2024-07-24 01:18:02
I wanna run away from here, I wanna fly away from here, sings Lenny Kravitz in one of his biggest hits. The escapist song Fly Away, composed by the part-Bahamian musician on this Caribbean island, describes a similar escape from reality that people go to concerts or festivals for. Thanks to Kravitz, many went to Colors in Ostrava this Friday.
The 60-year-old American guitarist and singer played here his eighth, but by far the biggest concert in the Czech Republic. The bet on a rock star of the first category paid off for the organizers, according to the ČTK agency, 50,000 people arrived, making the 21st year of the event one of the most visited in history. Because Tom Morello or Gary Clark Jr also performed at this year’s Colors, it was also unusually rock.
The price for inviting Kravitz was a slightly weaker program on the third day – while, for example, the excellent Moroccans Widad Mjama and Khalil Epi, the discovery of last year’s Womex fair, did not start on a smaller stage until one in the morning, so they were far from full. Lenny Kravitz arrived in Ostrava, despite the fact that on Friday morning a global outage of IT systems paralyzed several European airports, and the singer Sevdaliza, whom listeners will hear only on Saturday, did not make it to the festival in time. But the American is performing in Poland for the next few days, so he traveled to the Czech Republic by bus from there. President Petr Pavel also watched his concert from the stands.
The almost two-hour show started about ten minutes late, but energetically. Lenny Kravitz took to the smoke-shrouded stage wearing black glasses, shoulder-length dreadlocks, a nose piercing, a gold neck chain and earring, high-heeled leopard-print boots and a leather jacket that he tossed aside to reveal a fishnet T-shirt during encores. With a seven-piece band, later expanded to include a three-piece brass section, he started with the hit Are You Gonna Go My Way.
The song about spreading love, written from the point of view of Jesus Christ, was created in 1993, when the former forerunner of Tom Petty or David Bowie definitely shot to worldwide fame. It was then that Kravitz consolidated his sound into the form that he holds to this day with minor deviations. He basically plays pop-music, albeit based on rock or funk of the 60s and 70s of the last century. It was retro when he started, and it’s retro today, taking advantage of the legacy of bands like Led Zeppelin or Earth, Wind & Fire, and above all of Kravitz’s two biggest role models: guitarists Jimi Hendrix and Prince. Unlike him, however, they were also great innovators, style-creating players.
Two basses in one song
Lenny Kravitz is above all an excellent musician, truly the Minister of Rock ‘n Roll, as the title of the second track of the Ostrava concert sounds, i.e. in this sense, a mediator, a servant, an instrument of an imaginary higher musical will. A decent singer with a characteristic baritone voice and a talented instrumentalist who records guitars, basses, keyboards and drums himself on his records. In Ostrava, he reminds of this right from the beginning of the evening, when he replaces two bass guitars during one song. He plays each one with a different technique.
Lenny Kravitz played in the Czech Republic for the first time in 1996. | Photo: Zdenko Hanout
The son of a part-Ukrainian-Jewish producer and a Bahamian-born actress, who attended a high school in Beverly Hills similar to the one in the popular TV series, he was at the height of his fame around the turn of the millennium. He won four consecutive Grammys for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance.
Since then, he hasn’t developed much musically and hasn’t entered the charts for a quarter of a century. Still, thanks to his charisma and energetic shows, he maintains a solid position in the entertainment industry. Like the fashion celebrity and former partner of actresses Lisa Bonet, Vanessa Paradis and Nicole Kidman, he still interests the tabloids. He recently attracted attention by saying that he has not been in a relationship for nine years and is celibate. He attracted attention again with a video clip in which the 60-year-old American in admirable physical condition performs completely naked. “I hired a young Ukrainian director. She said that she and her crew would come to my house and film me getting out of bed and opening the curtains. I thought it was a bit boring, but why not. So they came, and before they start filming, the director says: but in You’re going to sleep in that bed naked, right?” he narrated. The song he also plays on Colors is funny named TK421. It is said to refer to the Empire soldier from the movie Star Wars, but according to the text it is simply a metaphor for Kravitz’s nature.
The Colors musician plays a sample cross-section of his career from the 1990s to this year’s Blue Electric Light album. Once or twice he thanks “that we can celebrate life together today and use this opportunity for further personal growth”, but Kravitz is not visited either for speeches or song lyrics. The important thing is that he still plays and sings. And that even in falsetto, as he proves in It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over – a song he used in the early 90s to try to please his wife Lisa Bonet, with whom he raised a daughter, today’s popular actress Zoë Kravitz.
Although the equipment was brought to Ostrava by seven trucks, the show is sympathetically simple, with a lot of work with lights or effects on large screens, thanks to which, for example, the musicians at one point look like transparent, glowing ghosts. There’s just enough of it so it doesn’t overshadow the music.
Hit Fly Away as played by Lenny Kravitz this Friday on the main stage of Colors of Ostrava. Photo: Zdenko Hanout | Video: Martin Dybala
Young rhythmic
Kravitz alternates between Fender and Gibson electric guitars throughout the evening, from the famed clamshell Flying V to a gold-and-white vintage Gibson Les Paul Gold Top. He bought it in the early 90s when he was fronting Tom Petty, and it’s been his main guitar ever since. “One day someone told me on the line that there was a guy down in the parking lot selling guitars. They said he was going to jail and needed money for a lawyer. So I bought about five guitars from him,” he said.
There are two vocalists on stage the whole time, a three-piece brass section is added halfway through as a nice addition. Among the musicians, guitarist Craig Ross, who has accompanied Kravitz for over three decades and helped him come up with the riffs of his most famous compositions, or keyboardist George Laks play the best. In addition to a wurlitzer electric piano or an old Oberheim OB-X8 analog synthesizer, as used by Queen or Prince in the 80s, it also has a Hammond organ with a so-called Leslie box and a rotating speaker that creates vibrato. It’s beautiful to hear during the final jam.
Kravitz’s new beat is also great. The young drummer Jas Kayser studied with jazz musicians at the Berklee College of Music and already flashed in the Low video clip from 2018. On the other hand, the Korean bassist Hoonch Choi, known as The Wolf, was recently added to the line-up, perhaps playing with Kravitz for the first time last month in London’s Wembley before the final Champions League. In Ostrava, he gets behind a Moog synthesizer a few times. And he shines in the hit Fly Away, when he slaps the bass with his thumb.
During the course of the evening, the energy on the stage subsides a few times, the audience in the front would probably appreciate it if Kravitz dared to come out on the catwalk to them more often. Longer pauses between songs or extended introductions of the band may bother some. But all the weak points are richly balanced by the final whirlwind of hits, including Again or the cover version of American Woman by the rock band The Guess Who. Which is the song during which Kravitz’s leather pants burst in the crotch at a concert in Stockholm in 2015. Because the musician does not wear underwear, the media around the world wrote that the rocker inadvertently exposed himself in front of tens of thousands of people.
Nothing as unusual as in Stockholm or Prague, where in 2014 he had guitarist Carlos Santana as an unannounced guest, did not take place in Ostrava. Still, it was an excellent concert. It symbolically ended with the title track of his debut Let Love Rule from 1989. Lenny Kravitz wrote it in a New York apartment building full of bohemians and punks, where he rented an apartment. In the corridor there he scrawled Let Love Rule on the wall. “And then as I passed that sign every day on my way home, one day I come to the apartment, grab my guitar, and in no time I had a song written,” he described to the Guardian newspaper.
In Ostrava, at the end of it, he drops the microphone when it crackles in the speakers, goes to the first rows and greets the audience for a long time while he teaches them the chorus. As if he wanted to personally deliver that final message to as many people as possible.