Creativity Quote by Miroslav Vitous

Identity here isn’t a costume Vitous puts on for interviews; it’s a bodily claim. “Deeply inside of me” rejects the idea that “Slavic” is just an accent you can dial up in a melody or a passport detail you can outgrow once you’ve toured enough. He frames origin as a kind of internal rhythm section: not always foregrounded, but shaping the pulse of everything that follows.

Coming from Vitous, a Czech bassist who moved through jazz’s most cosmopolitan rooms, the line reads as both pride and pushback. Jazz culture often celebrates border-crossing while quietly pressuring musicians to sound “international” in a narrow, American-defined way. Vitous is staking out space for a different lineage of drama, lyricism, and melancholy - the Eastern European sensibility that can feel like weather in the music: long shadows, sudden brightness, a willingness to sit with tension rather than resolve it neatly.

The intent is also defensive in a subtle, tired way. If you’ve been asked, implicitly or explicitly, to justify why you don’t sound like everyone’s idea of jazz orthodoxy, you start answering with anatomy. “It is” becomes a final clause: not a marketing angle, not a genre fusion gimmick, not something to be translated into safer terms.

In a global scene that flattens difference into “world music” seasoning, Vitous’s sentence insists that heritage isn’t spice. It’s source code.