Thursday, January 05, 2006

Szalóki Ági

Just when I thought 2005 was going to be another very boring year musically, I chanced upon this CD on Christmas Eve. I'm not particularly interested in folk music as such, but when folk music meets jazz it's a different story. According to the Japanese sleeve notes, Ms. Szalóki has been around as a folk singer for a long time, but on this her debut album she has teemed up with a bunch of Hungarian jazz musicians, and the resulting mix of traditional melancholy melodies and quiet, sparse jazz arrangements is just my sort of thing. It sometimes even reminds me of Jan Johansson's classic Jazz på svenska, and that's very high praise indeed. The packaging is nice too.

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