When the great jazz progressive Duke Ellington himself plays Happy Birthday on the piano for your fifth birthday, and practically since your birth, "uncles" and "aunts" named Miles Davis, Count Basie or Ella Fitzgerald have been walking around the house, and then you get to high school and your classmate is a certain Saul Hudson, who's always picking up a guitar somewhere and in a few years the whole world will know him as Slash, it's hard not to fall for the muses. Also, why resist when you have an artistic background, obvious talent, are left at home to bang pots from the age of three until you can "beat" real drums, and at five you start picking up the guitar very quickly.
Lenny Kravitz's first pure funk-rock and very "60s" album, Let Love Rule, on which he played most of the instruments (which would become his standard for the future), was released in 1989 and, despite the huge competition, was quite a success, surprisingly mainly in Europe. A consequence perhaps even more significant than the album itself was the invitation to open for such aces as Bob Dylan, David Bowie and Tom Petty. Not only did he get a first-hand look at "how the greats do it", but he also got to meet the new star live in front of the right audience - and Lenny's concerts were big shows from the start. Which has lasted to this day.
Starting with his second, and immediate double-platinum album Mama Said, Lenny Kravitz embarked on a devilish career of stardom from which he hasn't stepped out since. Hit after hit, of which there were so many that when he closed the ninth decade with their Greatest Hits compilation, it sold over eleven million copies and the selection became one of the decade's most successful albums. And it wasn't just the commercial assault that kept Lenny Kravitz at the top of the charts: he was always taken very seriously and with respect by the music industry as well. He has been nominated for and won a long list of awards, among which the Grammy for Male Rock Vocal Performance stands out in particular, which he won four times in a row between 1999 and 2002, setting a record that has never been broken before.
In Lenny Kravitz, the Colours of Ostrava will welcome a multi-talented artist who has managed to reach millions of fans with the music he has built on a solid foundation of rock, funk, soul and rhythm and blues, who not only wait anxiously for each of his new recordings, but also enthusiastically come to his concerts with the justified expectation of a great experience. And don't worry, Lenny won't be intimidated by a festival crowd of many thousands. Already in 2005 he attracted three hundred thousand fans to his solo concert on the Brazilian Copacabana beach, and two years later at the Live Earth charity concert he had even a hundred thousand more under the stage. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)