MUSIC OF THE CONTINUOUS PRESENT

Musictime

When life says
sorry for being
like other times.

Miklós Lukács’s album Timeless has a quality that is not far from the definition of music encapsulated in the haiku by Ákos Fodor. The experience of reconciliation and arrival permeates the cimbalmist’s entire second solo album. At least, seen from a distance. From the perspective of a migrating bird, which, after covering several thousand kilometres on a spring day, lands with a graceful motion on its weighty nest, which has been marked by winters past. So many layers, airiness and ponderousness, melancholy and cheer, nostalgia and eternal resumption, condensed into a single, particular moment. In this album, after his recent contemporary and jazz projects, which include atonal, aleatory, and dodecaphonic elements, Miklós Lukács returns to pure beauty, in these adaptations of well-known songs for the acoustic cimbalom. These songs can be sung, they trigger the listener’s emotional memory, while the manner of the interpretation bears us aloft to a new sound.
For Miklós Lukács himself is a bird of passage, whose musical literacy allows him to adopt a kind of universal bird’s-eye view of music; while flitting freely between genres, he fetches various stylistic elements back and forth like weightless straws from one nest to the other. Recently awarded the Ferenc Liszt Prize, Miklós Lukács (who has a close working relationship with György Kurtág to this day, as he did with Péter Eötvös until his death, and as a jazz musician is very active in the international scene) never abandons his identity as a contemporary and jazz musician, even when on his instrument he plays the musical memories of childhood welling up from the subconscious, the legendary melodies of Keith Jarrett, Ennio Morricone, Sting, the Beatles, Bernstein, and Rezső Seress. He, after all, is aware of the perils of the genre of “arrangements album”, and he has no intention of riding on the back of well-known composers to reach a wider audience; rather, his search is how to perform these popular songs with the same value as the contemporary canon, as measured by that aesthetic standard. At the same time, he tries to reflect the original performer, while highlighting the special qualities of the cimbalom. His state is that of the stork balancing on one leg, who rests, utterly unshakeable, on the narrow band between commercial music and that of lasting value.
Resting, because as Miklós Lukács admits, this time it felt good to play things tonally. All the more so, because Timeless was made as the counterpart to a particular album, No Man’s Land (Fonó Records, 2021), his first solo album. Back then, in a creative process ongoing during the pandemic, he was exploring where digitalization, music extracted from physicality, would lead; the result was an avowedly downbeat CD about the dehumanized future of music. Although there, the focus was on the aesthetics of absence, and on the expanding of the potentials of the instrument through electronic means, here in Timeless, it is with purely acoustic means, and within a tonal framework, that he aims to express timeless beauty.
He is quite correct to make timelessness the title of the album. While listening to the CD, it becomes clear that here, the word Timeless is not merely a synonym for “eternally valid”. Miklós Lukács (who, incidentally, is fond of playing with various aspects of musical time) has here created a special river of time, which has neither beginning nor end, where the past and the future are woven together, and in which the boundaries of the self can dissolve. Timelessness represents a kind of escape from the artificial construct of time. He has already attempted this in other forms, for instance in Music from the solitude of timeless minutes, recorded with Cimbiosis for BMC Records, where he eschewed traditional rhythmic paradigms to trip up listeners’ perception of time. Now, one of the ways in which he aims to distract us from the passing of time, is that with one exception (The Beatles: Norwegian Wood), all the songs he has chosen have a slow or moderate tempo, which thus congeal into a gently billowing process music. In addition, over and over, like a sweet spice, the musical past creeps into his arrangements, be it in the garb of classical music, traditional musical cultures, or in the form of imitation of ornaments, or of instruments, or even compositional solutions. Although he concentrates on the present throughout, when he tries to free himself from musical prototypes, to conjure up the pleasure of the first listening, and revive it in a new form. All this together forms the music of the continuous present. We step into this peaceful river with Keith Jarrett’s composition My Song, where the cimbalom reflects the image of the piano, for in this track Miklós Lukács seeks a piano-like sound. In his version, the role of Jan Garbarek’s soprano saxophone, which brims over in embellishments reminiscent of the jazz sound of the 1970s and 80s, is taken by the rich overtones of the cimbalom in the upper register, and this conveys a more puritan ideal of beauty. The twist here can be heard in the last minute of the piece, where Miklós Lukács has smuggled in Hungarian-style ornaments, perhaps as a delicate reference to the Hungarian connections of Keith Jarrett and his art.
