Our series, “We are the night” presents artists, promoters, production managers, label owners and others who are bringing the music world of the Czech Republic forward, from the past to the present and the present to the future. This week, we spoke to Czech alternative folkster Marie Puttnerova…
When in doubt, and if you don’t know which way to follow, at least you will always have music to guide you.
In modern production, where tracks are created and consumed quickly, there is still a small place remaining for poetry, deep meaning, and a spark of intelligence melodically mixed.
Digging the web one day, I came across a great discovery, the album “Laila Tov” by Marie Puttnerova, a real example of what music can do, a body of work with the sounds of nature and the flow of feelings.
Before she goes out on the road this month with her band, including a gig at Brno’s Klub Leitnerova on 30 October, I wanted to understand the genesis and the path of such a project.
And so here we are.
Where are you from originally?
I was born in Brno, growing up in a small village nearby in the countryside.
What was the very first memory you have related to music?
My very first memory related to music is naturally connected with my family. My grandfather played alto saxophone, along with a small amount of farming. My father plays violin as his hobby and my mother played accordion. We all played a bit of something, so it was always somehow a part of our natural life. At the same time it also had the disadvantage of not pushing me towards any instrument more seriously, so singing took the role of the main instrument a long time after. To sum it up, we had always sung, mostly when grandpa’s cousins were still alive, meeting during big family celebrations. It was a very nice and formative moment, I would say.
Did you get any musical education as a kid?
I started going to music school to play violin when I was six, but it didn’t last long, I really wanted to play piano. So I started with piano lessons then, but they finally turned back into singing as my teacher was very kind and nice. When I was not ready for the lesson, I asked her to sing instead. She was also a singer and very open to it. She used to sing at the choir of Břetislav Bakala as a teenage girl. Why I’m saying this, and what is interesting about it, is that Bakala was the last student of the famous Czech composer Leoš Janáček. Therefore she had this experience and used to tell stories of this time. Bakala ignited a big admiration for Janaček’s music, so she just proceeded with what was also natural for her. And Janaček wrote amazing music for singers, so that’s how it was.
When did you start singing and playing music more seriously?
Aside from the time spent on very small public performances for parents at the music school, the first truly serious performances began with the choir. It started around the age of 13. It was an amazing time getting to know the art of choir singing and new experiences thanks to lots of travel abroad.
Then during university I started singing, and the VUS Ondráš (military artistic ensemble), which was a step to the world of folklore. At the same time I was a member of two bands. The first one was a rock band with an English native and the second one was a band by a friend and songwriter called Cymbelin. I had become a regular attendee of a Jazz Summer Workshop in Frýdlant, which was also an important meeting with another spectrum of music styles.
In the meantime I was about to finish my university studies (Bachelor in Finance and Masters in European Studies in Business and Economics) at Mendel University. During this time I moved to France for studies, but this year was not finally fully fulfilled due to my mother’s illness. It was a time when I did not sing at all. After all this (2010) I realized I must do something else. I decided to find a job outside Brno, Prague was the first place I was accepted, so I moved there. I wanted badly to sing, but didn’t know anybody, so I connected to a band called Jablkoň, with whom the children’s choir used to cooperate in the past, and asked the band leader Michal Němec if there was any opportunity for some cooperation. And It happened, after some time. We have recorded five albums so far, including two albums for a secondary project called Půljablkoň: Němec & Puttnerová. It is a very important part of my music experience that naturally tends to create something personal.
When and why did you start this much more personal project?
I have had the luck to go through different genres, and got saturated enough to start with something personal, with something that will go along with my own feelings and music perception, and also something that I will stand for. I would call it growing up. I wrote a couple of songs way before, but was not still confident enough to finish them, and there was no band I could perform them with. It has been four years now, when I finished my real music studies of jazz music, which really helped me to really focus on what I consider important for my music development. I also met my husband and we created a beautiful band, asked a great British producer called Eddie Stevens (Moloko, Roisin Murphy, etc.) for a cooperation, went to the recording studio, and made the record.
How would you describe the music from this project?
It is a bit of a complicated question. Our music combines all of the things mentioned above, all experiences we have absorbed as active musicians so far. It is a world of folk songs that were recorded as paintings. It is an invitation to the land of colours, sounds, that still keeps the direct connection to its content.
