György Szabados – Festival d’Avignon

Throughout the Festival there will be a number of musical interludes provided by jazz composers and musicians. Because of the way it masters gestures – at the same time a fundamental and liberating act – improvised music is echoed in the work of Josef Nadj who wants to bring attention to this particular musical territory.

“Ever since I was a teenager, I have really been attracted to this music and to the jazz musicians who I met during my regular visits to jazz clubs. They had to feature in this Festival because this improvised music has been such a part of my life. I have always been fascinated by the freedom in this approach and by the incredible capacity for inventiveness and exchange in just one instant. It is a real common language which enables musicians who don’t know each other, often from different cultures, to communicate and create right away. They prove, if it is necessary to do so, that free and genuine spaces do exist which respect ‘otherness’ in the quality of exchanges, the cross-overs, ultimately the fusion, that come out of these encounters.

Their jazz has other influences, from traditional music from the East to contemporary, without forgetting the origins of jazz, the blues.
Every musician is at the same time, playing an instrument and composing. That’s how jazz is so open and has maintained a space that resists, that is far from banal, that preserves and expresses a gesture of pure research, that is always open to open to new possibilities, to creation. “(Josef Nadj, interviewed by Irène Filiberti)

Pianist György Szabados is considered as the father of Hungarian improvised music. From his country’s folk songs and asymetric rhythms of Béla Bartók, he developed a style, theory and practice in the nineteen sixties that became a school and has inspired the two following generations of Hungarian jazz musicians.

He performs in solo as well as with groups and has influenced musicians such as Mihály Dresch, Ferenc Kovács and Félix Lajkó. György Szabados composed the music for the musical drama by Josef Nadj La Mort de l’empereur (The Death of the Emperor). This will be his first performance in France.

 Program of the Festival