Sziget summary, Sziget to come, and a bit about festivals...

No better place than Sziget to test the Frenchman's capacity in foreign languages. My place at the information desk of the festival was mostly for the purpose of helping these incorrigable french tourists who barge into a totally foreign culture 'come dans en un moulin' (as in a windmill), with their french language and their incapacity to adapt to difference.
I find it's a very harsh stereotype - many hungarians actually have a very tainted image of french for this very reason - as most of them gave their best effort into speaking english (with the little they knew, that's true, but still). Italians I encountered were quite the opposite, refusing even to try and communicate spanish with me (no one behind the sziget information desk speaks italian I'm sorry to say - or at least it wasn't the case last year). In any case it's quite a privileged position among festival-goers (because this is what I am, whichever door I'm going through to make it to the different concerts), and I love the contact with the lost and happy 'tourists' and festival regulars.
Last year, a french girl came up to me and said she woke up this morning under a tree, all her possessions lost (her tent, her wallet, passport, mp3s and whatevers...), but it sounded like quite a joke the way she was explaining it!
Festivals, and Sziget is quite a paradise for this matter, are quite a modern catharsis of daily problems or sorrows as well as they are an - alternative - consumer-land (alternative because it awakens our thoughts on responsibility, and every year more festivals take part in signing such petitions, Sziget being one of them), with every possible service and choice for leisure.
This year, I'll spend 2 more days - 5 in total - and it'll be a fight for energy, but such an awesome one! Check out the webpage for the program (in english):

http://www.sziget.hu/festival_english/programs

My information for future festival goers, is that if you have a weekly Sziget pass (which is a bracelet), don't panick if it's broken or if it's loosing its color, just come to the information desk and we'll direct you towards another tent where you'll be able to get new ones.
Have fun...

Balázs Elemer Groupe: Sziget Fesztivál re-discovery

Balazs Elemer, Elemer Balazs for westerners... his brother Jozsef (Balazs) on Piano, the son of saxophonist Des Laszlo, Andras, on percussion, the unique voice of Gabor Winand, the delicate touch of double bass player Szandai Mátyás, the amazingly improvising Lamm David on guitars, and finally the electrifying purity of Czerovszky Henriett's vocals.
I showed the band to a friend in France not long ago, and in the long line of what he calls 'delicate jazz' I listen to, it's a real jewel. I think it was the album 'around the world'... One of the first I discovered myself. since then I have been running through music stores in Germany for the wonders of the Balazs and Des family, and the uniqueness of Gabor Winand (along with his favourite composer Gabor Gado)... I believe very few hungarians make it into the 'music-business' (as they tend to call it there), and nevertheless it holds so many musicians in its small territory. Balazs Elemer was lucky to have shared his 'shining-cimbal' style (his ride constantly shivers with emotion) with Pat Metheny, a good start to head the new hungarian jazz collective... (link found at the bottom of this post)
I have seen the band twice last year in a few months, once in a very poor atmosphere, in a cinema in central hungarian Szolnok (we were 40 in the room I think, what a waste of quality!), and the second time as headlines of Sziget's jazz 'repertoire' in their very good Jazz tent.
The program Sziget has to offer for jazz is very representative of what Hungarians and their 'eastern neighbours' (often Polish, Czech...) do at the moment, and probably also of what they like. After all this year the jazz tent will be full of amazing moments (I'll talk about that later) with amazing western and hungarian artists...
Balazs Elemer group will headline for the second year in a row, playing before Cameroun bass player Etienne M'Bappe...
I am so looking forward to it, because it is a band that has been looking back and forward in so many places and directions I think it's important to honor such a musical look on the world.
A good example of a strong identity wich hold possibility, I think Balazs Elemer and his 6 virtuosos (they are now 7 on stage) are a brilliant example for young hungarian musicians.

The hungarian jazz collective:
http://www.majazz.hu/html_majazz/angol/aktualis.htm

Balazs Elemer group:
http://www.balazselemergroup.hu

Sziget nostalgia part II

French people abroad are probably the most 'anticipated' and apprehended group of people during the tourist high tide. Sziget was no exception. That is after all the major reason why I work at the information tent with very little hungarian to offer to the locals with lost passports, wallets, tents... Most of the French nevertheless tried to talk to me in English, an offer I wouldn't refuse (but most hungarians speaking french might switch straight away - a kind of eastern communication pragmatism), well glad to test french adaptational capacities. In the face of those french people who went there that failed to get very far with their english (in which case I didn't leave them suffer for too long), I found Italians refusing to try and communicate with me in spanish much worse. If they did know a few words in english, it was generally very rapidly pronouced, and regarding my complete incomprehension, a few refused to even try spanish, or a slower italian I may have found some logic in.
Sziget is curious for me, because it is obviously at the very heart of a very strong Eastern european identity (even putting them 'in eastern Europe' might offend some), and because my own complex but mostly western roots are constantly tested by the available french or british stereotypes.
But people there are very fond of French culture, and although most of them have the worst to say about their experiences in Paris or the south of France, they somehow keep going there, because it's part of the holiday sacrifice, the western exotism. A strong clash of identity hungarians probably like and identify too, altough it must be hard for people who have to speak two or three foreign languages to gain a good professional position in the new european era, to arrive in a country where people sometimes litteraly refuse to try english, or to listen to it.
I have been to Paris a few weeks ago, and was curious to test this facet of french people in Bars, in the street, at Bus-stops... I got surprisingly encouraging results even when I started to talk english, sometimes without even engaging with them to get directions or a particular Bus number. Parisians know their foreign 'numero'... they know their numbers too, but I find it's one of the cities where populations mix the most, in slight contrast to London and its communities.
Everything is complicated in France, maybe too complicated for other cultures, part of the laique ideal, the 'Laic' inheritance. but altough I can feel a bit foreign to everywhere, myself I'm never completely foreign to the french context...

The three days I spent last year in the sziget festival were quite marvellously simple; it made me think of what lake Balaton was to the East-Germans during the soviet regime, a little paradise for us (we western wizzers) and our little problems with it. Hungarians are, to my point of view, such good guests. There is a simple feeling all around this island during festival week in August, and that is pure contact...

Sziget nostalgia part I

The first morning I went to bed on the sziget - this was on the second day of the festival, the crowd was already forming its own natural flow, its own shape - the festival's shadows were sprayed upon the duna, among shouts of early morning drinkers, late night sleepers, common festival sound-landscape. After my first night-walk amongst hungarian led party-animals, discovering the tracks to follow on this small eastern european paradise-factory. The kind of place where hope is taking place, in Budapest's open wound, Sziget, island splitting the gorge between two symbolical worlds.
Pest a very open door to the massive and empty hungarian step... Buda a door we turn our backs on when we work, Buda a hill we pay our respects to when we arrive and depart from Budapest. Sziget is a tribute of the moment to hungary's strength, awakening, and suffering. And the inevitable presence of very hated sponsors doesn't leave me cold. Hungary has gone past this time of waiting, and when I saw Radiohead play in a field packed with probably 50 000 people, Guru hail the city's name with his Brooklyn twang (strangely enough, something like " Be you da pest " ...), or Bootsie quartet make a trendy public display of modernness, I felt warmth to the ears and pleasure to the eyes. It seems Sziget is ever more alive.