Saturday, April 21, 2018

Balázs Balogh Quintet - Borderline Inspirations (UNIT RECORDS 2018)

The band was established by Hungarian drummer Balázs Balogh in 2014 in Graz, Austria. It has been an international quintet from the beginning, having had members from Italy, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Montenegro and Brazil since then.

They play mostly Balázs’ compositions and arrangements. The music is based on the hard-bop tradition of jazz, but involves everything that has influenced the composer at a time, such as jazz-rock, free jazz, the folk music of Eastern-Europe, and the Balkans, odd-meters and polyrhythms, etc…

The goal was to create a band with a characteristic sound – using a very ordinary instrumentation, and Balázs found great partners in the recent members of the quintet to achieve this: Tobias Pustelnik (AT) on tenor saxophone, Lajos Tóth (HU) on piano, Márton Fenyvesi (HU) on guitar, and Gustavo Boni
(BR) on bass.

They’ve had appearances in several countries of Central-Europe, including Opus Jazz Club (Budapest), Round Midnight (Trieste), ZWE (Vienna), and a radio appearance in Studio Glas Podzemlja (Maribor). They participated and won second prize at Zilina International Jazz Contest in Slovakia (2015), and won the Best Band Prize at Sibiu Jazz Festival, Romania (2016).

Their first album entitled „Borderline Inspirations” will be released at Unit Records, and contains only original compositions of the band leader. Two compositions of the CD were also arranged and performed by the RTV Big Band Slovejina.

1 Intro
2 Evening Song 5:19
3 Remonkable 6:53
4 Daybreak 7:41
5 Passing Fancy 6:37
6 Metamorphosis 7:38
7 Things That Should Have Been Said 4:52

Márton Fenyyesi, guitar
Tobias Pustelnik, tenor saxophone
Lajos Tóth, piano
Gustavo Boni, bass
Ivan Krizic, bass
Marcelo Valezi, tenor saxophone, flute
Andrea Sulvoá. flute
Pippo Corvino, guitar