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Treti Kniha Kzungli (2CD)
The Czech Republic didn't have a lot of symphonic prog bands but they did have a few. Progres 2 was one of the best. This double album is a conceptual work that translates as The Third Jungle Book. Hard band to compare to a Western European counterpart. Perhaps a bit of Pink Floyd and Yes.
"From the cover of the original 2LP (8113 0259): Audio-visual bands have become fashionable in our rock music. It is hard to say how much Pink Floyd and others like them contributed to it with their gigantic projects, and how much general domestic awareness, somewhat simplistically spreading the prejudice that a monothematic ensemble is perhaps automatically something more than an ordinary concert of songs.
Everyone is looking for screenwriters and subjects, artists and photographers, projectors and directors, smart heads full of ideas. Only to be able to treat the viewer with an electronic sound shower, lasers, stereophonic sound, smoke, colorful mazes of lights, costumes, masks, slides, and even a real movie theater. And the viewer is drawn into the magical world of wonders like a fairground stall, he is intoxicated and affected, so that even the music itself suddenly sounds somehow more festive to him in this attractive package. Development takes paths of progress and detours, but you cannot stop it; even the so-called "light genre", once referred to somewhere within the limits of dance entertainment and relaxation, dares to take on increasingly demanding forms and formats, in synthetic forms it combines its best strengths with the qualities of its neighbors from various artistic fields. It's as if he's trying to prove what he can do, how serious and "big" topics he is able to express.
The only remaining founder of the original tradition of the "company" Progres 2, drummer, singer and bandleader Zdeněk Kluka, nowadays does not like to hear all the eternal memories of the glory of the group's first development phase, the historical Progress Organization (founded in 1968). It is said that they were young then, and that was enough. And the new current model with a double in the emblem is said to be quite a different chapter, an attempt at song variations on a Kipling theme (Mowgli album, 1978) remained half way - the lyricist changed at the last minute and the result was ultimately fragmented in terms of content.
Dialogue with Space, rock science fiction, associated with the name of the author of the theme and lyrics, Oskar Man, became a true and successful test of creative abilities on a larger surface. Already here, the members of the group, in the roles of music composers, pointed out their future direction, somewhere in the middle between hard rock aggressiveness and ballad song melodiousness, a direction indicating that the discovering and experimenting handling of formal compositional tasks while completing the logically flowing and dramatically gradating plot of a full-length musical band is for the authors directly by hobby and passion. Dialogue with the Universe received many acclaimed reprises and abbreviated recording on an album and associated singles (Panton, 1980).
Progres 2 went into the second project with valuable experience, but also with new people in the cast. The group established contacts with the lyricist Vladimír Čort, an author with the business card of a professional, but recently also a promoter of science fiction themes in song texts.
The role of solo singer was taken over from 1981 by another Brno discovery among vocal talents, Roman Dragoun, a man with keyboard player specialization and compositional ambitions after the previous soloist Pavlo Ván. The collective of artists, technicians and the director, inventing all the production magic, remained together, and also the basic theme was not quite new: again the impulse from Rudyard Kipling, this time under the title The Third Jungle Book. More distant from literary motifs in specific stories (you won't find Mowgli or other characters from popular books here), but closer in the basic idea - the depiction of the process in which a person searches for his place in the complex "jungle" of fictional civilizations of tomorrow. The civilization of technology and stress, bold plans and fears about the future of humanity, victories and losses, material and moral.
In the texts, attributed in the form of a singing monologue or dialogue to the imaginary "roles" of Man, Jungle, City or Crowd, almost philosophical questions are heard, the vocabulary often draws not so much from lyrical inspiration as from technical and scientific lexicons. All this in the embrace of suggestive empowering music. All members of Progres 2 participate in it (Zdeněk Kluka dominates together with guitarist Miloš Morávek) and they have chosen a really wide range of means of expression; we feel the rock ferocity and aggression, the consistent development and gradation of ostinato motifs, the thoughtful contrasts of neurotic chaos and liberating areas of calm and peace, there are no shortage of small sound, technical and playing tricks (Morávka's electric guitar etude Ozvěna). Just as Čort's Third Book of the Jungle is an opportunity to demonstrate poetic insight and imagination on a large scale, it is an indisputably successful singing debut for Roman Dragoun in a large solo group (see, for example, his performances in his own compositions The Man Who Looks Like the Far Side of the Moon and The Jungle World ), for all the authors then a sympathetic confirmation of the ability to create musical tension and smooth melodies, and for the whole band finally an optimistic perspective in the form of the realization that even in the new line-up it has retained the stamp of its own development-capable and attractive expression for a young audience.
The third jungle book had MS. Premiered on stage on 5/30/1981 in Brno. Now it comes to you in the form of a double album. Before you get from the first notes of the prologue to the majestic "triumphant" finale, almost ninety minutes of time pass, which, however, is important"