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How can a Hungarian jazz singer get a new album from a New York, Japanese or Dutch-German label?
This is how it works most of the time in the world of domestic jazz. The artist creates a finished album, records it, and then submits it to publishers. And like it or not. So far I’ve been lucky, they loved what I sent them. I did this for my three albums, Japan, New York and now too: we made a mastered or ready-to-produce material and shipped it.
What does it mean today when a record release is on the floor, no one has been buying a CD for at least a decade to release an album? Is there still an effective record or can only a digitally played record be released?
Double Moon & Challenge Records, where my current album was released, still has a CD, but many smaller labels have already switched to fully digital releases. I see that the CD is already starting to have a bit of a classic character, with fans and collectors, or those in need, getting numbered and dedicated copies. The essence of the joint Dutch-German and American appearance is that registration is available in these countries. After my 2014 New York album Hidden Roots, this one still has a New York look to it because guitarist Ben Monder is also from New York. He also plays on the latest David Bowie album, by the way.
When you submit your finished material to the publisher, you have no idea whether it will be responsive or not?
In jazz, for the high average, this is the method. However, it should be added that this works differently for top artists and publishers. Before recording, the record producer develops the concept, the repertoire, down to the smallest musical detail. I was the producer of my albums until now, but that doesn’t matter to me, I enjoyed being able to control the whole process.
To what extent is self-management part of the world of jazz and success on this track?
In today’s world, more and more. The singer inevitably takes on the role of leader of the band, so he has to figure everything out for him. The repertoire, the style, the image, the visual content and of course who you play with. The financial and business side of the thing is a separate profession. I needed him from the beginning to help me with that. Until now, I have always had a manager because it is nice to have someone to handle club referrals and help with press and public relations matters. There are still quite a few tasks left.
His mother was the opera singer Júlia Pászthy, at one time one of the busiest lyric sopranos in Hungarian opera. How did this influence your relationship with music?
Singing has always been a natural medium for me, but for a long time I didn’t think it would be my form of self-expression. At first I didn’t even study to be a musician. I graduated in Philosophy and Aesthetics from Eötvös Loránd University. Of course, I learned music, I played the violin, I played the piano from a young age, but it was a long way before I got to sing. I have also thought about going in the direction of musicology, but I am not that analytical figure, and I have always felt like a musician among the humanities as well.
I found flying, an unlimited experience of freedom without borders, mainly in singing and improvisation. Fortunately, I’m the late-maturing type, and jazz is a late-maturing genre as well.
His band, Júlia Karosi, has existed for more than ten years. Quartet . Sooner or later will every jazz musician who also composes have a quartet?
Workshop work is important in composition, so it really evokes the need for one’s own training. At the same time, the musicians play in other places, in different formations, with other singers. This is natural, as you have to stand up for financial reasons. I rarely perform as a guest artist, but that’s when it’s always a very liberating feeling.
IT IS NOT YOUR RESPONSIBILITY, IT ONLY HAS A PULSE THAT LEADS IT.
Of the artists, musicians were perhaps the most affected by the pandemic, since they do not belong to a company. How does the current period affect you?
The situation is really difficult. However, during the spring period, when we were closed in on ourselves, I was able to focus differently on work, relating to music or even composition.
Take the pandemic out of the current situation. If not, in Hungary today simply Can you make a living from jazz music, jazz music?
Difficult. Some other fixed source of income is also needed. I currently teach jazz and jazz singing at the Béla Bartók High School of Music. Fortunately, teaching is not an obligation because I love it and the students are talented and inspiring.
When was the last time you performed?
In September at the Gödi Jazz Festival as part of the “Thank you, Hungary” program.
And when will you act next?
On November 13 at the Budapest Jazz Club, at the request of the Harmony Jazz Workshop. There will also be an online broadcast of the concert.
Representatives from all disciplines are fighting for their curriculum to be incorporated into public education. Jazz was never in it, in the least. Would this be necessary, he demanded, would it be important?
