Jaroslav Ježek (1906-1942) was a Czech composer, pianist and conductor, author of jazz, classical, incidental and film music. He was almost blind from a young age. He studied composition at the Prague Conservatory as a pupil of Karel Boleslav Jirák (1924–1927), at the master school of composition with Josef Suk (1927–1930), and shortly also with Alois Hába (1927–1928). Ježek met the playwrights/comedians Jan Werich and Jiří Voskovec, leaders of the Osvobozené divadlo (Prague Liberated Theatre) in Prague, and took up the post of main composer and conductor for the theatre. During the next decade (from 1928 to 1939), he composed incidental music, songs, dances, and ballets for the comic and satirical plays of Voskovec and Werich. In 1934 he became a member of Czech Group of Surrealists. Forced to leave Czechoslovakia following the Nazi occupation, Ježek, Voskovec and Werich went into exile in New York City. He worked as a piano teacher and choirmaster there, and continued to work with Voskovec and Werich. In 1942, the long-ill Ježek died of chronic kidney disease in New York. On December 29, 1941, two days before his death, Ježek married Frances Bečáková. He collaborated with many avant-garde artists of pre-war Czechoslovakia, such as Vítězslav Nezval and E. F. Burian. His musical output is commonly divided into two parts. One one hand, his work consists of chamber, piano and concertant compositions, created first under the influence of Stravinsky, of the Parisian Les Six and of Arnold Schönberg. On the other hand, he also became a popular jazz composer in pre-war Czechoslovakia. Between 1929 and 1936, possibly earlier, Ježek organized and conducted an orchestra featuring his original jazz compositions and arrangements. His jazz recordings, very few of which could have survived the Nazi occupation and World War II, are popular till today in his homeland but almost completely unknown in the USA. In this brilliant 1933 recording, Ježek's band is directed by Jiří Srnka (1907-1982), who was a Czech composer. Since the age of eight he was a student of the legendary violin pedagogue Otakar Ševčík, and after his admission to the Prague Conservatory, he studied violin and composition alongside with Otakar Šín. In 1928, he was admitted to a master class with Vítězslav Novák and Alois Hába. All his life he devoted himself to film music. He wrote music for nearly two hundred feature films such as Krakatit, Jan Hus and Dařbuján a Pandrhola, but also for many series. Besides film scores, however, he also wrote a number of vocal and instrumental compositions.
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Music