Everyone's a Winner At Monk Competition

....

There was other star power on hand as well, from presenters Quincy Jones, Phylicia Rashad and Billy Dee Williams. But amid the celebratory back-patting, there was a larger lesson to be learned than just having a jazzy good time. The Monk Institute has a genuinely global educational mission, which was embodied in this year's 12 piano semifinalists -- who hailed from different countries. The annual composition prize went to a Hungarian, Kalman Olah.

"The philosophy of jazz represents tolerance, teamwork and inclusion," said Thelonious Monk Jr., who helped found the Washington-based institute in 1986 and is its board chairman. "That's what America is about. The music reflects that."

For Monk, the institute is a way of "taking care of my father's legacy."
...

washintonpost.com

BMC: la punta di diamante del jazz ungherese

Kálmán Oláh - Kristóf Bacsó - Sébastien Boisseau
Fitting
BMC Records (2006)

....

Pianista di formazione classica, Oláh ama fondere nella sua musica le sue tre grandi passioni: il jazz, la musica contemporanea, e gli orizzonti classici (soprattutto Bartók e Bach). Nonostante le composizioni portino la firma di tutti i membri del trio, l'album dà una sensazione di grande compattezza ed omogeneità, quasi come se tutti i brani fossero scaturiti dalla stessa penna. Segno che questa formazione è davvero un trio, nel senso stretto del termine. Ottime le melodie, interessanti le articolazioni ritmiche (soprattutto la scansione in sette della quinta traccia). Un album in cui rigore formale e massima libertà convivono serenamente mentre a tratti, nel fraseggio ma soprattutto nel timbro del sax soprano di Bacsó, affiora lo spirito di Steve Lacy. Dal canto suo, Boisseau (presente anche nell'album di Winand) si conferma il migliore esponente della nuova generazione di contrabbassisti francesi, che su questo strumento vantano una scuola almeno pari a quella scandinava.
...

BMC: la punta di diamante del jazz ungherese

Featured Artist: Budapest Jazz Orchestra Meets Kálmán Oláh

Review:

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. Pianist Kálmán Oláh, a recipient of the Liszt-prize who was also named Jazz Musician of the Year by Gramofon magazine, won the Grand Prize of the BMI Thelonious Monk International Jazz Composer's Competition in 2006. As a performer/teacher he leads his own groups in addition to giving lectures at Liszt Academy of Music.

"Images" is Oláh's brilliant homage to, and reworking memoriam of, Bela Bartok's music into a quasi-jazz/classical highbred that is true to both genres and crossovers between them as well. Without the need for direct quotes of Bartok's music, Oláh, in the two part "Images" suite, evokes not just the complexity and tight construction inherent within the folk music pioneer's music, but also orchestrates a big band sound resplendent with clashing brass and triumphant saxophones. Oláh's piano work, a mainstay and focal point throughout, is at times both terse and sprawling in much the same way Bartok's Miraculous Mandarin is both a statement of strength and yet full of beautifully constructed 20th century harmonically oriented melodies.

After the 26 minute suite, the recording concludes with four last Oláh arrangements. First up is his "Valley Of Megiddo," a broodingly happy swinger, again featuring Oláh's inspired piano work and a bevy of orchestral colors from the big band interspersed with superior solos that serve to highlight the musical arrangement, not draw attention away from it.

Thelonious Monk's "Round About Midnight," along with a true classically oriented "Prologue," follows next. The album is completed by Oláh's, "Last Moment," one of his most famous compositions. Here arranged for big band, we are again treated to sheer timbral delight. The composition takes the form of a 3 plus 1 part suite and is almost too hip for its own good. The Latin elements, mixed with the folk style melody, are layered perfectly. You can't help but smile as you listen.

The Budapest Jazz Orchestra is as fine a big band as can be found in today's jazz market. They play with a surety and grace, punctuated by solid metrical time concepts and an innate feel for swing, missing from so many of today's best collegiate and professional jazz ensembles. In the hands of Oláh's tremendous arrangements the group has produced their finest record, and the best big band recording, so far, of this century. If you only buy one big band album this year, this is the disc to buy. Because it's hard to find you won't see the big magazines reviewing it, but have faith, when you listen to this you will know and fully understand just how grand and glorious a musical statement this is.

