the year 1973 meant a lot in the world of music, in the world and also at home. Dežo Ursiny (October 4, 1947 – May 2, 1995) was already an established musician on the domestic scene, a respected author and from the very beginning perceived as an uncompromising young man with a strong opinion on the world, his surroundings and especially on music. He applied it absolutely, precisely and very strictly. This resulted in his first solo album Provisorium.
center of glory
In retrospect, we can hardly imagine Dež Ursiny in the spotlight standing in front of a passionate and young audience. It would not be because the audience has grown old, but mainly because the ovations went by the wayside with the musical development of the main protagonist, and “serious music” came next, as he once defined it in the beginning. In the first half of the 1960s, like most of the post-war generation, he experienced a musical boom caused by the Liverpool quartet The Beatles. It is not by chance that young Dežo Ursiny and his teammates experienced a previously unseen wave of federal fame in the similar-looking line-up of the Bratislava group The Beatmen.
In 1966, the black suits and the touch of the Beatles were replaced by “sober gray sweaters”, as one period review described them to the readers, and in which the trio, led by Ursiny, performed at the 1st Czechoslovak Beat Festival in Prague. The winners were The Soulmen, where twenty-year-old Dežo Ursiny begins to apply his new musical vision and feeling. From naive, unbridled youthful compositions, the work alongside bassist Fedor Freš and drummer Vlad Mallé becomes more thoughtful, and especially in it you can feel Ursina’s already very mature handwriting. His early creative years are documented only by two singles from The Beatmen era and one small EP by The Soulmen. However, all of them are full of fantastic songs such as Let’s Make a Summer, I Wish I Were or Baby Do Not Cry, which even today stand up to the world music of that time.
a new stage
After less than a year of operation of The Soulmen group, Dežo Ursiny decided to rebuild the band for a while. The group under the renewed name The New Soulmen did not work much longer and did not perform a single concert, but it nevertheless became a significant point in Ursina’s career. Today, few people know that in addition to bassist Fedor Letňan and drummer Petr Mráz, keyboard player and singer Janko Lehotský also worked in this line-up. He was still waiting for his star moment as a composer of popular evergreens, but with his participation in the musically demanding and uncompromising Ursiny, he proved his excellent qualities. “Dež and I were quite close, we visited each other, we played the piano together. He admired my high falsetto – I was much younger then. At that time, he really liked Cream, and I liked rhythm and blues and Ray Charles, I was inclined towards black expression, so we complemented each other well”, Janko Lehotský remembers this period.
The creation of the group The New Soulmen was slowly approaching what Dežo Ursiny brought to a successful end on his first solo album. The first prog rock bands like Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Genesis, Yes were slowly emerging in the world, and some of them had already released their debut albums. Despite all the circumstances, Dežo Ursina did not lag behind in the musical direction at all, although he probably did not catch the prog boom of the year in any particular way. Only two radio recordings survive from this period, one of which is the song It’s Time, which combines the influence of the slowly fading sixties with the touch of something that was still waiting for its moment. The composition is elaborate and carefully rehearsed, which Janko Lehotský also proves: “Dežo was a great commander, he knew what he wanted. He was very tough in exams, he rarely smiled. He also knew how to praise a little, but he was always very strict. He wrote very difficult compositions, harmonically, but mainly vocally – with unusual intervals. The vocals were really good, perfectly built, sounded good and above all they were very demanding. We had to be in very good shape to sing them.”
fateful meeting
On August 21, 1968, tanks of “friendly” armies invaded Czechoslovakia, and their tracks passed through human, family, social, and finally musician destinies. Many of them emigrated abroad, and distance broke all ties. The New Soulmen broke up as well, and Dežo Ursiny started looking for and building a new musical project again. No other adjective can be attributed to the meeting with Jaro Filip as fateful. Their musical collaboration continued for the rest of his life, until Dežo Ursiny’s untimely death in 1995. Jaro Filip was a faithful servant of the black and white keyboard, an exceptional musician and a catalyst for the musical ideas of his closest musical colleague, but it was never easy with him: “At first, Dežo was on an egocentric type in exams, he controlled it all and demanded certain things harshly. From the beginning, he was literally in the role of a teacher: play this like this and so on. However, this cannot be sustained for long on either side. However, everything is a matter of soul mates. In the end, however, he got so used to my beglait (in musical jargon, accompaniment, author’s note) that it was difficult to get used to another one,” recalled Jaro Filip about the beginnings of the collaboration.
