that, there was this Community Centre across the street from Nisa Café and next to it, there would be this so-called 'experimentálka' later, but back then, there was the S-club, Studenstký klub (The Students' Club), and I would get in contact with the people from the S-klub through the Community Centre and I would start doing my Jazz Mondays an the club. At the beginning I would be doing these record-listening evenings. And as I remember, I would open the first evening with the Modern Jazz Quartet record, that was John Lewis with his band led by vibraphone, who also wrote 'Django', which was a beautiful song. We would play it in 1968, as that thing would happen, as those allies of ours would come, and we would play the song in the S-klub, and as there were maybe eight people killed, we would play the cymbals to honour their memory. Well, that was a beautiful evening.”