Yes, yes, there are those photos with a bow tie and tuxedo, a polished bald head and a clean-shaven face, in which Jiří Stivín looks like Jeff Bezos, who has just come back from a charity event, beaming.
However, most of the illustrations show him with the notorious flat cap, stubbly beard, slouchy look and a face wrinkled with fate.
Just like a clochard who only leaves his accustomed quarters under some Seine bridge when he has to collect a few sous for a new bottle of red wine on the Rue de la Huchette with his battered recorder.
The Czech jazz musician Jiří Stivín has cultivated his image of the lovable bohemian for a long time.
Actually, he is only known when he mischievously plays a nose flute, puts two reed instruments in his mouth as if he were an antique aulos player, but mostly when he strides across the stage with a flute, under the deep umbrella of his much too large one Hat cunningly blinks out and utters wonderful jazz phrases, sensually melodic, sometimes sensitively tracking down the folk tones of his Bohemian homeland and always with enormous rhythmic drive.
At home in jazz as in classical music
The whole battery of different saxophones and clarinets is of course also part of his instrument pool.
Stivín, however, has turned the tables on the traditional hierarchy of wind instruments in jazz.
He is not a saxophonist who occasionally also plays the flute.
He is irrevocably a flute player who also knows how to make musical use of anything you can put in your mouth.
What's more: Stivín belongs to the handful of serious jazz musicians who are at home in jazz as well as in classical music, perhaps better: in Renaissance and Baroque music.
With the Collegium Quodlibet, for example, he immersed himself deeply in the past in order to create brilliant sound art from twelve raw tones;
not dissimilar to the Prague alchemists of the time of Emperor Rudolf II, who are said to have turned base materials into gold.
The most amazing thing about the career of the native of Prague is of course that he, who comes from an acting family and was initially trained as a cameraman at the Prague Film Academy, until he discovered the musician in himself, learned to play the saxophone autodidactically, played in various rock bands and finally his actual instrument, the flute in all versions.
But even then he was always an unconventional artist.
He studied jazz with Johnny Dankworth at the Royal Academy in London, was a member of Cornelius Cardew's experimental Scratch Orchestra, belonged to the Czech Radio Big Band and Milan Svoboda's ensemble, recorded with legendary bandleader Gustav Brom, performed with combos by Karel Velebny and Martin Kratochvíls Jazz Q and founded his own free jazz group "Jiří Stivín & Co." and his successful duo Systém Tandem with guitarist Rudolf Dašek.
Basically he has shared the stage with all the great European jazz musicians since the 1970s, with Albert Mangelsdorff and Radu Malfatti, Willem Breuker and Alan Skidmore, Trevor Watts, Tony Scott, Pierre Favre and Zbigniew Seifert.
He was also a frequent soloist with orchestras and ensembles.
For Jiří Stivín, who taught at the Prague Conservatory and recently often with his children, the drummer Jiří Stivín jr.
and the singer Zuzanna Stivínova, there seems to be no retirement.
Around his 80th birthday today, he can still be seen in Prague's jazz clubs.