Vive le Jazz! Festival 2023
A celebration of French jazz at Opus Jazz Club
18-20 October

French jazz brings wonderful colours to the European scene. Vive le Jazz!, a joint festival of the Budapest Music Center and the Institut Français de Budapest, celebrates the vivid and diverse world of French jazz, featuring stars such as Émile Parisien and Jim Black on the stage of Opus Jazz Club between 18 and 20 October.

This year's festival programme includes three productions that use acoustic music to help listeners step outside the confines of our everyday world. The opening day of the festival, on the evening of 18 October, will feature a performance by Les Géants Terrestres, a female quartet of string trio and piano led by Anne Quillier. Quillier calls out to the fragile and fascinating giants of our earth, the trees, in the voices of fairies and trolls. The singer-keyboardist inexhaustibly discovers the unusual instrumental arrangement she has dreamed up. Together with her fellow musicians, they are always ready to experiment, adapt or even start afresh, and they demonstrate their deep passion for music in a wide range of fields, from tango to musical education. Their music sheds all genre labels: its sole purpose is to lift the listener's gaze from our machine-filled environment to the wonders of life.

Paul Jarret and Jim Black share a passion for the bold improvisation that characterizes free jazz, and both were immersed in the indie rock scene of the 90s. The project Ghost Songs, which comes to life on 19 October, was developed with Jozef Dumoulin and Julien Pontvianne. The deliberately simple melodies, almost reminiscent of pop or folk music, allow all four members to express their strong musical personalities both individually and together, as they leave ample room for the creation of different sonorities, silence, improvisation and interaction. The songs suggest moods and states of mind as elusive but very much present ghosts: they reappear in ever-changing forms to play on the strings of our memory.

The festival will close with the world-famous duo of Émile Parisien and Roberto Negro, who will pay tribute to György Ligeti, born 100 years ago this year. The composer wrote his first string quartet, entitled Métamorphoses nocturnes, when he was just 30 years old and still under the influence of Bartók. The two representatives of the vitality and open-mindedness of European jazz did not merely arrange the work, but brought out its mysterious beauty with high-wire virtuosity through improvisation. The adaptation of Parisien and Negro, at times lyrical, at times mischievous, at times impetuous, but always coherent and natural, has been released on disc by ACT and received the highest rating, Choc, from the French Jazz Magazine in July.

PROGRAMMES

18 October 2023 8 PM Vive le Jazz! Festival | Les Géants Terrestres (FR)

19 October 2023 8 PM Vive le Jazz! Festival | Paul Jarret 'Ghost Songs' feat. Jim Black, Jozef Dumoulin & Julien Pontvianne (FR/US/BE)

20 October 2023 8 PM Vive le Jazz! Festival | Émile Parisien – Roberto Negro: Les Métanuits (FR)

SUPPORTING PARTNERS

Institut français Budapest
Groupama