This wonderful collaboration had been rumoured for some time. The music on the last A HAWK AND A HACKSAW album (The Way The Wind Blows) was so much more than yet another world music fusion thing. Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost, working with Romanian and American musicians had cooked up something so special that the possibility of seeing and hearing such a thing reproduced in a live performance seemed very exciting however difficult the logistics seemed to be.
But, hints and whispers and stories, a quickly made CD, and then a UK tour was announced. Heads went up and after a flurry of doubt about the first choice venue in Leeds, rescue came in the grand shape of the Holy Trinity Church (Buddhist/Christian mediations on Saturdays). Not surprisingly the venue was packed.
The main event started with Heather Trost playing the richly dolorous opening bars of "Kiraly Siratás". The mighty Balázs Unger was her only visible companion, gradually tapping out the humbly reverberating tones of the cymbalon - a box of piano wire that looks from the pews like a Sunday-best mahogany table with large turned legs. Unger is gently beating it, head back,. elbows tucked in, with what seem to be long spoons that bounce from string to string with a demonic life of their own. As violin and cymbalon started to weave a tune that we could dry our tears and maybe dance to, there's a sudden hubbub at the west end of the nave.
Some kind of carnival has broken in. Heads turn, people stand for a better view and cameras flash. Jeremy Barnes, with three of Budapest's finest are making their entry the long way. Masks and drums and street music muscle in and march eastward to join the music near the altar. This is theatre and folklore and great fun. The masks are wonderful gargoyles - they light up the magic that lasts until they are brought out again to finish the show with a triumphant procession.
There are distinctly lascivious tendencies in the Gypsy, Klezmer, Magyar, folk-past-the-post music. Fire, wine, dancing, shouting, dark eyes and the carefully deliberate removal of inhibition are stirred in with generous and knowing ladles. Barnes is at the heart of the action. He is a bit of a virtuoso on the accordion these days. But Trost has the leading voice in her strong violin playing, while the HUM HANGÁR ENSEMBLE provide masterful embellishments in al the black, gold and vermilion a serious keens-up requires. Balázs Unger's cymbalon playing rouses the audience to wild cheering after his solo, a hymn to his native village (Vajdaszentivány in Transylvania). He can surely play that thing.
|
Béla Ágoston (Hungarian bagpipes, clarinet, alto saxophone, taragoto, viola) Zsolt Kürtösi (upright bass, accordion) and Ferenc Kovács (trumpet, violin) can play anything it seems. And everything they play has style and accomplishment. We get whole orchestras of variation as the night grows older. They swap between and within songs, channelling music from a range of traditions and people. They pause for a glass of wine and return with even more energy and joy for a second set. A few people manage to dance in the narrow spaces left by the pews and the crowds. Everybody sways and claps and everybody would love to dance. As Barnes said "It would be disrespectful not to"
The tunes and songs are taken form the very new celebratory CD (reviewed recently in W&H) and from "The Way The Wind Blows", and Barnes sings the beautiful Portland Town from 2005's "Darkness At Noon". We have two-steps and polkas and dances whose names I will never know.
It was one of those unforgettably delirious gigs that will be talked about for years. We had the great pleasure of seeing and hearing some newly created, exciting music while it was fresh, with the fire still burning strong.
JACK ROSE had opened the evening with some solo instrumental music. Two ragtime guitar tunes were followed by Indian-ish improvised-sounding pieces on a lap steel guitar. The set finished on a Ry Cooder sort of a tune that might actually have been Woody Guthrie's "Do Re Me", on Rose's open tuned Taylor guitar. The applause was large and enthusiastic. I think I was in minority in not falling in love with it. I think that a solo instrument with no introductions and no audience contact requires prodigious rather than carefully rehearsed talent. The echoes (in my head, at least) of the Reverend Gary Davis and Ravi Shankar have light-fingered, syncopated brilliance that ravish the ears. But Rose, tackling the fringes of the same music was heavier in the thumb, and somewhat relentless in the tempo and his tunes never quite left the lowlands of carefully managed contemplation.
|
