The ?life work concert series? will give you an opportunity to assess your career. Is that in a way a scary thing to do?
Indeed, a life work series is usually put together from works of composers who are at the end of their careers or perhaps have already died. But to play at such a series would only be scary if I was otherwise staying at home doing nothing all day. But this is not the case, since my life work is still in process. I am in the middle of a big project, writing a ballet score. Plus I have many plans for the future. So I do not feel that anything would have come to a close even though the life work series is indeed an assessment.
You have some compositions that were only released on vinyl, and then there are those before 1981 that were never released. Is there no trace of this era?
Indeed the first seven years of my career is a blank space. No recordings were ever made of the bands that I played with at the time.
A Dés complete recordings series came out last year but your earliest works have been omitted even in that series.
Starting in 1974, I played with some very important jazz musicians in exciting combinations, so I really regret that no recordings were made. A few fanatics would come to these shows carrying the reel-to-reel tape players common in those days. I can still remember some of their faces. After all, perhaps they did make some recordings. I sometimes think about putting an ad in the papers looking for these amateur recordings. Perhaps something has survived.
What extra did you get from studying classical music?
The more types of music you know, the wider the space in which you can manoeuvre and the more sources you can utilise. These days the reason I make slow progress with writing a ballet score is because I continually face my limitations. In order to create an interesting musical language, I must create a symbiosis of contemporary music and jazz. If this was an everyday practice in my work, I would find it easier to make progress. But I had never done it previously. I am now continually experimenting to see how contemporary music and jazz can work together in a dramatic ballet score.
Is it not this new challenge that makes the work exciting?
Of course it is. I am always most excited about things I have never tried. This is like when I first wrote a musical or a film score.
Once you said that when you first heard jazz, you almost found it annoying?
?because I did not understand that musical language. It is also a learning process.
What happened then that made you realise that jazz was exciting?
At first it annoyed me that I did not understand it. Because I really wanted to figure it out. I had listened to a great deal of music by the age of 14-15, folk, classical and beat, so I already had a sense for quality and I immediately realised when I heard something good. Something interesting. But if you do not speak a certain musical language, then you do not understand what the instruments are saying. The musical phrases I was listening to sounded alien. They did not make sense in my mind. Many listeners have this experience. It?s something one needs to battle with: the understanding and perception of music, just like in the case of all other branches of art, it?s a learning process. Like when you learn a foreign language and you do not understand it first for some time but then all of a sudden, you start understanding more and more when they speak it around you in an alien country.
It is rather annoying when many people say they do not like jazz, since the word ?jazz? can refer to many different types of music. Hungarian jazz musicians especially stand out creating individual musical worlds with contemporary musical improvisations.
This is what increasingly interests me, too. I highly respect those that can excellently perform historic jazz standards and there are many such musicians in Hungary. But if you also compose music, then you must go one step further. The ?score? is everything that you have learnt and filtered through. The more instruments you hold in your hands, the greater your opportunities are. All these things have their structure. That?s why it is important that you find your identity in your instrument, which can be a small tilt, a subjective voice that makes you immediately recognisable.
In this growth process, how important are the works that turned into successful film tunes? You worked with Miklós Jancsó and Károly Makk when you were commissioned to compose the score for Love Till First Blood and it became a real pop hit. In what way did that contribute to this growth process?
Well, if none other, then it helped me grow successful. That?s an aspect not to be neglected, either. Many people know my name from that song. Or from the scores I?ve written for Somewhere in Europe and The Jungle Book. I never denied my involvement in mass culture and what?s more: I?m proud of it. Because you can apply high standards to that, too. My ten-year cooperation with LGT is a category in itself and songs for Jazz+Azz have also demonstrated that one can approach pop music with a demand for quality. Everything can result in important realisations and experiences. Perhaps one can even influence the trends. In a good way.
But would you agree that when it comes to pop music, quite a lot depends on sophisticated studio technologies?
Surely, a great many songs would be completely uninteresting if played on a single piano. Good songs have a structure and well-planned harmony. It can be simple, but must not include anything superfluous because that tips the whole thing over. You can usually tell a good song if it sounds right even when played on a single piano or guitar. However, there are exceptions. My song A Drop in the Ocean has a translucent, simple harmony but quite a tricky structure and it eventually worked because of the extra production we added in the studio.
Songs need to be tight, whereas jazz is freedom by definition. Is that why the two in combination is so exciting?
Jazz improvisation is freedom but it?s useful to know that strict rules till apply. When one knows the rules and also has the technical and intellectual skills, he or she can really fly. Each song has a harmony, a structure and an often complicated rhythm. With improvisation, I use my playing mode and my language to make sentences, to create form. When I listen to an improvisation later, it?s only good if it created a nice and well-built form. This is difficult to rationalise during the improvisation itself but it turns out later whether it worked. At the same time, it is a free-flying play, just like you said before. That?s what makes it exciting. The song is a different thing and that?s what attracted me to it. You need to create a clearly calculated and premeditated structure for a song to work.
You have also written songs for excellent actors. The album Transit Passenger by the actress Dorottya Udvaros has gained almost cult status and in your current concert series tickets sold out so quickly for the Transit Passenger performance that you had to add an extra show. The Man and Woman production was also a great success: you wrote really powerful songs with Géza Bereményi, to be performed by Juli Básti, Udvaros, György Cserhalmi and János Kulka. Four fantastic actors who came out on stage and their characters and stories immediately came to life. The concert turned into theatre.