Budapest Jazz Orchestra Meets Kálmán Oláh Images - Hungaroton on @ jazzreview.com - CD Review

Ron McClure: Wonderland, Always & Between or Beyond

... McClure is reunited with his former Charles Lloyd rhythm section partner Jack DeJohnette on Hungarian pianist Kálman Oláh's disc Always. Oláh has made his mark at European festivals with a two-fisted style drawn not only from jazz but also from classical and folk music. He's always imbued his music with a strong sense of swing but here with McClure and DeJohnette in his corner, he rises above the occasion, attacking the music with what at times seems like an almost manic energy. The first half of the disc focuses on Oláh's compositions. The title track, an energetic opener, won the 2006 Thelonious Monk Institute's best composition prize. But it's "Polymodal Blues" with its shifting tonalities and "Hungarian Sketch No. 1"'s dissonant splashes and roiling drums that really catch the ear. Elsewhere, a lengthy unaccompanied intro to "Stella By Starlight" shows Oláh's individuality. McClure and DeJohnette sound invigorated by this material, providing a stellar accompaniment to Oláh's unique excursions. ...

allaboutjazz.com

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

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

The Kalman Olah Trio

Always
(Memphis International)

How's this for international cooperation? Hungarian pianist Kalman Olah wins the Thelonious Monk Institute Jazz Composer's Competition, then enlists jazz gurus Jack DeJohnette on drums and Ron McClure on bass to record one of the best instrumental releases in a long time. Olah is a mindblower, mixing several musical elements into a fearsome whole, someone that takes originals and standards to the highest level of improvisation. He displays his real Gypsy blood at the same time paying exciting homage to the jazz giants before him. DeJohnette and McClure add a wondrous drive to every song, detailing how a rhythm section can take a great session and turn it into something even stronger. In a time when so many national boundaries seem as if they're turning into insurmountable walls, music like this gives hope the universal language of jazz will come to the rescue and save the day—once again.

Bill Bentley

Savoy swings from Cajun to Gallic

By Mark Jordan

Special to The Commercial Appeal

If Dreams Come True
Ann Savoy & Her Sleepless Knights
Memphis International Records

Always
The Kalman Olah Trio
Memphis International Records

Memphis International Records, whose most recent release featured Midtown indie rocker Ron Franklin, puts the emphasis back on the international with two new jazz CDs.

The career of Louisiana-based singer and multi-instrumentalist Ann Savoy is most closely associated with Cajun music. Besides playing with husband Marc Savoy in the famed Savoy-Doucet Band, she is the founder of the all-female Cajun supergroup the Magnolia Sisters and has even written an award-winning history on the subject.

But for her new CD, the Virginia-raised Savoy, a French major at the University of Virginia in her youth, chose to explore a different sound with roots in Gallic culture. If Dreams Come True has more in common with the legendary Quintette du Hot Club de France, the '30s era European acoustic swing band that introduced the world to Django Reinhardt and gypsy jazz.

Collaborating with fiddler Kevin Wimmer, a member of the Red Stick Ramblers and Balfa Toujours, and guitarist Tom Mitchell, Savoy, singing in both French and English, crafts a wistfully romantic and breezy record that mines the standard repertoire for both familiar favorites ("Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered," "The Way You Look Tonight") and more obscure gems such as the Billie Holiday number "Getting Some Fun Out Of Life" and the naughty "If You Don't I Know Who Will," made famous by Bessie Smith.

