Eva Pilarová – Vážky
Eva Pilarová – Fontana
Eva Pilarová – Swing
I’m on my way to the Bay Area for an academic conference, but just as important as the conference is a trip to the legendary Groove Merchant record store in San Francisco. Next week’s radio show will likely include a whole set of the goodies I run into, but I thought I’d post one of my recent finds from that venerable store. I don’t know a lot about this artist, I believe in addition to being a singer she was an actress in Czechoslovakia and perhaps remains so in the Czech Republic. Given the Soviet influence over that region, this record includes the kind of songs you might stereotypically expect, lots of horns and marching drums. But then there are these minor psych gems (esp. “Fontana” included here and “Kdyz Se Spolu K Veceru”) that evoke completely different areas of the world. In listening to “Vážky” I’d swear they had brought in Arthur Verocai to handle the arrangements, it’s really beautiful and subtly funky. Since I included “Kdyz Se Spolu K Veceru” in a prior post, I’ve included a jazzy, oddball, just dying to be sampled track, “Swing.” It’s not as out-there corny as this classic, but I can totally imagine some dance that accompanied this song and hopefully it made its way into a film.
Cheers,
Michael
{Just after writing those words, I decided to do a quick search on Youtube and did track down a film with Eva and two of her songs “Swing” and “Vážky”! It’s not as cool as I had hoped but cool nonetheless}
Eva Pilarová – “Vážky”
Eva Pilarová – Swing