2024-07-27 13:06:28
Oldřich Janota, an important representative of Czech alternative folk, passed away at the age of 74 this Saturday morning, the author of the song I cesta can be the goal, made famous by the group Mňága and Žďorp. The survivors announced it on social networks.
“There are no words that can describe the pain with which I inform you that Oldřich breathed his last psalm today at 5:45 and went to the sacred lands. Thank you all for your prayers,” says the musician’s Facebook page.
Entering the world of Janot’s music was not easy. According to music critics, his listener-demanding work caused questions, doubts and insecurities in a perceptive person. “I never preached certainties in my songs. I wanted the things to come and speak for themselves,” Janota said some time ago.
Nine hours of his work were summarized on eight albums by the set Ultimate Nothing, released in 2016. It contained concert recordings, jam session recordings, but also archival recordings from home studios. According to music journalist Jaroslav Riedel, Janota has never been a musician who prepares a composition, hones it into the optimal shape, performs it in front of an audience and doesn’t change it any further. “For him, the essence of creation consisted in development, while he usually stopped playing songs that he began to consider finished. In addition, during the time of the greatest creative boom, he could not release records, all the more amateur recordings were made,” said Riedel at the time.
Live and emerging music has always been important to Janota. “The archives, that’s philately, a collection of trilobites. It can be interesting, but meeting a live trilobite is not,” he told Rock & Pop magazine years ago.
Janota was born on August 27, 1949 in Pilsen. He started performing in the first half of the 70s. At the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, he gave concerts with violists Irena and Vojtěch Havel, while his concept of music came very close to the work of the new age circuit. The first half of the 1980s is often referred to as his strongest authorial period. “That’s when Janota had a stroke of genius. He composed most of his best songs in a short time,” said the critic Riedel.
In 2009, the album Lost in the World: A Tribute to Oldřich Janota was released, on which various musicians play his songs. Janota also wrote, among other things, the play The Chained Flea and several books. In 2016, the Torst publishing house published Janot’s collected texts.
Video: Oldřich Janota sings She Was Not Afraid
Oldřich Janota was accompanied by jazz musicians such as guitarist David Dorůžka and double bass player Jaromír Honzák. She sings She Was Not Afraid in the video. | Video: Jan Šípek