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Written in fRoots issue 365, Nov 2013

LAJKÓ FÉLIX
Mezö – Field
Fonó FA 283-2 (2013)

At the time of writing this has been number one for two months in the World Music Chart Europe airplay chart. Félix Lajkó (in Hungarian name-order Lajkó Félix) is not only an elusive master of tradition-based fiddle improvisation, but also a brilliant player of the Hungarian fretted zither.
     For this album, for the first time, he concentrates entirely on the latter, the multi-scrolled, open-based, table-played Hungarian zither, with two groups of fretted strings, the rest open as drones, related to the other European fretted zithers and their emigrant brother the Appalachian dulcimer. He plays fast-chop-strummed and wild, accompanied by his current band of Michael Kurina on cimbalom, Antal Brasyó’s viola and Ferenc Kurina on double bass.
     The same line-up, but with Felix playing both fiddle and zither, played their hearts out in a show at Poznan’s always acutely-programmed Ethno Port festival this year that was a lifetime-memorable piece of pure music, with Felix totally immersed in and possessed by the music he was tearing out of his instruments, supported with perfect empathy by the band. It had the festival director in tears of fulfilment, and me close to, and was a gig that nothing could follow (except that immediately following it trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf and his band, on the last show of their tour, did another lifetime-great gig of total musical communication and emotion).
     During the first few tracks of this album I was tending to the thought that without the fiddle as contrast, while the massively high-energy drive of Félix’s zither is immediately attracting, it might be one of those albums that makes popular radio play a track at a time, but as an album tends to sameyness. But then as the tracks pass it gets a grip, as I’m drawn into Félix’s intense flow of consciousness and creativity. As was clear from the live show, this isn’t a man showing off or calculating, it’s a person putting his whole being into the music as it streams out of him. And when the last track finishes, in the silence there’s a sense of loss, a feeling of “what just happened?”

www.fono.hu


© 2013 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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