Peter Lipa at Pohoda 2019
The most eminent figure of our jazz scene – Peter Lipa – will perform at Pohoda 2019. Just four months after the premiere of the album Slovenské evergreeny, he released the new album Dobré meno at the end of March. It is a "standard Lipa-like" album with singer’s own songs on the border of jazz, soul, blues and pop. Peter Lipa Band will perform at Pohoda in a line-up consisting of Peter Lipa Jr. (keyboards), Miroslav Fedor (drums), Radovan Tariška (saxophone) and Michal Šimko (bass).
06. June 2019
"The second album is actually its direct continuation," says Peter Lipa in an interview for Aktuality.sk. "In addition to four songs for Evergreens, we also recorded nine of my songs as a part of one studio session with my band. I even thought about releasing them all at once, but then I told myself only Prince could dare do such a thing and that I won’t compete with myself, so there was a four-month interval between them. ” Milan Lasica, Lipa’s regular and exclusive lyricist for several albums, wrote only one song this time, Motýľ. And it was this song that became the first video candidate. The co-author of this song is Martin Majlo Štefánik (Ľudové mladistvá), music producer is Adrián Liška and the video was shot by director Branislav Vincze.
BIO
Peter Lipa inclined to music since childhood. He started playing the violin when he was twelve, later took up trumpet, trombone and guitar. After finishing the Faculty of Civil Engineering in Bratislava, he worked as an editor for the Czechoslovak Radio. From 1975 to 1976 he attended the postgraduate studies of journalism at the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts in Bratislava. He has been working in music industry since the early 1960s. Struny was his first band, followed by Istropilana, Blues Five, Gustav Offerman's Orchestra, Revival Jazz Band, T+R Band and Lipa Andršt Blues Band. In 1968, he and Blues Five won the Discovery of the Festival Award at the 2nd Beat Festival in Prague. Throughout his career, he sought cooperations with pianists, as this instrument best suits him as a singer. Ladislav Gerhard, Milan Svoboda, Gabriel Jonáš, Emil Viklický, Peter Breiner, Boris Urbánek, Juraj Tatár, Pavol Bodnár and his son Peter Lipa Jr. are just some of them. In 1978, he founded his own formation called Combo, and this project has been accompanying him in various forms under the name Peter Lipa Band until these days. Meanwhile, he has worked on many short and long term projects. Currently it is Visegrad Blues Band, EU4, Traditional club.
Peter Lipa created a distinctive vocal expression with an emphasis on lyrics. His music draws from a combination of jazz and blues, based on the works of Jimmy Rushing, Ray Charles, Al Jarreau, Joe Cocker and Bobby McFerrin, to name a few. In the 1980s, he was regularly ranked among the top five of the best European jazz singers in the Jazz Forum magazine. In 1976, together with Miloš Paško, he founded the tradition of Bratislava jazz days and began to host a regular radio program about jazz music. It is a curios fact that he did not release his first record until he was 40 years old due to Communist censorship. His most powerful experience from the music world was his duet with Bobby McFerrin at the end of his Bratislava concert in 1986. In 1990, Slovak Jazz Society was founded, with Peter Lipa being the president since the beginning.