Kovász Fermentum
With this album, a new generation of Hungarian folk jazz makes its mark: Kovász – Sourdough in Hungarian – renews the genre's decades-old tradition with its instrumental lineup as well as its approach. The band leader, Gergő Kováts, had got a foothold both in the world of jazz and folk, so his compositions do not simply approach folk music from the perspective of a jazz musician, but unbreakably combine all the influences that he and his bandmates have experienced so far, almost creating a new genre.
Fermentum differs significantly from the work of first-generation folk-jazz greats: while Mihály Dresch or Mihály Borbély aimed at developing a characteristic, organic and folk-focused jazz sound working in parallel with the traditional dance house movement, the members of Kovász explore the now readily accessible traditional musical knowledge with a similar commitment, but approach it rather through intuition and bold associations, which yields more eclectic results. The music of Kovász, like the ancient folk practice of sourdough baking that they chose as their name, is in the constant motion of change. The band breaks down different genres into molecules, then sets up their interaction based on well-established musical analogies. They put hard bop and free jazz in their jars, fed the pre-ferment with characteristic elements and dances of Hungarian folk music, and eventually some hip-hop and funk mixed in from the air. All this calls for an unusual instrumental lineup, with synthesizer and prepared gardon decisively shaping the group’s sound.
Artists
Gergő Kováts – tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, fuvolya, electronics
Máté Pozsár – piano, synth
Ábel Dénes – double bass, gardon
Attila Gyárfás – drums, prepared gardon, electronics
About the album
All compositions by Gergő Kováts
Recorded at BMC Studio, Budapest on 25-27 August, 2024
Recorded by Zsolt Kiss
Mixed and mastered by Márton Fenyvesi
Artwork: Anna Natter / Cinniature
Produced by László Gőz
Label manager: Tamás Bognár
Kovász - Fermentum
The album is available in digital form at our retail partners
SENSUOUS AND ALIVE
“What do you want to play jazz for, when you’ve got Gypsy music?! (sic!)” runs the fragmentary anecdote: a musician from
the Art Ensemble of Chicago allegedly asked this of a Hungarian colleague during a visit to Budapest, recognizing the richness of Hungarian folk music and its inherent potential for improvisation. He said nothing new; after all, the second generation of musicians since György Szabados, the iconic figure of Hungarian free music, knows that “the raw material for jazz, Afro-American folk music, can perfectly well be substituted by the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic treasures of Hungarian folk music – all the while preserving the creative freedom of jazz.” This is how saxophonist Gergő Kováts put it, who with this CD by the band Kovász, founded in 2022, presents the “passport” in the name of the new generation of Hungarian folk jazz. This audio document not only tells of the journey (lasting at least fifteen years) that he made himself in the fields of free jazz and folk music, but it also bears the seal of a paradigm shift. The first generation of big-name musicians (including Mihály Dresch and Mihály Borbély) began their respective careers as the dance house movement was taking off, which meant their work tended to develop an organic jazz sound, easily recognizable, with a very strong folk music focus. Conversely, Gergő Kováts & co. are typical Generation Y musicians: they bring a depth similar to their predecessors into their research of the now easily accessible knowledge of traditional music, but at the same time they also have that rapid-connection mindset typical of digital natives, so through hunches and audacious associations, they are forever approaching the accumulated information about (folk) music from new angles, resulting in a far more eclectic sound.
But it would be a mistake to consider them mere jugglers of musical data. Kovász’s music, as its brilliant choice of name implies, is sensual and alive, just like sourdough (or in Hungarian, kovász), constantly working and changing, and incorporating everything that can be found in the surrounding musical bacterial culture and has an effect on the members. Just as sourdough starts raising a dough through fermentation, in other words, decomposition, so the members of Kovász first break down music to the constituent molecules, in order to set up interactions based on well-established parallels. Using sourdough is an archaic practice that is enjoying a renaissance; how the listener responds to this combination of flavours depends largely on individual taste preferences. Anyone who listens to it with jazz tastebuds will find crumbled vestiges of their favourite standards, while masterly jazz abounds in side-dishes, and in the chefs’ individual invention, but someone who has been brought up on “peasant fare” might have the impression, given the harmonic progressions and the authentic playing of the soloist, that in some exclusive dinner they are being served the rarest dishes from folk music collections, in which familiar aromas surface as an unusual bouquet of flavours.
