Parting the Iron Curtain

Mandolinist learned from smuggled American music

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Even during the height of the Cold War, American country music thrived in the Eastern Bloc of the Soviet Union.

Radim Zenkl was born and raised behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia, and said he relied on smuggled albums to get his Americana fix.

“It wasn’t on the mainstream media because anything from the West was not encouraged,” Zenkl said. “You couldn’t buy it. You couldn’t even own western currency. But there was a big passion for Western culture in general, things like cowboy movies and the Wild West, country music, guitars.”

Fortunately, the black market was efficient and thriving, Zenkl said.

“It was very difficult to get the music from the mainstream, but in the underground there was a great network,” he said. “Somebody would smuggle in an LP and people would make copies — in those days reel-to-reel. I would never see the jacket of the LP, but we knew the songs and how the players sounded. On reel-to-reel it was easy to slow down with one button, so we were transcribing solos and learning from it.”

Zenkl fell in love with the western music, and learned how to play it on the mandolin, he said. Since then, he has immigrated to the United States and become a formidable musician, having won the U.S. Mandolin Championship in 1992.

PT Performance

Zenkl will perform at 6:30 p.m. March 10 at the Port Townsend Friends Meeting Hall, 1841 Sheridan St. The proceeds from the show will help Zenkl build a home after his former residence in Paradise, California was destroyed by the Camp Fire in November.

“The reason he is touring here currently is that he lost his home and his lifelong legacy of original music, rare instruments and all his personal memorabilia in the (fire),” said Al Bergstein, concert organizer. “He was out on tour with just the usual instruments he tours with, and the clothes he had with him. There was a huge GoFundMe concert that San Francisco musicians held for him a few months back, but it still didn’t get enough to really rebuild in total. All the funds from this concert will be given to Radim.”

Zenkl is a one-of-a-kind player whose performance should not be missed, Bergstein said.

“I consider him one of the top mandolin players in the world today,” he said. “I have taken lessons from him in the past. He is a very good teacher and he was the U.S. champion ... and that is not easy. That is a premier place if you want to prove your chops as a mandolin player. That is where you go to do that if you want to compete.”

Bergstein said he is a fan of Zenkl as a person as well as a musician.

“He is a wonderful human being, really funny and has a great sense of humor, both musically as well as personally,” he said. “He is really fun to watch, plus the fact that he does the flute as well. He is a very good flute player and brings a lot of flutes to his concerts.”

Born into communism

Zenkl, born in 1966, grew up about 200 miles east of Prague in the town of Ostrava, where his father taught classical music at the university there, according to his website. From a young age, he studied piano and classical guitar. He began playing the mandolin at age 13, to his father’s chagrin, he said.

“My father was a classical musician and initially he was worried that I picked the mandolin because in his world the mandolin is not a real instrument,” Zenkl said. “Even though there are some pieces for mandolin written by classical composers, in his knowledge there were very few of them. He said, ‘You can play all that stuff in one evening. What are you going to do then?’”

After hearing American bluegrass, became devoted to it at age 17.

“By the time I was born ... there were several bands playing American country music and later bluegrass, copying American bands like The Stanley Brothers,” Zenkl said. “It was pretty incredible. In the 1980s there were a number of bluegrass festivals and music bands, all amateur but with a couple of professional ones. It was OK with the ruling party because bluegrass was considered the music of oppressed American farmers.”

In those days there were close to 100 bands playing bluegrass, Zenkl said.

“It was the second country after the USA in the amount of bands. The first country in the amount of bluegrass bands per capita because it was a small country.”

The popularity of bluegrass probably could be traced to the veterans who returned home to Czechoslovakia after World War I, Zenkl said.

“There was a group of young people who were in the military basically fighting in the trenches, who liked the aspect of the war of being outside in nature,” he said. “After the war was over, they continued every weekend to go back to the fields, woods and mountains and just camp out like unorganized boy scouts. They billed themselves ‘tramps,’ which is not quite the same meaning of the term in the U.S. They were not bums. They were interested in nature and definitely in the legacy of the Wild West and Native Americans, and learning about living in the outdoors.”

The tramps often traveled with guitars and four-string banjos, writing music throughout the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, Zenkl said.

“They would write original folk songs in the style of popular music — swing, tangos and fox-trots. They were great songs that are still played today. That was good fertile ground for playing guitar and singing songs.”

Then in 1964, Pete Seeger toured Czechoslovakia, a watershed moment for American style country music in a place that already had strong folk roots, Zenkl said.

“Seeger was invited behind the Iron Curtain to Czechoslovakia,” he said. “That was the first time a five-stringed banjo got to the Czech Republic, and people there say that was the turning point, because until then we only knew of the Dixieland four-string banjos. People were really inspired by this. I think this really started a movement of following more American folk music, which led into discovering bluegrass.”

Learning the style

Unable to get music sheets or LPs, all of the bluegrass songs learned by musicians in Czechoslovakia were transcribed by ear, Zenkl said.

“Literally there were bands playing bluegrass copying from American bands almost note for note, sometimes using phonetic English, sometimes writing Czech lyrics,” he said. “That was the source of learning. We didn’t have good instruments, but we were good craftsmen, so people started making copies of mandolins, guitars, banjos and dobros.”

Between 1984 and 1989, Zenkl played in and led several bluegrass bands. He also performed as a soloist with the State Opera Orchestra of Ostrava and the Janacek Philharmonic Symphony of Ostrava on several occasions, according to his website.

Access to the music brightened the lives of those who were exposed to it, Zenkl said.

“The music definitely helped us to keep the spirit,” he said. “Sometimes it was very depressing, but being able to go to the bluegrass festival which was very liberating. The organizers always had to invite some jazz bands from Russia to please the political party. Sometimes they were very good and sometimes they are very terrible. There were also jazz musicians from the West, and they were incredible.”

Still, many of the tramps decided to escape to the West, Zenkl said.

“Those are people with free spirits,” he said. “They escaped to Canada, the United States, Switzerland and Australia. The fact that people were leaving left and right, well, maybe something is not working here.”

Zenkl decided to follow suit.

“Originally I wanted to go to Canada. But then when I was 18, I got more involved in bluegrass music and I found out there were way more bands here and just a bigger musical scene in general.”

Zenkl said he escaped Czechoslovakia four months before the fall of communism and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area.