Absolutely. Not so much jazz teaching, much more improvisation. It would also be important for classical musicians to learn this. Reveal deeper layers of music.
By the way, I would like to teach improvisation also in the business field, let’s say in the form of a workshop, so that the participants get a little out of their comfort zone.
This is a state of consciousness, through which one learns a lot about himself. For a few years now, I have been working as an MMA intern on a series of intonation and improvisation assignments developed for singers, starting with pieces from Bartók’s Microcosm. But I am also very interested in another topic that I would like to take more seriously in the future: the relationship between improvisation and the mother tongue. This is because our mother tongue has a great impact on improvisation, even the way we articulate sentences. The sounds we use define singing without text, skeleton. It is very interesting to hear, for example, how the Slavs are skeletal. The relationship between music and verbality is always very interesting, with singing without text lately, I feel like it gives me a deeper form of expression than text-centric singing themes.
What place do national and central European jazz musicians occupy in the world jazz palette?
National jazz is very strong, but it is underrepresented in the world. We do not have a well established foreign administration.
I think that the field of Hungarian jazz pianists is particularly strong, but we can also safely say that prominent musicians of our genre would take their place anywhere in the world.
I tend to lead by example with Poles who have had strong support for the genre for decades. As a result, Polish jazz is much more present in the world. But the jazz genre is also under-represented in Hungarian cultural and musical life.
What could the profession or the public cultural sphere do so that jazz reaches more people, which has certainly never been a mass genre?
There are organizations and there is no doubt that we ourselves could do much more. As a positive trend, it is worth mentioning that the genre has become increasingly fashionable in recent years. Perhaps our biggest difficulty is that everyone thinks jazz is light music, but if we look at how it works, we actually need to talk about contemporary classical music. First, it does not live in the market.
Jazz musicians do not print partial reproduction programs in the hundreds of thousands per capita and do not make a living from the royalties they receive for their radio hits. Jazz is contemporary classical music that responds in the most sensitive way possible to contemporary culture and must also be judged and supported.
If we look at current trends in European jazz, we can get astonishingly exciting impulses. Most merge their own culture, music, mother tongue with elements of genre style and improvisation. And the product created in this way represents our culture in the most vivid way possible.
There are many musical references in jazz, so if you know Bartók, it doesn’t hurt to meet Bartók. Otherwise, you may feel left out.
This is so, however, jazz can work without prior knowledge when one is only bathing in sounds, improvisations, that anything can happen. For us, this spontaneity is our strength.
I once spoke to one of our most original and best opera directors, Balázs Kovalik, that under pressure from the influence of the media, opera singing is expected to be attractive, fashionable, dazzling appearance, whether female or man, because it is part of the production, the experience of the receiver. How typical is this jazz?
There is also that line in jazz, but fortunately it is still a very natural and without appearance. It also attracts me.
I’m not that kind of diva, it would bother me. But there are bloody jazz dives like Dee Dee Bridgewater or Dianne Reaves that can create such incredible immediacy.
One of my students once said that he likes jazz hanging out with a guy who looks like an accountant or a payroll accountant while blowing stars out of the sky. I really liked this, an extremely accurate characterization of our genre.
And it is an entrance hand that the director who joins and directs is a man, and the singer who enchants and carries his wings is a woman. There are especially few male instrumentalists and singers in jazz.
This is more the case with us. There are more and more great female instrumental musicians in America, not to mention the world’s stars of male singing. Think of Frank Sinatra or Kurt Elling.
And why is it different with us?
I do not know. At home in jazz, somehow the instrumental musicians are still mostly men, the singers are still women. In America, the culture is different, education, they pay more attention to gender equality.
Can we say that jazz is both an introvert and an extrovert genre?
Absolute. It is an inner path, a creative process, a search. The most beautiful thing is when my search processes meet the audience.
Total subjective offer of the artist’s author: Waste Your Time on Love.
(Cover image: Júlia Karosi. Photo: Ora Hasenfratz)
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