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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
 


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