PRAGUE, Czech Republic - Walking around Prague is like strolling through a 15th century fairy tale. Gothic church steeples protrude from clusters of trees and seem to prop up a blanket of blue sky. Stone bridges stretch across the sleepy Vltava River. Clock towers that are about 500 years old chime.
Above it all, Prague Castle - a sprawling complex of churches, convents, courtyards and palaces - sits atop a hill, presiding over the medieval metropolis.
But from deep below the cobblestone streets comes the contemporary sound of Chicago blues.
Accompanied by my friend Michaela Vasickova, a Czech lawyer and jazz/blues lover, I spent an evening at the city's hippest club. U Maliho Glena (A Little Glen) is beneath cobblestoned Karmelitska Street, not far from Prague Castle.
The club is distinguished by its intimate atmosphere and the fact that many local musicians hang out there when they're not playing at one of a handful of other jazz clubs.
Moments before the Rene Trossman Band belted out its first blues number, Michaela and I walked through a ground-level entrance, bypassed the club's restaurant and teetered down a cramped staircase. I paid a $6 cover charge, and we squeezed into a tiny bar packed with blues lovers from England, Germany, the United States and the Czech Republic.
Probably one of the world's smallest live-music venues, U Maleho Glena conjures up images of a midget submarine that has been chopped in half. The narrow bar area was crammed with perhaps 20 standees. A slender doorway led to a performance area barely wide enough to accommodate the keyboard player, bassist, drummer and guitarist.
But therein lay the beauty of the club. Four or five tables ran along either side of the smoke-filled room. The only available chairs were in the front, at a petite table pressed so tightly against the keyboard that I worried my drink might spill on the keys.
The leader of the combo is guitarist Rene Trossman, who hails from my hometown of Chicago. In 1994, five years after the Czech Republic's famed "Velvet Revolution," which transformed the nation from communism to democracy, Trossman moved to Prague. "I came here because the cost of living is affordable," he told me. "And because it gave me the opportunity to form my own band."
After Trossman welcomed the crowd, he leaped into a funky blues number that rocked the little submarine, along with most of the audience crammed inside of it.
Czech keyboard player Jakub Zomer with each dramatic stroke contorted his face into expressions that ran from ecstasy to pain.
The other performers were from the Czech Republic, Ukraine and Slovakia. Their "bluesy-jazz" sound, as Trossman termed it, rivals that of many good bands back in Chicago. But in the club's cozy environment, this night was special.
On other evenings I heard more good music in the brick-walled basement that is the Zelezna jazz club and in Reduta, Prague's oldest and best-known jazz venue. Founded in 1958, when the communists were in power, Reduta has been the venue for jazz notables such as Wynton Marsalis and former President Bill Clinton, who played his saxophone in 1994 to a cheering crowd.
But most nights, I returned to U Maliho Glena, where you pay to listen to one musical set, but no one minds if you stay to listen to all three. After a few nights, the bartender, cocktail server and musicians knew me by name. Though most spoke with heavy Czech accents, it was the first time in 10 months of traveling that I felt as if I were home.
