The grenadilla is an extremely dense, solid species of tree native to South Africa, and is used to make the clarinet of Western classical music, and the tárogató used in Hungarian folk music. But here, with wood from this tree, we hear the voice of Africa and Europe together, when on the tárogató, the clarinet, and bass clarinet Mihály Borbély plays a peculiarly European style of Afro-American origin jazz, with a European, or rather, Hungarian flavour. Mihály Borbély is a polyglot not just in genres, but in terms of instruments, for on this CD alone seven wind instruments are in dialogue, testing each other’s boundaries. What we are dealing with here is musical alchemy. What really brings these experiments to life is that Mihály Borbély talks with creative minds, like pianist Dániel Szabó, who after a long period as a member of the Borbély Quartet, went to spread his wings in the USA, but on visits to Hungary popped into the studio for a jam session, bassist Balázs Horváth, who provides a stable foundation, Hunor G. Szabó on the drums, who synthesizes his wide-ranging musical interests: jazz, folk music, and rock and the young multi-instrumentalist Áron Tálas, with a vibrant concentrated presence throughout the recording. The meeting of generations is well symbolized by the way that fashion has caught up with Mihály Borbély. Through modern jazz, the younger folk have now mastered as their mother tongue what Mihály Borbély has always known from folk music: odd rhythms. At the same time Mihály Borbély and his fellow musicians always endeavour to play naturally flowing, rolling music, rather than “math jazz”.

Borbély, however, is not one to get stuck in the past, even though he sets out from a traditional basis, he always aims his music at an airy, fresh, very much present dimension. As for what they think of the past and the present, of west and east, this is perhaps best shown by Our Favorite Things, which is as if Coltrane had teleported somewhere to the Balkans while buying a few Hungarian folk instruments: the standard from The Sound of Music has perhaps never before been played on a tárogató and a dvojnice (a Serbian double flute), which enrich the basic theme with exotic, oriental scales. This is how the music of Mihály Borbély concentrates the past and present into one point.

Based on the booklet text by Emese Szász