One reason the character of Kovász is misleading is because on the one hand it makes individual podium- and moment-music from the functional (dance) music of communities, and on the other it leads to a new kind of community experience. Scrambled eggs, ratatouille, mote pillo, or menemen? The four dishes are basically the same thing, just as the Moldavian sirba and the Brazilian funk/ favela funk beat, or the turnaround in a jazz song and the “aprája” figuration in folk music, the leaping “szökős” rhythm in Palatka music, and the “wonky” beat are made in the same baking tin, from very similar ingredients, but with different methods, and different herbs and spices. But according to the members of the band, the complex rhythm of the standard Four on Six can, with a little imagination, be heard as equivalent to the asymmetric rhythm of the Hungarian “lassú” (slow) dance. (We hear the musical argument for this in the composition Lassú villamos or Slow Tram). And the unrealistically dark tones of the szapora dance from Kalotaszeg, on the fiddle’s low strings, can serve as the point of departure for making free jazz of an expressionist bent. Kovász’s music is inclusive, for here there is no differentiation in quality between peasant music and urban jazz. In the tune In Dense Fog, out of flute tunes from the village of Gyimes and a spiritual that John Coltrane also arranged, he sets about making a one-course meal, in which rather than cancelling each other out, the two characters reinforce one another.
This misleading, playful attitude arises naturally from the personalities of the band members. When Gergő Kováts, band leader and saxophonist, was studying jazz saxophone at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, he started going to flute lessons in the folk department, and this quickly turned into a passion. He became a shapeshifting jolly joker of Hungarian music life, who, as a highly qualified improviser and a stylistically sensitive interpreter of folk music, gave a jazz flavour to the sound of a good few world music bands (those of Tárkány Művek, Esszencia, and Paár Julianna), while remaining a stable, inescapable figure in the Hungarian creative and free jazz scene, for instance, as a member of Geröly Trio, Decolonize Your Mind Society, and the Máté Pozsár Septet. Although this caused constant surprise to musicians and audiences in the two fields, his personal self-expression became ever more deeply entrenched in this bidirectional absorption, because he realized that to create an organic texture of the two genres, one impossible to tease apart, one lifetime is not enough. Finally, after long, slow deliberation, in 2022, to an external commission, he created Kovász, freeing himself of the dogmas of free jazz and the real or imaginary expectations of the “folk police” overseeing the practice of folk music. For partners, he chose not an assistant he could direct, but the “master chefs” of the Hungarian jazz and creative music scene, important as both teachers and stage performers, who make a significant contribution to the overall effect. As to how live this material is, the moment it is created demonstrates: Gergő Kováts had to relinquish his own musical preconceptions when his childhood friend, one of his oldest fellow musicians, keyboard player Máté Pozsár came up with the idea of using a synthesizer in the band. Although at first it seemed irreconcilable with Kováts’s original plans, he agreed, and ever since, the synthesizer has been one of the most powerful influences on the character of the band’s soundworld. Ábel Dénes on bass is similar to Gergő Kováts in that he too is an amphibian, equally at home in folk music and jazz, but even he, and drummer Attila Gyárfás, known in European jazz circles and open to folk music, had to find the appropriate musical solutions required by this new, hybrid genre. Prepared bass, flute, pipes, or effects imitating the viola – these are just a few of the band’s ever-expanding instrumental armory, just as in terms of playing style, they are always questioning themselves and their tried and tested approach.
The music of Kovász meets a new demand in the Hungarian musical palette: through its folk character and the freedom of jazz, it is easy to listen to, and nutritious, but at the same time it’s dense and has countless nuances, so we can relish the details for hours. To stay with the gastronomical metaphor, it’s a kind of canteen meal in which even gourmets find something to enjoy.
Emese Szász
(Translated by Richard Robinson)