It was a jazz weekend at the Posticum in Nagyvárad

March 7–10 The Posticum in Nagyvárad organized a free jazz weekend between

(below only from Saturday evening)

In short, to make the tone more personal, unfortunately I only managed to get here on Saturday (March 9). What I heard at that time was world-class jazz music, and you didn't have to travel to New York or even next door, Budapest. Below I'll share some thoughts about the hour and a half of pure music I listened to at JazzLand - I came with a heavy heart during the break of the second part, but due to other commitments I couldn't stay until the end of the late-night show.

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Róbert Szakcsi Lakatos opened the evening with a non-stop, uninterrupted solo show of about an hour, we can say that almost an hour long chain of compositions unfolded on the piano, different jazz era styles from standards, but sensitive classical music influences, and obviously the performer's own musical ideas with great taste. , his inspirations alternated in successive and simultaneous harmony, with an excellent mixing of color palettes, with many sophisticated emotional roller coasters.

In the second half of the evening, the Cristi Copaciu Band chose the world of more established standards, also with an individual, fresh, witty sound. Members of the band: Cristian Copaciu - guitar, David Luca - piano, Alexandru Aruxandei - bass, Frankie Ercsei - drums. The excellent jazz guitarist Olivér Báder from Varad joined the Copacicu's as a guest artist. Róbert Szakcsi Lakatos was visibly and of course audibly having such a good time at the piano during the evening that he also joined Copaciu's team for the first two numbers in the second part.

In terms of musical roots and alma mater influences, two, or better said, three different schools, i.e. jazz academies, sat here one after the other, the ones from Budapest and the ones from Hungary (Cluj and Bucharest).

But let me also say a few words about the atmosphere, which was excellent, as it always is in Posticum's JazzLand. Now the approx. half an hour plus waiting was not so disturbing at the beginning and neither was the long break in the middle. It was a full house, many familiar and diverse international listeners (as we found out, from many parts of the world). On the whole, it was an understanding audience, they knew where and when it was appropriate to applaud the improvisations.

The Baumgardt piano had the special feature of having its front cover removed, so it was not only acoustically good, but also offered a very intimate view - in its slightly "more loose clothing", the hammer mechanism and strings of the instrument could partially be flashed.

I don't think I need to explain anything about the quality of pianist Róbert Szakcsi Lakatos, in both classical and jazz genres, but to hear him here in Nagyvárád, close up in a club atmosphere, and also out of free love from Posticum, well, it's more than an experience... - I'd say it's indescribable experience, but I just wrote it down.

As I said above, it was both a simultaneous and successive fusion, the opening of the gateway between jazz and classical musical ideas, woven from the soul of Róbert Szakcsi Lakatos himself, who is a professional conjurer and expertly understands the creation of spiritual silence in music, as a poet, lyrical, but he can also be very, very loose in his sudden witty ideas, if he feels like it.

Poetry is also what unfolded in his approximately one-hour continuous improvisation, swimming in a wide sea, where various light refractions and waves appear from time to time accompanied by various winds (more flirtatious or more aggressive), from cool to scorching, where all kinds of thematic surprises await at each buoy .

Of course, you can be serious and smile about what a classically educated (donkey) ear hears in this special improvisational poetic world, even often compulsively, there is a saying about this that if you only have a hammer, you see everything as a nail. I am saying this because - also because of Róbert's versatile classical music skills - what I personally saw as a nail/buoy in this world of both jazz and classical music improvisation in passing: Gerswin's love theme from Rhapsody in Blue, Beethoven's Pastorale sonata opening low hum, Brahms symphony opening theme, Debussy's Fireworks Prelude and Dance of the Snowflakes (the latter perfectly rhymed with the motto of the Jazz Weekend: "goodbye winter, hello spring"), cross-overs of Liszt's Dante and B minor sonatas, that's all that suddenly jumped out.

And then about the binding material: jazz formulas, scale progressions, harmonic subtleties, surprise substitutions, sequences that Bartók would surely nod to... All this from the little finger, or from ten, relaxed, with excellent taste.

Then approx. after an hour we came to the inevitable end - dramaturgically the end of the one-hour show - a concrete quotation, a leaden slussopoena came as a closing, Rachmaninoff's coffin-nail-pounding vision, a fragment of the C sharp minor prelude.

Pause.

We don't need to introduce Oliver Báder Báder from Nagyvárad, the musical soul of Posticum, to the locals, but I don't think to "non-Varadians" in particular either - with the refined taste and technique he plays the guitar, it is often a sky-high prayer in jazz. Cristian Copaciu (guitar) comes from Brest-Bucharest, Alexandru Aruxandei (bass) straight from Rome, David Luca (piano) from Cluj, Frankie Ercsei (drums) from Marosvásárhely-Cluj. Unfortunately, I can only write a few thoughts about the short first half of the concert, as I already mentioned above.

This time we could hear standards, seasoned with a lot of Charlie Parker, but also Hargrove, Coltrane, Dizzy. The very first impression (almost immediate) of the team is how extremely delicately these guys from different places react to each other, and in their professional life they also move in a variety of musical styles, how calmly and pleasantly they get used to each other, and with what good taste they react in a stylistic and dynamic pattern in a matter of seconds each other's playing, how good the two guitarists' dialogues, call-and-responses are, but also how witty the team is - the humor is there in the tiniest musical comments, for example when they slip some sound(ulat) crumb under the improvising colleague, or rather a track ends with a surprising conclusion. This is where my hour and a half ended on Saturday at Posticum's JazzLand, shortly after Anthropology was played.