An instrumental Czech-Polish quartet combining the worlds of contemporary jazz, popular and electronic music. Modern jazz that tells powerful stories through melodies that stick in your head and surprising arrangements. Up to the soundtrack surfaces alternate free improvisation. After a very sharp and restless groove comes a gentle ballad. The natural sound of a guitar quartet with trumpet intertwined with electronic sounds and improvisation with them.
The band has been put together in 2019 as a Czech guitar quartet with saxophone. After 5 years long collaboration with Petr Smekal on sax and Marek Antonu on drums, and releasing the 2nd album, the band recently rearanged, now engaging Polish trumpeter and electronic improviser Fabian Klimanek and drummer Petr Nohavica.
Since Fabian is also a electronic artist, doing solo sets of improvised electronic music, our options how to blend the acoustic quartet sound, organically incorporate the electronic sound to the music and be free in performing it, widen even further.
A new album Peripheral People (released in 11/2024 on Bivak Records) features two songs with vocals by amazing American singer Allison Wheeler and a track featuring well-known Czech electronic artist Aid Kid. The album was masterfully mixed and produced by Eddie Stevens, a British producer and composer who has worked with Moloko, Zero7 and Freak Power, and Robin Mullarkey, bassist for stars such as Jacob Collier, Jordan Rakei or Laura Mvula.
The album debut album Open to Closeness (2022, Bivak Records) features a star guest appearance, the new-york-based keyboardist Jason Lindner, one of the main forces behind the David Bowie’s last, iconic album Blackstar, or the bands of Donny McCaslin, Mark Guiliana, his own Now vs. Now project and many others. This collaboration was a dream-come-true idea of the bandleader Radim Přidal: “Jason was my number one wish when I was thinking about who I’d like to feature as a guest artist on the album. We never met and didn’t know each other before and when he agreed to work on the album with us, it was really thrilling and gratifying. The collaboration worked out perfectly and Jason, remotely from his home studio in Brooklyn, recorded the keyboard, synth and sequencer tracks and really moved the album forward big time,” says Přidal about the experience.
When I ask Jason, how he would describe our music, he wrote me: “Big, honest, open-hearted music.”
The album’s title “Open To Closeness” carries also a non-musical theme:
As a society, we’ve isolated ourselves in our shells, be they cities, apartments, or cars, thinking that we’ve matured to our surroundings, that we’ve conquered them, that we can cut ourselves off from their influence, and that we’re better off without them. But now we are coming to the point that eventually we have no choice but to come out of these shells again and find a new relationship with the environment, a new way to live in connection and intimacy with it.
In 2020 we released a 5-piece video-series of live sessions in different, often unsual environments, which was also released as an EP Live Sessions. That became a characteristic of the Point of Few, we place a great emphasis on the visuals, too – two tracks from our debut album were given very unusual music videos, one acted, the other abstract. For the new album, we also created two stunning videos set in the former blast furnace.
Radim Přidal – guitar
Fabian Klimanek– trumpet, fx
Vlastimil Skoda – bassguitar
Petr Nohavica – drums
