01
A question. A yes. A club.
More than twenty years ago, I met a woman who inspired me – and who, in different ways, would remain part of my life for years to come. She was already making things happen in Ostrava that caught my attention. We talked. We had a glass of wine. And at some point during that evening, she asked me a surprisingly simple question: “Would you like to open a music club next to mine on Stodolní Street?”
I hadn't been dreaming of owning a club. I didn't have a business plan. I didn't know how to run one. But sometimes a moment arrives before you've had time to prepare for it.
Yes or no? I said yes.
The next day, I went to see the space. It was a former slaughterhouse. Promising. But I wasn’t there alone. At the time, I was organising a Christian music conference in the mountains near Ostrava, bringing together people from different countries. Some of our guests from England came with me to see the space. I told them about this slightly crazy idea of opening a music club.
Did I have the money to make it happen? I didn’t. But something had already been built between us during those days together: trust. They believed in me, and they believed in the idea. They decided to support it – morally and financially. And suddenly something that hadn’t existed the evening before had begun to become real.
A space waiting to become a place.
The club takes shape.
Then came the slightly less romantic part. I had to figure out how to run a club. So I learned. Over the next five years, the club became a world of its own. I programmed concerts, worked with artists, managed the place – and spent nights behind the bar because I wanted to understand the club from every side.
And then the room filled with people.
That experience taught me something I still believe today:
If you really want to understand a world, step inside it.
02
What if we opened the gates?
During those same years, another world was growing alongside mine. Remember the woman from that first evening? By then, she had become much more than the woman who had asked me a question over a glass of wine. We had become close friends. For years, our lives and our work grew alongside each other. Sometimes she showed me a way forward. Sometimes I did the same for her.
In different moments, we became guides for each other. When we first met, she was already running one of the best-known music clubs in the region – the club next to which I would open mine. But her world was growing too. She had created an international music festival in Ostrava, and year by year it was becoming something much bigger. My world began to grow with it.
While I was still living the everyday reality of my own club, I also began creating and managing club and church stages across the city as part of the festival. Suddenly, the world was coming to my city. Artists, music, languages and cultures from places I had never been. For several years, I experienced from the inside what a growing international festival could do – how it could change the atmosphere of a place and expose people to worlds they might otherwise never encounter.
But over time, I started noticing something else. What happened outside the festival gates. It was a ticketed event. Not everyone in Ostrava could, or wanted to enter. The festival was alive. Much of the city around it still felt as if it was sleeping. And that left me with another question:
What if we opened the gates?
What if international culture didn’t only happen inside a festival site? What if we brought it directly into the streets – free, accessible, unexpected? That question became Festival in the Streets.
03
“People won’t come.”
As tends to happen with new ideas, there were plenty of reasons why it apparently wouldn’t work. Without big names, people won’t come. Why would anyone stop for an artist they’d never heard of? For unfamiliar music, another culture, something they hadn’t planned to see? Fair questions. But there was another one: What if they did? They did.
People stopped. Listened. Stayed.
And over the next five years, something began to happen. People started coming without needing to know exactly what they were coming for. They trusted us. Year after year, I realised that something more interesting was happening than simply building an audience. People were becoming curious. For a few days each year, the city felt different. People stopped. Listened. Stayed. Encountered something unfamiliar.
We didn’t just build an audience. We built curiosity.
Music, close enough to become part of everyday life.
04
And somewhere along the way – Barcelona.
During those years, I travelled too. And Barcelona got under my skin. The sounds. The smells. The colours. The processions. Giant figures moving through the streets as if this were perfectly normal. And I loved that. I wasn’t simply watching the city. I felt part of it. But one thing fascinated me more than anything else: the castells – human towers built by communities.
People standing on each other’s shoulders. Another layer. Then another. And eventually, a child climbing all the way to the top. Everyone below responsible for making sure that child came safely back down. I remember looking at it and thinking: This is trust. And then, inevitably, another question arrived. What if Ostrava could experience this? There were many practical reasons why bringing something like that to Ostrava would be complicated.
But by then I had developed a fairly persistent response to that kind of problem: Why not? In 2017, hundreds of Catalan musicians, singers, dancers, acrobats and performers came to Ostrava. For a moment, Ostrava became Barcelona.
