Progressive Savage

Many years ago someone told me that there is a long process of maturation before you’ll start enjoying jazz music. For some time now, I thought about myself as a person whose musical taste had become mature enough to understand and appreciate some of the jazz performances. Couple of days ago I learned about a Jazz at the Old Town Square Festival and thought it might be interesting to see what is it all about, given that I’ve never been to any jazz gig before. Jazz at the Old Town Square Festival is an open air jazz festival taking place every summer here in Warsaw, Poland. It lasts for two months, presenting a different artist each Saturday evening. This year it started on July 4th and will continue till the August 29th.

The jazz festivities were initiated yesterday by a Hungarian fusion/world music band Djabe. The band was completely unknown to me–quite as every other name on the festival’s performers list–but after a visit to their website and hearing Doromb I became really excited about seeing them live and–oh boy–I was not leftdown. The band performance was absolutely amazing and Tamás Barabás quickly joined the ranks of my favorite bass players (and not only because of his excellent slapping). As for the other musicians, I think that many heavy metal drummers should be learning from Szilárd Banai’s fast and precise double bass drumming. Both Zoltán Kovács (keyboards) and Ferenc Kovács (violin, trumpet) gave a great performance as well and the only glitch was barely audible  sound of Attila Égerházi’s guitar which emerged only occasionally.

Nonetheless, I can say that Djabe made a great impression on me and left me expecting much of the festival itself. I can’t wait for the next Saturday’s performance by a “living legend” of Polish fusion/jazz rock scene, String Connection.

Judging from what I’ve heard so far from the Hungarian progressive scene I can say it’s unique and definitely cognisable, mainly because of the use of many non-rock sounds like piano, string and brass instruments and mostly avoiding the heaviness that the whole Western progressive world have already adopted. One of the bands that populated Hungarian progressive landscape of the 90s was Townscream, formed by Vedres Csaba after he parted ways with After Crying. Nagyvárosi Ikonok, which translates to Metropolitan Icons, is the band’s only album written mostly by Vedres Csaba–of course–while lyrics, in Hungarian, came from Egervári Gábor. All the tracks of this piano driven album are bound by a common theme: the big city and it’s comparison to countryside.

What the hell is wrong with prog-metal lately? It should be progressive as in moving forward, changing and evolving but instead it just became same ol’ stagnant music genre. Many new–at least to me–progressive metal bands sound pretty much the same, no matter whether it’s French Spheric Universe Experience, Australian Vanishing Point, Italian Somniae Status or Hungarian Dying Wish.

The albums I’ve heard lately, that isAnima, The Fourth Season, Echoes and D.Y.I.N.G. W.I.S.H. respectively, are pretty decent at most. There’s nothing that would make want to come back to them every now and again and to me they all sound alike. It resembles me of Andromeda: pretty cool band but unable to keep my attention for too long. OK, last Andromeda’s album I’ve thoroughly listen to was II=I so I’m not up-to-date with their music. On the other hand, it just proves that they weren’t able to keep me interested.

My words may seem a little bit bitter but–really–what’s wrong with prog-metal?