The first edition of Jazzdor Budapest launches with the premiere of an irresistibly intimate and poetic album. The Twigs trio was founded by French jazz icon Vincent Courtois, who has chosen two rising stars to join him. Dutch singer Sanne Rambags, who leads several bands on her own, is one of the great hopes of the international jazz world, while Swiss drummer and media artist Julian Sartorius has been one of Europe's most sought-after performers for years. Their album, recorded last summer at the BMC, is song-centred chamber jazz with improvisations, in an undefinable style that echoes everything from traditional jazz to contemporary classical music and shamanistic folk. Whether she whispers or sings in guttural voice, Rambags always captivates with her immediacy, while Courtois and Sartorius are ready to punctuate or contradict the singer's words.

Renowned French violinist Clément Janinet founded the O.U.R.S. quartet in 2017. The band's name is a play on words: their full name is Ornette Under the Repetitive Skies, but the acronym itself means bear in French. Since the release of their album on BMC Records in September 2022, they have received the highest critical awards in all French jazz magazines. The album combines the sonic and rhythmic textures of American contemporary repetitive music, the lyricism of Ornette’s free jazz and a somewhat rockish mood, but Janinet's compositions also draw inspiration from the musical world of African trance and liturgical chants. Joined by three equally distinguished, seasoned and inventive colleagues, the violinist conjures streams of sound that are both conceptual and freely floating.

A singer, percussionist, poet but also a dancer, Ann O'Aro has made the major axis of her poetics of the movement that links the rhythms of the body to those of the Creole language, in which she expresses herself. With her sensitive writing, she carves autobiographical texts, raw, violent and committed, which she interprets with a strong and passionate voice, reaching these hyper-contemporary zones where the intimate and the political combine. Leading her trio and bringing together trombonist Teddy Doris and percussionist Bino Hoarau around her voice and percussion, Ann O'Aro revisits the traditional rhythms of Réunionese maloya and Mauritian sega with the sounds and pulses of jazz, zouk or Balkans' music, thus propelling into our contemporaneity the strong speech of a standing woman.

This album, featuring Gábor Gadó, who is most often referred to as a jazz guitarist, and one of Hungary's greatest jazz singers, Veronika Harcsa, overrides our preconceived notions of music. The dialectic of composition and improvisation is resolved in a dialogue between contemporary classical musicians and jazz musicians, without a rhythm section. From the jazz side, two wind players – Belgian trumpeter Laurent Blondiau and the sound magician saxophonist János Ávéd – and from the classical side, two string players – Tamás Zétényi, a prominent cellist of the contemporary music scene, and Éva Csermák, a violinist living in Berlin – add defining colours to the character of the music. Both by animating the vocal line and as the author of the texts, Veronika Harcsa adds even more content to the translucent songs, in which not only the different musical parts but also elements of early and contemporary music are woven into an organic whole.

Visionary minds of the German and French jazz scene unite forces once again under the artistic direction of Hans Lüdemann. The members of TransEuropeExpress Ensemble draw creative energies from the interplay and fusion of their different dialects to form colourful and multilayered images of European jazz. For their four-part series ‘On The Edges’ on BMC Records, the octet explores the Old Continent’s frontiers to generate energy and tension from contrasting musical elements and cultural backgrounds, as evidenced by their recent album featuring Moroccan musician, composer, and singer Majid Bekkas.

For this premiere at Jazzdor Strasbourg-Budapest, Lüdemann has invited Italian accordionist Luciano Biondini to write the next chapter of ‘On The Edges’. They will first perform as a duo to start a musical dialogue with inventive and intriguing twists and turns. Then, together with the TransEurope Express Ensemble, the musicians deliberately step out of their comfort zone of familiar musical styles to open themselves and the ensemble in new directions. These encounters have the goal of merging the wide scope of different projects into a unified musical “Gesamtkunstwerk” – a total work of art.

Electron libre de la musique, c’est auprès du public français que la chanteuse et musicienne suédoise, Isabel Sörling, a trouvé sa voix. Après un premier album folk et pop produit par Ibrahim Maalouf, Something Came With The Sun, l’artiste multiplie les collaborations avec d’autres artistes de la planète jazz (Ibrahim Maalouf, Cabaret Contemporain, Paul Lay, Airelle Besson…) ou des musiques plus expérimentales. Elle ne renonce pas pour autant à son goût pour l’indie-folk et la musique d’avant-garde. Son album MARELD mêle ses envies et ses multiples influences, un opus de pop tribale et synthétique, salué unanimement par la presse et récompensé par les Victoires de Jazz dans la catégorie "Artiste vocal" en 2021.
Dans son format solo, on l’entend dans sa dimension la plus épurée, acoustique, brute, dans ses chansons folk réarrangées pour piano, guitare et voix. Une artiste, qui navigue librement entre l’improvisation le folk et l’avant-garde, mêlant vulnérabilité et maîtrise.

Quoting Stan Getz as his main saxophonist influence, Sylvain Rifflet gladly draws in the field of American repetitive and minimalist music to develop a writing mixing improvisation, repetition, rupture, bruitism and even sometimes trance. After the success of Mechanics, then his tribute to Stan Getz (Re Focus, 2017), his hypnotic ode to the music of the ancient poets of love (Troubadours, 2019) and his project around speeches of revolt (Rebellions, 2021), Sylvain Rifflet is back with a more personal work: Aux Anges. This album, which the artist considers to be his most accomplished, is dedicated to his loved ones, his “angels”, and to the personalities who have influenced and nourished him. We find references to American composers Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, but also Moondog, to the singer, composer and activist Abbey Lincoln, to saxophonists Stan Getz and Jon Irabagon, to filmmaker Claude Sautet, or to novelist James Baldwin.