The most famous Latvian jazz-funk band “Very Cool People” continues its artistic flight at unlimited heights. Their eighth album \u201c50 Years of Influence + 30 Years of Cool Equals 13 Years of Music Hooliganism\u201d is a positive musical irony about Latvia’s turbulent recent history. There is also a new video – the fifth single “Rapid Dough – Pelmjak\u0161ki\u201d from this album.<\/p>\n
With this instrumental music album, the band members pay tribute to their teachers and the previous generations of musicians, who helped jazz and rock and roll to survive behind the Iron Curtain, as well as get through the crazy nineties in the Baltic States. Everything is already mentioned in the title of the album – jazz here is intertwined with classical music, Balkan music with metal, surf music with funk and soul, but choral music with klezmer and the musical heritage of other peoples living in Latvia.<\/p>\n
This is an instrumental album of original music, where compositions are written by the group’s guitarist and bandleader Elvijs Grafcovs, saxophonists M\u0101ris J\u0113kabsons and Kristaps Lubovs, drummer Andris Bui\u0137is and the group’s keyboardist M\u0101ris Vitkus, for whom this is his debut in composing.<\/p>\n
This is the band’s eighth album and the fifth in the row released since 2017, the band still fulfilling their promise to release a stylistically different new album every year, which at the same time is paying homage to the work culture of musicians in the past.<\/p>\n
The album was recorded in the legendary basement studio of the Riga Reformed Church \u201cMints Music Studio\u201d by no less than the legendary recording engineer T\u0101lis Timrots. Andris Buikis mixed the recorded material in Ciemupe & the whole group\u2019s members relentlessly and pleasantly commented each step of the mixing process. The record is produced by Elvijs Grafcovs and mastered by the master legend Dave McNair at the Dave McNair Mastering Studio in North Carolina, USA.<\/p>\n