Downbeat-kritika (kattintásra kinagyítható)

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"If you only buy one big band album this year, this is the disc to buy."

jazzreview.com

It's about time someone created a superior third-stream jazz recording in the 21st century. The Budapest Jazz Orchestra Meets Kálmán Oláh, Images, is that disc... Teljes kritika »

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OCTOBER 2007

KALMAN OLAH
Always (Memphis International)

Kálman Oláh's first U.S. release exceeds the high expectations created by his excellent press in Europe and his first prize at the 2006 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Composers Competition. He is a fully developed, finished pianist with a seductive touch and a continuous lyricism on material that never follows a linear process but rather flows and swirls. You can get lost–euphorically lost–in the reveries of Oláh's music.
He is from Hungary, of Romany (Gypsy) parentage, and graduated from the Béla Bartók Conservatory in Budapest. He is interested in blending jazz with contemporary classical and Hungarian folk music. Paradoxically, these influences are more apparent in Oláh's interpretations of standards than in his own compositions. For example, "Polymodal Blues (Homage to Béla Bartók)" quickly gets past its allusions to Bartok's polymodal chromaticism and plunges directly into the blues. But "All of You" and "How My Heart Sings" are syncopated and segmented and transformed by concepts that come from outside jazz.
The shortest piece, "Introduction," is the most revealing of Oláhs' gifts. What it introduces is the song that follows, "Stella by Starlight." Taken solo, it is like an ever-expanding pool of piano sonorities, some formal, all lush, in which implications of "Stella" can be glimpsed in momentary flashes. It has more magic than the next track, when the theme is stated and becomes merely explicit. – Thomas Conrad

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"DeJohnette reached all the way to Hungary for another intriguing trio project, this one with bassist Ron McClure and the extraordinary pianist Kálmán Oláh. Truth be told, compared to the Hornsby session, in which DeJohnette more than once either emulates or accommodates a sequenced electronic beat, Always (Memphis International 218 62:36) * * * * feels exuberantly free. Oláh led this date in 2004, two years before he won broader exposure in the United States by winning the Thelonious Monk International jazz Composers Competition. This invests his performance with something beyond it's fluid inventiveness, technical assurance, passionate lyricism recalling Michel Petrucciani and a related sense of swing." Robert Doerschuk, Downbeat.com

Downbeat
September 2007 (pg. 71)