The band's first performance took place where it is still at home today: on Hus-Platz in Rakovník in Central Bohemia. Founded on 1 May 1990, six months after the Velvet Revolution, Brass Band Rakovník has devoted itself to a style known in the Czech Republic as orthodox Dixieland. This means New Orleans jazz from the 1920s and 1930s, played in an instrumentation faithful to that era: cornet, trombone and clarinet in the frontline, with banjo, sousaphone and drums underneath.
This school is heard in the collective interplay of the three horn players. The cornet leads the melody, the clarinet weaves around it in high runs, and the trombone adds glissandi in the lower register. Banjo and sousaphone keep the two-beat rhythm that works for marching, and that is meant quite literally: the band also performs as a street band and needs no electricity for that.
What sets the musicians from Rakovník apart from many style-related groups is the language. They have fitted the tunes in their repertoire with their own Czech lyrics, which are usually humorous. Singing follows the example of the old masters, sometimes in chorus, sometimes through the megaphone, and on foreign tours occasionally in German as well. One of their most successful numbers is called "Solární baron", and when it is played, the band invites the audience to sing along and join in with fitting hand movements.
Trombonist Sláva Vaic hosts the programme. At a home concert in Rakovník, he greeted the audience by remarking that, after all, everyone knew each other. Since the band was founded, it has released seven studio albums and one best-of compilation, along with hundreds of concerts at home and abroad.
The road led to Dixieland festivals in Tarragona, in the Portuguese town of Cantanhede, to Fredericia in Denmark, to Posen, Bromberg and Riga. Dresden has a place of its own on this list. The band’s first performances at the festival on the Elbe are regarded in the band’s history as a musical breakthrough; since then, the band has kept coming back.
You don’t need to know Czech to enjoy the Rakonitzer. The rhythm of banjo and sousaphone speaks for itself, and everyone can sing along with the chorus after the second run-through.