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Awards Two BMC Records albums awarded ÉLU by Citizen Jazz
Two recent releases by BMC Records have been awarded one of the most prestigious accolades in the French jazz world: the joint album Responses to Ligeti by the Cimbiosis Trio and the Ligeti Ensemble, and Bond by the FUR trio, have been included in the Citizen Jazz ÉLU category.
Miklós Lukács Cimbiosis Trio – Ligeti Ensemble: Responses to Ligeti
On the centenary of György Ligeti's birth, a special recording was made by the Miklós Lukács Cimbiosis Trio, balancing between jazz, contemporary music and improvisation, and the Ligeti Ensemble, specializing in contemporary music. They give their answers to the questions raised in Ligeti’s Ten Pieces for Wind Quintet. The musicians of the Ligeti Ensemble – founded by András Keller and Zoltán Rácz, and operating under the auspices of Concerto Budapest – play the challenging Ten pieces for wind quintet, which are answered by the Miklós Lukács Cimbiosis Trio, blurring the thin line between contemporary music and jazz. Instead of an arrangement, the Cimbiosis Trio sought ways to engage in a dialogue with Ligeti’s music, by the means of preludes and postludes, the musical elaboration of different moods and colours, and, in the 7th movement, the dimension-changing power of simultaneous playing with the wind quintet. The collaboration was conceived by Miklós Lukács at the commission of BMC, and after the two bands presented the project at the Ligeti 100 Festival in May 2023, they carried on to the studio – the result is now available to the public and was warmly received by Citizen Jazz as well.
FUR: Bond
FUR, the French-Belgian trio of Hélène Duret, joins the catalogue of BMC Records with their second album. Bond, released in April 2024 and awarded Citizen Jazz’s ÉLU just after a month, is pure jazz, but also features unpredictable musical shifts, an unlikely mix of styles and genres: a succession of ballads, groovy sections, blues themes, hit-like compositions, hypnotical, repetitive motifs and psychedelic colours. But it is the melodic line, branded by pop, that the trio cherish above all, even if sometimes noise breaks the line so that the band can plunge themselves into timbre. The ensemble has the strongest ties to the French and Belgian jazz scene: the French-born bandleader lived in Belgium for more than a decade, and FUR also started out during this period. Since then, Duret has become part of the international European jazz scene, playing in Daniel Erdmann's star sextet Thérapie de couple.