It was during this period, at the turn of the sixties and seventies, that the first seeds of the musical compositions of the first album began to germinate. They were created over a long period of time and gradually, at the piano and later at joint rehearsals. Other members of the group gathered around the main couple. The line-up was variable, Dežo Ursiny at this time was characterized by constant changes in his band, but for a while bassist Marcel Daniš and drummer Vlado Mallý anchored in it. This quartet also played several concerts, one of them is even captured on an amateur recording and can be found on the album Pevniny a Vrchy II. (Rarities). Dežo Ursiny and his Provisional rightly attracted attention at the time, and in the relatively small federal world of Czechoslovakia, every concert or recording was under the careful scrutiny of listeners and fans.
in the studio
After quite a long time of composing, rehearsing and live presentation, it was time for recording. “Although we had it well rehearsed, it suffered from too much rehearsing, there was a feeling of dullness,” recalled Jaro Filip, and so it can be said that the recording came at the best time. It took place in a typical place for that time – in the studio of Supraphon in Prague – Dejvicy. He was consecrated by the young producer Hynek Žalčík with his exceptional abilities. It is his name that unites several phenomenal recordings that were created under his baton and the same studio in the course of one year: Šľahačková prinzná by Pavel Hammel and Prúdov and Kuře v Hodinky by the Flamengo group. In the atmosphere of normalization that was increasingly coming in at the time, these albums became, among others, shining jewels of domestic rock. This “Žalčíkov” trio was finally completed by the Provisorium.
The recording took place during two weeks in June 1972. In the studio, Dežo Ursiny met Jaro Filip and the studio group, which became the members of the aforementioned Flamengo. Hynek Žalčík thus brought together the best musicians from both sides of the Morava River. “Guma Kulhánek and Erno Šedivý were big beat crazy”, recalled Jaro Filip. And although the group rehearsed for three days before recording, because the form was very complex, later they bet on collective empathy and affinity. “Dežo discovered that feeling and “courage” cannot be achieved by trying. I told Dež that x times, sometimes he was even angry, but I honestly think that the band’s harmony is not in the rehearsal”, recalled Jaro Filip. Other members of Flamengo joined the band: wind instrument player Jan Kubík and Vladimír Mišík also helped with vocals. “…Perhaps for the first time, leading rock musicians put aside their famous rivalry and “lent” each other their kumšt. (…) The record was created in a friendly, unhurried and selfless atmosphere, and this is reflected in its mood as well,” writes producer Hynek Žalčík in the accompanying text to the album.
The album consists of four tracks. Each of them is characterized by something different, but together they form one strong unit of the album statement. Today we can only wonder and ask where Dežo Ursiny got his inspiration from. The longest of them in terms of time – and without a doubt the most rearranged, the twenty-two minute composition Christmas Time is a unique phenomenon, because similarly constructed compositions in the world‘s progressive music were also created or released at a similar time to our aforementioned album. Dežo Ursina was still generous at this time. In contrast to his future approach to guitar playing, he performed a fantastically rich solo here, proving his extraordinary talent in this direction as well. The second half of the album consists of three songs. Looking for the Place to Spend Next Summer is a somewhat dreamy and fantastically arranged song. The next one is I Have Found, which came from the days of The Soulmen, but with enriched arrangements, it became a completely different song, and the whole album closes with a fantastic drum solo by Jaroslav “Ern” Šedivý. The jewel in the middle is perhaps one of Ursina’s most beautiful compositions, the piano-vocal Apple Tree in Winter.
big beat in english
From today’s point of view, it is quite surprising that the Provisional saw the light of day in the atmosphere of that time. Normalization took on monstrous proportions and affected all areas of art. The very first prerequisite for the ban was the music itself, but the lyrics, as the names of the songs suggest, were in English. From the very beginning, Dežo Ursiny recognized only the English language of song texts. Ursina did not abandon this, at the time, downright Sisyphean work even on the album. “Since the days of Soulmen, Dežo left the texting to me. I didn’t really want to write lyrics either. It’s a terrible job: to think in English with a limited vocabulary… The second thing is that I learned a lot of English, I looked for English books in second-hand shops, especially poetry”, recalled the author of the lyrics Juraj Lihosit years later. “I found Christmas Time very difficult to write. At that time, I avoided Dež so that I wouldn’t have to hand him over. Sometimes he played me some passages of the songs, whether I meant it, in terms of the atmosphere, and so on.” Eventually, however, Dežo Ursiny abandoned English, and the complex musical form was complemented by the no less fragmented lyrics of the poet Ivan Štrpka or the more accessible lyrical statements of Ján Štrasser.
fifty years in the light of the world
After the release of the album, Dežo Ursiny went silent for a few years. Prohibitions came next, his further work was also determined by finding a new lyricist, and he began working as a dramaturg of a short film in the Koliba studios. However, with the album Provisorium, he began writing a unique series of eleven albums that are unlike anything else, unique and original. They are still referred to and followed up on. They are a brand of exceptional quality, a musician’s and lyricist’s kumšt.
The Provisorium album also conceptually revived the story of Dež Ursiny in 2017, when it was first released in a reissued vinyl edition, as the original editions had become a hopelessly unavailable and prized item. Today, after six years, it is quite different, and fanatics and new fans can listen to Dež Ursiny again on vinyl.
All authentic statements were taken with the permission of the author from the book Dežo Ursina Pevniny a Vrchy (Marian Jaslovský, Slovart, 2011), for which I sincerely thank him.
The author is a music blogger, you can find his blog at https://blog.sme.sk/ivancak.
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