A Catalan human tower in Ostrava.
Not literally. That would have required considerably more Gaudí. But something happened. One world had entered another. People who might never have travelled to Barcelona suddenly stood in the streets of Ostrava watching a Catalan human tower rise above them. And I learned something else: You don’t always have to know exactly what will happen when two worlds meet. Sometimes you just have to bring them close enough.
One world entering another.
05
When a meeting leads somewhere.
But bringing worlds together didn’t only happen in the streets. Around the same time, another idea had begun to grow. I had seen what could happen when an audience encountered something unfamiliar. Now I became curious about another kind of encounter. What if the meeting itself could lead somewhere? What if we brought artists together not only with audiences, but with people who could open doors beyond Ostrava – festival programmers, agents, promoters and music professionals from other countries?
That idea became Czech Music Crossroads. For twelve years, it brought artists and music professionals together in Ostrava. Some meetings lasted twenty minutes. Some relationships lasted years. And some opened doors to stages and opportunities far beyond the city. Crossroads changed the way I thought about what an event could actually do. A concert mattered. But sometimes what happened after the concert mattered even more.
I began to understand that the most important thing you create isn’t always the event itself.
Sometimes it’s a connection that leads somewhere.
A shared moment.
06
I ask questions.
By then, many years had passed since that first conversation over a glass of wine. And looking back, I could see that certain questions kept returning. When somebody says: “You can’t do that.” Have you tried? When somebody says: “We don’t know how.” Who said somebody else knows how to do it better? And when the argument is: “It’s never been done here before.”
There is one question I find particularly difficult to resist: Why not? Of course, not every idea is brilliant. There are budgets. Regulations. Logistics. Physics. Occasionally even common sense. Unfortunately. But I am suspicious of the moment when difficult quietly becomes impossible simply because we are used to doing things another way.
Are we sure this is impossible, or are we just very used to doing it another way?
THINGS BEGIN BEFORE THEY EXIST.
Looking back across all those years, I began to recognise something else. Things often exist in our minds before they exist in the world. First, we see them. Then we begin to create them. We see something that isn’t there yet. A club. A festival in the streets. A meeting between people who don’t know each other yet. A new platform. Then we start talking about it.
Someone adds an idea. Someone sees a connection. Someone says: “I know someone you should talk to.” And slowly, something begins to take shape. We start giving the idea a world to exist in. It may not have a name yet. Or a budget. Or a plan. Sometimes not even a particularly convincing chance of success. But it has begun. I’ve seen that happen too many times over the past twenty years not to believe in it.
And then comes the interesting question: Do we step into that world and start building it – or do we leave it as an idea? I know which option usually makes me more curious.
07
So, what next?
More than twenty years after that first glass of wine, there is Across Worlds. It didn’t come from nowhere. It grew from everything that came before it – the club, the streets, the encounters between cultures, the friendships and relationships built along the way, and twelve years of Czech Music Crossroads. In many ways, it continues that story. But it also takes it somewhere new.
Czech Music Crossroads taught me what can happen when the right people meet. Across Worlds begins with the same belief – and asks how much further those connections can go. It isn’t my attempt to recreate what I’ve already done. I’ve already done that. It carries everything those years gave me – experience, mistakes, friendships, trust, relationships, curiosity and a fairly persistent habit of asking questions.
But it is looking forward. I want to keep discovering. To walk into places I don’t know. To meet people whose worlds are different from mine. To connect people who might otherwise never meet. To open doors – and sometimes simply point to a door nobody has noticed yet. Because more than twenty years ago, somebody did something very similar for me. Someone I had only just met asked me a question.
I said yes. Other people believed in me – and in an idea that didn’t exist yet. And a new world opened. I have never forgotten what that can make possible. There are still people I haven’t met. Places I don’t know. Stories I haven’t heard. Ideas we haven’t imagined yet. And probably quite a few things somebody will tell me can’t be done. Good. We’ll have something to talk about.
Together, along the way.
ACROSS WORLDS
A new chapter. The same curiosity. And one question I’m not ready to stop asking:
Why not?
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