- Cloud Valley Music website -
- Andrew Cronshaw website -
- Andrew Cronshaw MySpace -

- Back to Reviews Introduction page -

Written in fRoots issue 273, 2006
 

ÁGI SZALÓKI
Hallgató – Lament
FolkEurópa FECD 020 (2005)

This is a beautiful album, a new departure in Hungarian music that, with a slight publicity push in the right directions, could do very well worldwide.
      Well known for her work with Makám, the Ökrös Ensemble and Besh o droM, Ági Szalóki is a Hungarian traditional singer with a seductive still, quiet, reedy voice with perfectly turned grace-noting and vibrato that, Like Márta Sebestyén’s, is equally at home solo or making its own calm space among accompaniment.
      Lament is an album of sad Hungarian traditional and Romany songs; the twist is that her accompaniment is not traditional instruments but a top team from another form of music in which Hungary excels, jazz. What they deliver isn’t brash and brassy, it’s a smoky, reflective environment of liquid piano, guitar and bass with interjecting lines on tenor sax.
      The combination works perfectly; there’s absolutely no pressure nor discomfort on either side, and the songs emerge shining. Romany music, of course, already has links with jazz, but the non-Romany songs work equally well, either harmonised with great non-impeding skill or, where full harmony would be inappropriate, taken either unaccompanied or intertwining as a duet with the sax.
      No concessions are made in the traditional melodies; the jazz players are given new shapes to work with, a world away from international cool jazz, and they cherish them with subtlety and understanding. And, rather as with Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, the power and meaning of stark lyrics such as “Oh, I wish the world would die, rather than my mother” is intensified by the contrast with their musical environment.

www.hangveto.hu


© 2006 Andrew Cronshaw
 

You're welcome to quote from reviews on this site, but please credit the writer and fRoots.

Links:
fRoots - The feature and review-packed UK-based monthly world roots music magazine in which these reviews were published, and by whose permission they're reproduced here.

It's not practical to give, and keep up to date, current contact details and sales sources for all the artists and labels in these reviews, but try Googling for them, and where possible buy direct from the artists.
CDRoots.com in the USA, run by Cliff Furnald, is a reliable and independent online retail source, with reviews, of many of the CDs in these reviews; it's connected to his excellent online magazine Rootsworld.com 

For more reviews click on the regions below

NORDIC        BALTIC        IBERIA (& islands)   

CENTRAL & EASTERN EUROPE, & CAUCASUS   

OTHER EUROPEAN        AMERICAS        OTHER, AND WORLD IN GENERAL

- Back to Reviews Introduction page -