Meditating Four – Meditácia nad vášňou
from compilation “Beatová horúčka 1965-70”, 1989, Opus 90132113
original 1989 compilation LP sleeve
Let’s have a look at one of the more obscure tracks from this already quite obscure music blog. The Meditating Four was a legendary Slovak beat and blues combo around 1967 and 1968. The group’s master mind was the singer and guitarist Jozef “Barry” Barina. Earlier he also used to play with another Slovak beat legend, the surf-influenced Players.
Meditácia nad vášňou (Meditation About Passion) is not really a spectacular song. It’s just another variation on the classic twelve bar blues, albeit with a little “twist”. Still, Barina who was then only twenty years old plays some fine guitar licks and the drummer hits it hard and quite funky, making the song sound more like early progressive rock. That puts it relatively ahead of its time, at least in local dimensions. The song has been originally released on a Supraphon seven inch in 1969, the group’s only record. But already in late 1968 they have actually disappeared from the scene. Barina revived the band for another tour in 1971 before he started to work in some Slovak studio orchestras. In the early 1980s he returned to playing the blues with B-Profil. He still ocassionally performs in Bratislava with various blues bands.
The vinyl compilation Beatová horúčka 1965-70 (Beat Fever) has been available on eBay recently. In the 1990s it has been reissued on CD too, but obviously it’s already out of print. There are fourteen rare tracks from Slovak beat groups like the Players, Beatmen, Soulmen, Blues Five, Prúdy or Modus, among others. I will present the “killer” track from that album on Funky Czech-In in a couple of weeks, so stay tuned…
Meditation about passion
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I have a request for your wonderful site: more 60’s girls and Yvonne Prenosilova :) :) :)
Hehe… I can see who your team members are… :)
Obviously you’ll be posting Boty proti lásce yourself, so I might consider another one, although Přenosilová doesn’t really fit into my Funky Czech-In definition; that doesn’t mean that I dislike her though.
Other ladies are in the pipeline. Helena Vondráčková is coming very soon, albeit this time with a 70s jazz-rock song, and a Petra Černocká post is already written, too. More sixties stuff is planned, recently I have found lots of old rarities, mostly on 45s. Watch out for Golden Kids, Jitka Zelenková, Hana Zagorová, Naďa Urbánková, Věra Špinarová, Eva Pilarová, Martha & Tena Elefteriadu, Eva Olmerová, more from Rottrová, Vondráčková, Braňo Hronec with his ladies etc., and of course more from the best of them all, Marta Kubišová.
It’s just that I’m not in a hurry so I’ll continue to post only once a week.
By the way, in case of “eastern” pop you don’t need to fix yourself on the 60s at all. Since we were quite behind the free world, many 70s outings still sound like if they were recorded in the sixties (the upcoming Černocká song will be such an example). Some of the best Czech records from the seventies were still recorded on a 4-track machine while US studios already were using 16 tracks or even more.
Yes, Yvonne Prenosilova is quite good; do you have anything which isn’t available on her current anthology CD, which is highly recommended by me, by the way. Also, can you post more from this beat album as time goes on? Thanks!
As far as I can tell, the Přenosilová song He’s So Heavenly, another Brenda Lee/Jackie DeShannon cover, has only been released on the 1990 vinyl album Sklípek. I don’t remember it but I think it’s a ballad. I’ll check it out when I come home tonight. And That’s All You Gotta Do is available on the CD Singly 1 by Olympic – who were her backing group on many songs around 1964-1965. She didn’t record that much, after she emigrated to Germany in 1968 she gave up recording completely. In fact, Sklípek was her first full album…
As for the Beatová horúčka compilation, I have an absolutely amazing Beatles cover version in the pipeline, one of the funkiest Beatles covers ever and definitely the funkiest version of that song. I just need to do some more research on the group.
Hello Everyone!!!
I have fallen for Yvonne Přenosilová music and I wonder if there is any web or where can I get some of her records in vynil. I might be asking too much. In fact I would like to have any with
Tak Prazdna in it. It could be even the 7″ record.
Regards,
W. Silva
wandson@yahoo.com
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