What’s the most creative, impassioned, distinctive niche in the musical life of Hungary’s capital? It could be the alternative jazz scene in Budapest, which has recently been documented and promoted in a new digital-only Bandcamp release called The Underground Jazz Scene in Budapest Today: an Adventurous Introduction. The twelve-track compilation album was released via Inverted Spectrum Records on September 22, 2023.
The tracks in the collection, five of which were remastered, were initially released between 2013 and 2022, most of them without the support of a label. And though the album is labeled as jazz, it should interest listeners of various genres like progressive rock, psychedelia, ethnic fusion, and contemporary experimental music. In other words, it’s likely good stuff for Third Eye readers.
“The works included herein abolish the boundaries between these styles and often display a means of expression that’s harsher, darker, or weirder than contemporary jazz,” the Bandcamp description reads. “Perhaps the peculiarity of the Hungarian alternative jazz scene is owed to a rich local history of jazz, both conventional and experimental, joint by a confrontational, deconstructivist attitude rooted in the Hungarian avant-rock and post-punk of the 1980s, and a curiosity towards non-Western musical elements that go all the way back to Béla Bartók and to the cosmopolitan characteristic of the country’s traditional music which is made up of Magyar, Jewish and Roma ingredients”
That’s heavy stuff, man! Inverted Spectrum Records reminds us that what’s presented on the album is only a fragment of what’s going on in the underground jazz world of Budapest. Many influential performers had to be excluded from the collection to narrow things down, including many free improvisation formations and the older generations of musicians still active in the scene.
It’s fun to note there will be an album release party for the compilation on October 7, 2023 in Gólya, Budapest, featuring Gentry Sultan, Sauropoda, Inverted Spectrum Records DJ Set, and an improvisational quartet explicitly curated for the event, composed of Péter Ajtai (bass), János Bujdosó (guitar), Ádám Czitrom (guitar), and Attila Gyárfás (drums). Yours truly will not attend (because I live far, far away) but, hell, maybe some readers in Hungary can make it.
If I’m not mistaken, the compilation is for Name Your Price on Bandcamp, which is always awesome. I quickly scooped this one up and have been enjoying it lately. I can’t say I know much about Hungarian experimental jazz, but the tracks have many psychedelic aspects, such as a sense of adventure, improvisation, and general weirdness.
Inverted Spectrum Records is a boutique label based in Budapest and Ankara, Turkey, that releases psychedelia, experimental music, synth music, outsider music, avant-jazz, and urban folk from Ankara, Istanbul, Belgrade, Budapest, Berlin, London, Texas (!), and beyond. Işık Sarıhan, a member of the psychedelic rock ensemble Hayvanlar Alemi, operates the label.
So, if you want to pretend you’re in a smoky Budapest jazz club with all the freaks enjoying the experimental sounds, head to Bandcamp and try this one on for size. Those of you who read the recent review about Brooklyn-based jazz-rock act Emergency Group and like what you heard will probably enjoy this one, too.
Purchase The Underground Jazz Scene in Budapest Today: an Adventurous Introduction on Bandcamp here.
Support Inverted Spectrum Records by finding them on Bandcamp or social media (Facebook, Instagram).
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