Due in stores June 16, Always features the U.S. debut of Hungarian pianist Kalman Olah, who is something of a find for fans of straight-ahead jazz. Of Romany heritage like Django Reinhardt, Olah is further proof that American jazz speaks deeply to something -- the wanderlust or the heritage of persecution, perhaps -- in the Gypsy spirit. Olah, 37, comes from a family of gifted pianists and started playing the instrument himself when he was 7. Proficient in both classical and jazz, he is on the faculty of the Liszt Music Academy of Budapest and has performed with such noted American jazz musicians as Lee Konitz, Randy Brecker, Pat Metheny, Steve Grossman, John Patitucci and Kenny Wheeler.

On this disc, he is joined by American bassist Ron McClure and drumming legend Jack DeJohnette. In 2006, Olah won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Composer's Competition for "Always," the title- and leadoff track on this collection. More Bill Evans than Monk, the composition is a standout, distinguished by its throbbing rhythm and melancholy melody. The rest of the record shows it is no fluke, with material ranging from the solid bop workout "Polymodal Blues" to the impressionistic closer "Elegy."

BMI Awards $10K Monk Prize to Jazz Pianist Kálmán Oláh

Congratulations to jazz pianist Kálmán Oláh, grand prize winner of the 2006 BMI-sponsored Thelonious Monk International Jazz Composer's Competition. The $10,000 award was presented during the Thelonious Monk Institute's 20th Anniversary Gala held Sept. 20 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Oláh's winning work, performed by a group of jazz all-stars during the celebration, was entitled "Always." Listen to the the winning song, "Always"

For the past 13 years, BMI has sponsored the Composer's Competition, which awards $10,000 to the young composer who best demonstrates originality, creativity and excellence in jazz composition. This year's judges included three members of the BMI family: Jim McNeely and Michael Abene, musical directors of the BMI Jazz Composers Workshop, and clarinet player Don Byron.

Born in 1970 in Budapest, Hungary, Kálmán Oláh began playing classical piano at the age of seven and started studying jazz piano at age 14. Greatly influenced by his grand-uncle, a Hungarian jazz pianist who was also one of his teachers, he continued playing jazz and began composing at the age of 17. Oláh attended the Béla Bartok Conservatory and completed his musical studies at the Franz Liszt Music University. In 1990, he established Trio Midnight, which launched his career in jazz. Since then, he has performed at festivals and concerts throughout the world.

Over the past decade, Oláh has recorded and performed compositions that fuse jazz and contemporary classical music with Hungarian folk music. Renowned for his distinctive compositional style and his original approach to playing jazz, Oláh has played and recorded with a number of well-known artists, including Lee Konitz, Randy Brecker, Pat Metheny, Steve Grossman, Jack DeJohnette, John Patitucci and Kenny Wheeler. He has recorded 10 albums in a variety of settings, including trio with strings, solo with chamber orchestra, and piano and bass duets, along with his rendition of Bach's "Goldberg Variations," which features his own improvisations over Bach's original themes.

Currently, Oláh is a member of the jazz faculty of the Liszt Music Academy of Budapest and leads big band workshops at the Berlin Jazz Institute. He plans to record a Concerto for Symphony Orchestra and Jazz Band, and is working on arrangements for his new compositions, which will be included on an album in memory of Béla Bartok. Earlier this year, Oláh received the Franz Liszt Award, the most prestigious award for music given by the Hungarian Ministry of Culture.

BMI is proud to represent the work of Thelonious Monk and the majority of today's outstanding jazz composers, including Monk Award winners Joshua Redman and Jackie Terrasson. BMI supports the careers of more than 220,000 American composers, and we are proud to represent Herbie Hancock, the Institute's Chairman, Billy Dee Williams, and, of course, T.S. Monk, Jr.

Established in 1986 in memory of the renowned jazz pianist and composer, the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz aims to preserve America's legacy of jazz through performance and education. The Institute offers the world's most promising young musicians college level training by America's jazz masters and presents public school-based jazz education programs for young people around the world. Additionally, the Institute provides scholarships, performance opportunities and worldwide recognition to gifted young musicians through its many jazz education programs. The Institute's most recent project is Jazz in America: The National Jazz Curriculum, a free Internet-based curriculum for 5th, 8th and 11th grade public school students.

bmi.com