Gustav Brom

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Gustav Brom (1989)

Gustav Brom (* 22. May 1921 in Veľké Leváre as Gustav Frkal ; † 25. September 1995 in Brno ) was a Czech Jazz - Big Band -Leader and clarinetist .

Life

Brom was born a Czech in Slovakia , where his father had founded a company that went bankrupt in 1922. The father left the family and died shortly afterwards. After moving to Moravia, the mother had to take care of the family as a mail sorter. Brom therefore grew up in children's homes and from 1931 attended high school, where he received a music education. As a child he learned to play the violin . From 1933 the family lived in Brno, where Brom received music lessons from the later director of the Brno Conservatory Tomastik, where he continued his lessons after the war, and learned the clarinet and saxophone .

Brom had been married since 1947 and had a son and daughter.

Gustav Brom Big Band

Before the war he founded the band R-Boys. After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia , he was imprisoned for four months because he had distributed leaflets with friends, was able to do his Abitur afterwards, but could no longer study as an architect or civil engineer as planned because the universities were closed. From this situation his R-Boys became the origin of the later Gustav Brom Big Band. In 1940 they played in the Radhošt Hotel in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm , in Brno and Katowice . Swing dance music was already in great demand shortly after the Second World War and they played in Brno, Bratislava and Prague (there in Café Vltava), as well as for several months in Switzerland in 1947 , which later had a politically disadvantageous effect for Brom. With Karel Vlach's big band , they soon became leaders in Czechoslovakia. They toured all of Eastern Europe in the 1950s and were e.g. B. 1955 very successful at the Leipzig trade fair . They also appeared regularly on Czechoslovak Radio , as early as 1946 on Slovak Radio in Bratislava.

Brom moved from Dixieland and Swing to more modern arrangements based on Shorty Rogers , Maynard Ferguson , with whom his band also worked, and Quincy Jones . The Gustav Brom Big Band was considered one of the leading European big bands in the 1960s. They performed at festivals in Manchester , Nuremberg , Warsaw and Antibes , toured as far as India and Cuba and were voted into the top 10 big bands around the world in international critic polls. There have been about 250 foreign tours under Brom's direction. Small groups from the band based their line-up on the Modern Jazz Quartet . They played with Edmond Hall , Ray Conniff , Betty Dorsey , Jimmy Witherspoon , Bill Moody , Jerzy Milian , Diana Ross and the Supremes , Dizzy Gillespie , Bill Ramsey , Peter Herbolzheimer , Albert Mangelsdorff .

The band made numerous recordings, first in the 1950s with Supraphon , a. a. as an accompanist to singers like Karel Gott and Helena Vondráčková from Czechoslovakia and Gery Scott from England (1957, re-released in 2006). Shortly after Yuri Gagarin's Sputnik flight , they recorded Pozdrav Astronautovi , in which Gustav Brom sings himself, as in numerous other recordings.

In the 1950s, the well-known band leader Karel Krautgartner and bassist Luděk Hulan also belonged to the band. In 1993, Brom received the Luděk Hulan Jazz Prize of the Czech Jazz Society. Since the death of Gustav Brom in 1995, the big band (now called "Gustav Brom Orchestra" or "Gustav Brom Big Band") has been under the direction of the Slovakian Vladimír Valovič from Bratislava, who was still designated by Brom .

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personal data
SURNAME Brom, Gustav
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Frkal, Gustav (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czech big band leader
DATE OF BIRTH May 22, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Veľké Levare
DATE OF DEATH September 25, 1995
Place of death Brno