Újbuda Jazz Festival – Őri-Kiss Botond, NovaN, Bala Marea

Despite its long history, the Újbuda Jazz Festival has never been about jazz sitting comfortably back in an armchair. It has always been more about constantly searching for new paths, experimenting, and exploring what happens when a musician does not necessarily want to stay within the boundaries drawn around a genre.

This year, the focus is on solo pianists and new-wave jazz. Two exciting, experimental acts, Őri-Kiss Botond and NovaN, return to Fonó, while Bala Marea will take the Fonó stage for the first time, bringing with them the fresh, rebellious spirit of young jazz musicians who graduated from the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music.

So if you love jazz but don’t mind when it occasionally steps outside itself; if you enjoy sophisticated music, new sounds and unexpected directions, and perhaps wouldn’t say no to a good glass of red wine from the shelf either, this is the place for you.

Őri-Kiss Botond

Composer and pianist Botond Őri-Kiss graduated from the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music. He has been composing and performing solo concerts since 2013, while collaborating with numerous figures from the Hungarian jazz and contemporary music scenes, including István Grencsó, Szabolcs Tóth, Dániel Horváth, Péter Friderikusz and Sándor Csoóri Jr.

This May, he presented his new concert material, built around analog sequences, at the House of Music Hungary. Starting from the world of the Music for Left & Right album, the program is expanded with previously unheard, more rhythmic, live act-style pieces. Repetition, improvisation, continuous transformation, a musical process in which the audience is not merely an observer.

Bala Marea

Led by Viktória Dely, Bala Marea brings together jazz and popular music, odd-meter grooves, heavy bass lines and the rich expressive vocabulary of vocal music. Built primarily around their own compositions, their musical world is personal, free and difficult to contain within genre labels. They will be performing at Fonó for the first time.

NovaN

Gábor Novai, known as NovaN, starts with the acoustic piano and then takes it somewhere much further. His music moves along the borderlands of jazz, neo-classical music and psychedelic soundscapes: intimate, meditative and experimental at the same time. One piano, surrounded by an entire, constantly evolving sonic world.

Ticket price: HUF 2,500 in advance, HUF 3,000 on the day of the event