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.