Musician Jiří Cerha dies at 78

Jiří Cerha, a longtime member of the C&K Vocal and Spiritual Quintet groups, died on Tuesday at the age of 78. The band Spiritual Quintet announced this on their website . He died 13 days after the Spiritual Quintet ended its 60-year career in Prague’s Lucerna. The oldest Czechoslovak folk group played the last of a series of fourteen farewell concerts there on October 13.

“We received the news with sadness that yesterday (October 26) in the evening Jirek Cerh, called Cidla, went to the musical heaven. Singer, composer, pedagogue, bandleader of C&K Vocal, member of the Spiritual Quintet since 2000. We are very sorry.” introduced by the Spiritual Quintet.

Jiří Cerha was born on June 10, 1943 in Prague. He taught composition and singing at the Prague Conservatory. As a composer, he dealt with stage music and setting music to various classical literary and dramatic works of world literature – such as Shakespeare’s Sonnets translated by Martin Hilský and others. He sings on the albums of the groups C&K Vocal and Spiritual Quintet, he also performed with Petr Skoumal on the album If a Pig Had Wings.

In the Spiritual Quintet, the baritone Cerha acted primarily as a singer. The author’s work is mainly connected with the vocal ensemble C&K Vocal, which he founded in 1970 together with Ladislav Kantor. Cerha had a composing role in it and was an important personality as a performer. In 1974, C&K Vocal recorded the LP Generation, which was not released until three years later. In 1977, C&K Vocal won the Melody Award. “At the eve of the Czech scene, they tried to come up with intelligent music, basically art rock music,” said music publicist Ondřej Bezr.

In the 1980s, the group passed a number of exit bans from the then communist regime. Since 1990, the band has had to do without Ladislav Kantor, who became an adviser to President Václav Havel. The group was engaged in the Labyrinth Theater in Prague, where Cerha has been a music dramatist for seven years since 1991. He has been the head of C&K Vocal since 1988, in 2000 he became a member of the Spiritual Quintet. In an interview with Právo, Cerha recently stated that he planned to finish a book about C&K Vocal.

Cerha is also the author of many stage music, songs for the Semafor Theater, for the Realistic Theater in Prague and for the Theater in Příbram.