Road back

Waking up - two years ago

Two years ago, for the first time, I was waking up in a big room, lying on a home-made mattress. It was a first taste of freedom, after an evening spent discovering cheep pints of Borsodi beers and discussing the little experience I had as an independent individual. This had been the first evening on the verge of discovering a new country, discovering myself in a new life. This was not the oriental dream of going east, it was pursuing an urge to travel east of Berlin I inherited from high-school exchanges. I had finished the evening walking along the beautiful Duna with my host, completely drunk and sobbing a broken heart, half-tears, half-részeg. Részeg, for pissed. Stuff I didn't know at the time, having only just nearly registered some of the basic national drink-greeting vocabulary. I was waking up to the smell of something half-pancake, half-bread, or even half-cake. Confusion was such I could easily have analyzed the situation in reference to three halves of a whole.
Not knowing...
This is in many respects, the best thing I inherited from my first 3 weeks in Magyar land.
Not expecting, but ready as a street agent with his digital camera and imaginary weapons.
I woke up on Valentine's day, not realising this for one moment. I ended up at Kriszta and Pille's flat, the blind couple that hosted me before my departure for Debrecen - and was probably interrupting a nice evening for two - still not realising.
Now I realise this day is over, but I love it all the same. Looking forward is something which differs strongly from a fresh arrival, where the only thing that counts in your integration is the desire to experience, discover, feel, and encounter more... Desires which still flourish, but in the same way as one grows a little garden in the back yard, or a little flower bed to show, share, cherish a little happiness.
Akkor marad nekem az angol szó - ezek a szavak mint egy kis virág-ágy adok neked.
Flower-beds from the gentle clouds...

Road back - dreams about Van Gogh and Grey places

Debris - bruises and irony

Strange is a small word in a lunatic world of mad stories.
But meaning is a stranger one still.
Closed in a carpet studio where meaning is muffled and red, where design meets circus and freaks of soviet past end up hung in the garden, crows of a white but innocent silence.
Carpet for the smooth and cleansing humor of ghosts too weak and impossible to answer back, design for the force of style in sacrifice, strange totems are raised
as of those who are bought each day.
To buy, hence to swallow an important amount of frames to fill with our desired images of responsibility, ethics sleeping in the twilight of a golden leaf...
Branches caressing her cheeks while she walks through forest of disordered symbols ending at the tip of my tongue when I see her to the door.
To see, and to be of an order very self-righteously rich in tears - tearing at the bed sheets of our shaken minds gone to blow the wind of our waves. Our waves.
Movement so strange, her cry is muffled by the starkness of our totem's color.

Dresch Quartet - fuvolás

Sziget 2007 - Fifth is you

Five for the family, festival, fairs, fulfilling for the flight of our spirit.
In the dark, lying under trees, amidst a pushing crowd, running for shelter
Under concert tents, at the Gypsy Music Stage, dancing on Tinariwen
Eating both our unique Kebabs at the terrace of empty stomachs, full glasses,
We spilled our looks in the pervading light of our moving shadows.

Fifth you came in the corner of my eye, but together and squeezed
Like in a deep Forest, a vast desert of living air, our water poring,
Crowd or Man, a number of you's and me's, connected souls rising
Up with moving swings of drums, turntables, hollow and high voices
Like of E.A.Poe's dungeons I dream of those tents packed with darkness and smiles.

Sziget festival 2007 - Come fourth, swinging between stages

From Jazz to World Music, I find Hungarians (often the same musicians too) busy with the same fusions, at the same time aspiring for more as in any active culture - the boundaries between interpretation and composition are always pushed back by playing. To play music bares its own meaning, but as for all pleasant games, it is one played with others, and specifically for others.
When I find young percussionist Dés András at work with both Szajról Szajra and Balázs Elemér, when I see the same singer at work with the same traditional ensemble and the Rap Band Anima Sound System, when I listen - eyes closed, this time - to the surprising delights of Winand Gábor's voice at work with Hungarian, Classical, and Jazz improvisational Music as well as with Elsa Valle's Cuban ensemble (where he takes on his saxophone), I believe I can only make but one, certainly obvious, comment:
The Music - Circuit in Hungary is certainly extremely active, but nevertheless the profession of Musician is difficult to achieve a sustainable status... That is why I am moved, excited, pleased and delighted at the dynamism of the music-network in Hungary, similarly to that which exists in Brittany, France, except it exports itself better.

I once met a drummer coming back from Scotland with his wife at the airport of Ferihegy. He told me he lives there touring with local jazz bands, or playing for local sessions, but that the musicians there didn't have such an exciting level as in home-town Budapest, where he was going back to meet up with some friends (drummer Balázs Elemér, guitarist Gábor Gado...) - that he was surprised I knew so well.
Networks of musicians evolve through festivals like Sziget, and although Hungarian culture still transcribes a paradoxical nostalgia of its larger territory ("damn that old Versaille story!") - paradox mainly mixed with an often undermining view of 'ex-hungaro' territories in Transylvania, Romania - despite this I believe Hungary does gain from its small size but great cultural heritage.

Connections are alive in a country once torn by the centralization around cities and factories, away from its dynamic 'folk'- culture, from its hearts, but directions which rapidly gave Hungary a lot of influence as 'Platform of the East', and as a consequence of which the voice of Hungarians always sounded louder and stronger against the hard walls of cement of Soviet officials.

Sziget is a revival of this determined culture always pushing further outside the boarders, somewhere between lost territories and voices found again, connected.

The oozing quality of sound, Hungarians swinging between stages.

Manu Dibango & Band

le grand Manu...

Manu came to the Sziget like a great king of Africa, the big bald man and his inimitable smile and deep, deep voice... Those voices that remind us of story-telling when we were tiny and listening to words unveiling landscapes full of soul and colours. The Makossa Crew gives the set the lightness it needs for the festival: An excellent second tenor-saxophone from England, a great pianist/singer from France, a very groovy Bass player from Cameroon, a fusion and fantastic stylish drummer from Cameroon also, a Percussionist from the US, Guitarist from North Africa, and a lovely young vocalist on the backing-vocals.
Somehow, Manu knows his team perfectly, and plays around the whole stage, eventually reducing the chances of getting a 'clishé'-shot of him somewhere along the line, at some point during the lion's dance. The king of Yaoundé sounds so fresh and in form it's hard to believe he's just celebrated his 72nd Birthday!
A bit of rain raises an umbrella in front of me, but I still keep on enjoying what I dream of being Yaoundé's dance-floor hymns. The nostalgia behind the deep voice is one of simple pleasure, it is just there, a full presence surrounding my eagerness...
I feel like a goat somewhere between Morocco and and the forests of Niger - enjoying the taste of Hungarian rain dropping down my neck while the crowd enjoys a careful, calm, and deep swing from side to side.