He is on ground familiar to everyone with Somewhere Over the Rainbow, a ballad from The Wizard of Oz that has seen countless arrangements, and it finds itself back in its original context when Miklós Lukács interprets it as fairytale music. The intro, with its nod to kitsch, could even be a reference to the place the song occupies in mainstream culture, and to how worn it is, but afterwards the mystic origin and character of the tale takes shape, when Lukács shifts the theme into deeper and deeper registers and starts to pick apart the initial idyll.
We see to the depths of the river bed, so crystal clear is Miklós Lukács’s performance of one of the most moving melodies in film history, Deborah’s Theme by Ennio Morricone, from Once Upon a Time in America, where he gives a major role to silences and long held notes.
Then, with a 6/8 intro, we find ourselves between the Tigris and the Euphrates, in an adaptation of Norwegian Wood (The Beatles), when Miklós Lukács brilliantly evokes the sound of the santur, a Persian cousin to the cimbalom, and then transforms it into a bass instrument. This is the quickest, most dynamic piece on the album, traits reinforced by the cimbalmist moving the melody into the bass, to get a groovier sound.
The romantic swaying of Sting’s sea of corn in Fields of Gold called out for a guitar-like sound from Lukács Miklós. For this song, he developed a special five- and six-finger plucking method on the instrument, which might confuse listeners, since the pizzicato harmonics are an almost perfect imitation of the sound of a guitar. In this song, Lukács achieves the rich pop texture of the original purely by plucking the strings, thus paying his respects to the scholarly musician Sting, who is both fond of unusual plucked instruments and keen to use them.
In Gloomy Sunday, an arrangement of Rezső Seress’ world-famous song, Miklós Lukács keeps potentially overwhelming emotions in check. Its secret has preoccupied him since childhood: what is the essence that propels a song to such fame – in both jazz circles, and others. Here too, he eschews obvious solutions, refraining from the modal world of the Billie Holiday or Coltrane versions; rather, he turns to classical music, adopting devices from Baroque music. Instead of parlando-rubato and laughing through tears, the song is kept on an even keel by a chorale-like structure, a steady beat, and voice leading, blunting the tragic edge to it, and foregrounding the beauty of the song.
Perhaps it is in Bernstein’s song Somewhere that Miklós Lukács basks most in the world of jazz, since in terms of chords, it is in this song that he strove most consciously for a jazz sound. He borrowed the harmonies from his work with Charles Lloyd’s orchestra, with the difference that mid-improvisation, he leads listeners into a misty forest of notes, typical of Romanticism, mapping the no-man’s land feeling at the heart of the song – the theme unfurls from this, initially vague, and it will never be the same as it was to begin with.
Since there was mention of water, and birds of passage, then the Aura – Hommage à Péter Eötvös that concludes the album is a river delta, where the water slows and birds stop to rest, where the opposing energies of high and low tides accumulate, where the river flows into the sea. This is Miklós Lukács’s own composition, which as the subtitle asserts, is a calm farewell to the maestro and mentor, in whose direct creative aura, so to speak, Miklós Lukács had the fortune to be. Here the album reaches its quietest point of rest, though technically it is full of tension, and intellectually it is one of the densest moments. In this composition, which is plucked throughout and musically maps out the phenomenon of the aura as an energy field, Miklós Lukács gives the impression of two instruments playing: he achieves this with pedalled, long sustained notes, and plucking with the fingernail and fingertips. Yet the beauty of the song places him too among the greatest of composers, who welcome him with the embrace of the sea.