The band contains four musicians (Martin Novák – guitars, drums, Petr Uvira – guitars, Martin Brunner – Nord Piano, Prophet synth, and me – singing, Moog synth). We were awarded a Czech Anděl award in the Folk music category for an album from 2023, but I would say it is more alternative than folk. I liked what Eddie Stevens says: “let’s call it an art song”, with the highest level of submission to what the songs really needed. We worked with my lyrics, two poems by a great Brno poet who suffered under the cruel communist regime of the 1950s, and four texts by my friend Vlastimil Třešňák, a master of Czech surrealist writing and also a dissident. It is a mixture of feelings, word games and serious content that we wanted to present to today’s uncertain and fast world. We just wanted to work on beauty in terms of what beauty means to us. It is up to each listener if they want to be invited. And we send all these kinds of invitations and would be happy to share a part of this world.
What are the main musical and any other artistic influences of the project?
The great influence on us was through the producer Eddie Stevens, who came with his endless curiosity and music mastery, without boundaries, very sensitive, open and smart. He just got the best out of us. It was such a cherishing time in the studio. One of the happiest recording sessions we had the chance to experience. We’re still drawing from these moments of a lifetime.
What about the lyrics? Who wrote them and what are the main themes?
As I said it is a mixture of texts. Some of them are mine, mostly about relationships, but on a more complex level. Not only about the topics connected to men and women, but other levels that are also connected to the world of Jan Zahradníček. He was imprisoned as part of fabricated trials in the 1950s, sentenced to 12 years of the hardest imprisonment. He was against all these totalitarian regimes, firstly against the Nazis, later against Bolshevism. His work “Symbol of Power” has become the most serious anti-totalitarian piece of Czech literature. Despite that he wrote beautiful poems full of faith, love and hope for better. He suffered incredibly, and what is coded in his work is an amazing inspiration for all us who live in a rich world with lack of scarcity and sometimes get frustrated about little things. I got a great chance to participate musically in a theatre play to honour Zahradníček’s life and work, and both these songs were written for this performance. It was more or less obvious that they also had to be on the album.
Then the texts written by Vlastimil Třešňák. I got one of them as a birthday gift, ‘Laila tov’ was an “order”. I wanted to describe a relationship that once existed but no longer does. However, many questions remain, and answers can only be sought within oneself. I asked Vlasta for his opinion about my poems, and finally he wrote an optimistic text about Marie Magdalene and her daughter Sarah, who was according to legend a daughter of Jesus Christ. So it is full of metaphor, floriography, it is a “funny” beautiful text filled with my meanings hidden within the rhymes of a great master. We also included an original composition by Vlasta Třešňák entitled ‘Martine’.’ I consider it as one of the most powerful songs, so we finally put it on album as well. It couldn’t be done in any other way.
How did you record the album?
We did it during two recording sessions, one week in June 2022 and one week in July 2022, almost three weeks before the birth of my second child. As I have already mentioned, it was a beautiful time spent with Eddie Stevens, but tough for me at the same time as I was very tired with the advanced pregnancy. We allowed ourselves the luxury of recording one song per day. Eddie uses advanced recording techniques. Essentially, nothing is impossible for him, so we recorded in locations outside the studio, in various musical combinations, using a wide range of both traditional and unconventional instruments available at the amazing Birdland Studios in Slovakia.
What is the difference between your recording set up and your live set up?
Eddie really influenced our way of musical thinking, and we could not return to our previous compositions, so I would say that we approached the sound of the album and tried to continue with that. There are also other songs that project a bit of difference, it is an adventurous journey and it is great fun and pleasure to be surrounded by musicians, as are “my” band boys.
When playing concerts, do you see any differences between the audience in Brno and Prague?
I can’t really say if the difference is so big. We are a part of the genre that needs listeners, and if they come they listen and are nice to us the same way, it doesn’t matter if they are from Brno or Prague.
How do you evaluate the current Czech musical scene?
I think there are loads of great Czech bands and music, but maybe a bit out of the mainstream. It depends on what the listener is looking for. The scene can be very colorful in terms of discovery. What has definitely changed after the Covid times is the number of people attending concerts. Some clubs and places we go are fighting the problem of the virtual world, and maybe generally people are going less to concerts. The Covid season made a great difference.
What are the next steps of your project? Any live dates coming up?
We should soon release our latest music video, which we filmed at the end of summer. As well as this, we would like to gently remind ourselves and also invite people to the concerts we have coming up in October, which we are looking forward to.
Our little tour starts on 24 October in Prague, at Čítárna Unijazz, then 25 October in Opava, at Klub Art OKO, and 30 October in Brno, at Klub Leitnerova.
All upcoming events are posted on my website, so if anybody is interested, all information can be found there.
Could you name three songs you would like to share with our readers?
You can watch the video for Marie Puttnerova’s “Pozdrav” here.