An important factor in this process was Bereményi?s special talent for writing lyrics for songs and not the other way round. In the case of these works, my aim was not to feature a professional singer who can really sound powerful. I was more interested in the performing talent and individual character of the featured actors.
You played the piano at the performances of Man and Woman. After someone had success as a performer, how can they give up appearing on stage and getting direct feedback for years? After Trio Stendhal split up in 1993, that?s what happened to you. Was this a conscious decision?
Already in 1974, I played in the band Interbrass, for a set fee. It was 150 forints every Sunday and later went up to 240. So I became a ?professional,? getting paid for my playing. They with my own band Dimenzió I also undertook the tasks of a band leader. And after that Trio Stendhal was formed. Twenty years with innumerable shows passed during the 20 years from 1974 to 1994. In the meantime, from the mid-80s, I wrote a lot of music for theatre, working together with the likes of Tamás Ascher and Andor Lukáts. I learnt a great lot from making theatre. That was much help when I wrote my own musicals later. When Trio Stendhal split up in 1993, it was an opportunity to retire and write some film scores. It just happened to develop that way.
Was that the time of We Never Die and The Great Journey?
Yes, and the opportunity arose to write a musical which was Somewhere in Europe. In the meantime, the Vígszínház theatre commissioned the score for The Jungle Book. I realised that these jobs immensely excited me. I kept sitting at home, composing music and I was not interested in heading a band and performing. We used to travel a great lot with Dimenzió and the Trio, also playing at international festivals. It was a bit too much. I was very lucky that it happened this way and it came quite naturally when I slowly shiften into a life of sitting around and composing. Only in the second part of the 1990s did I start missing my instrument. In 1996 Kamilló Lendvay composed a saxophone concerto for me and so I started practicing again like crazy. Then in ?98 we wrote the songs for Jazz+Az with Péter Geszti.
Were you not worried? A saxophone concerto after years of not playing?
Not simply worried, I was scared to death. It was a tough job. I have played with a number of symphonic orchestras, recorded an album with the Hungarian Radio orchestra which also developed into a long tour and a concert at the Music Academy. That piece was my return to playing the saxophone. Eventually, in around 2003, the album Cross Sections brought back jazz in my life. It was a ten-year hiatus but it worked out well.
These days can you easily create a balance between performing on stage and composing at home? Or do you find it difficult to return to composing for instance after playing a concert series of your life work?
It?s not easy to create such a balance because the two types of works demand such different approaches. I cannot do them both at the same time. It is difficult to get back on track composing a larger work. The current series is an exception: these four concerts, which turned into five, I undertook earlier than getting the commission to write the ballet score. But I was too excited about the ballet to reject the commission because of the life work concert series. I have put aside quite a few of the things I had originally planned for this year, but nothing that I had already undertaken. I must fit in all those things now. I had to suddenly suspend composing the ballet for three whole weeks, and I now understand that I have to pay the price for this.
What do you expect from the concert series?
Nothing special. Just to have a good time on stage and also have the audience enjoy the shows. This is a game, nothing more, since none of my musicals or film scores will be performed. No contemporary music compositions either. The whole series contains only a half jazz concert, with Ferenc Snétberger. The literary evening will feature literature and music together, the two combined into a single whole. I have been doing this with Péter Esterházy for about twenty years.
You know Esterházy well which must give you a feeling of safety. But this time Lajos Nagy Parti, György Spiró and Pál Závada will also read excerpts of their works and you will accompany them with your son András Dés and the bassist József Horváth Barcza. So you will have to react to a variety of literary worlds. Does that all happen right on the spot?
We got the texts in advance; that?s all the help we got. I play on my own when I perform with Esterházy, so I build up and play whatever comes to mind on the spot. This time there will be three of us, so what?s important is our interplay. And I am looking forward with curiosity to the end of the evening because I have given all four writers a heavy-duty topic, which I will not disclose now, and we will improvise against whatever they write for that. It will be a surprise.
Who has selected from your great many songs the ones that you will play at the upcoming shows?
During 4 nights, nearly 40 songs will be played. Each of the performers have made their selections because I wanted them to do this with fun and joy. Even the younger ones, Veronika Harcsa and Nikoletta Szőke, who have previously never sung these songs. And I edited the thing together. There will be some overlaps between the different shows, with one or two songs performed by more than one singer. So if someone comes to several shows, they will hear some songs in different versions. This will be immensely interesting because for instance Harcsa is a very different singer from Eszter Váczi. Ági Szalóki has chosen songs from the Udvaros album Transit Traveller and those two are again very different characters.
In Esterházy?s Hrabal?s Book there is a God character that plays the saxophone. Very poorly because he is untalented. Did Esterházy need a talented saxophonist, is that why your started your joint shows?
I know certain parts of Hrabal?s Book almost by heart because that was the starting point of our cooperation with Péter. In the book God really has a hard time playing the saxophone and so he ?looks for? a talented saxophonist. But of course this is a complex book full of fine details and so I have to approach it using all the talent I got. Wherever Peter writes about the voice of the saxophone, about the way it travels throughout the world, I find it a madly beautiful vision. That text was also included in the novel Harmonia Caelestis, where the father sits down at the typewriter and the sound of the typewriter spreads around the world. I have played on that excerpt many times, too. I sometimes manage to make the audience laugh when I continue Péter?s text. I am very proud of that because it is difficult to bring out irony and humour in music. It is easier to make people cry with it. But you need much experience with irony. I would not have been able to do that at the beginning of my career, for this, too, I needed to go though all the things I have been through.
Interviewer: Erzsébet Eszéki / Photo: Bence Kovács
