4. Hevhetia Festival

Budapest Music Center and Hevhetia Records present their joint festival for the fourth consecutive time this year. The 4. Hevhetia Festival will take place at Opus Jazz Club, Budapest between the 4th and 8th of September, 2018. The festival’s lineup offers a selection of bands recently debuting on Hevhetia Records – a prestigious catalogue of more than 150 releases available in 20 countries around the world.

Ľubo Šamo Project (SK) – 04.09 | 8 p.m.

Consisting of musicians from Central Slovakia, Ľubo Šamo Project was founded in 2013 by the renowned Slovak jazz violinist Ľubo Šamo. Their music, combining elements of jazz, rock, ethno with contemporary rhythms of popular music, has been applied not only in jazz clubs, but also at festival stages like Jazz Prešov or Fusion Prievidza. In 2015,Ľubo Šamo Project performed on Bratislava Jazz Days, the biggest annual jazz event in Slovakia. In 2016 Hevhetia released their debut album, Good Trip, which was nominated in the category of The Best Slovak Jazz Album of the Year for the “Slovak Grammy”, the Esprit Award.

Pavel Jakub Ryba & Petr Valášek (CZ) – 05.09 | 8 p.m.

Bass player Pavel Jakub Ryba ranks among the leading Czech jazz musicians and composers. His extensive repertoire mixes jazz, classical, pop, rock and transforms classic standards to fit his own energetic musical style. The excellent bass guitarist is not unknown to visitors of Opus Jazz Club, as his trio has been performing at the first Hevhetia festival three years ago, with Petr Valášek on bass clarinet and Tomáš Křemenák on saxophone and accordion. This time he comes in duo with Valášek, who, like Ryba, feels most comfortable in the world of blues, funk, mainstream and fusion jazz.

Kari Sál Quartet: Betesda (PL) – 06.09 | 8 p.m.

Kari Sál, the young polish singer, songwriter and lyricist was raised in the mountain range part of the Outer Eastern Carpathians in the south-east of Poland, which, along with the atmosphere of her home, gives inspiration to her compositions and lyrics. Reflections to its nature, beauty, and richness of colours form essential part in her art. The music on Betesda, Kari Sál’s Hevhetia debut, was born under influence of paintings and her recent journey to Iceland. The music of Betesda reveals two simultaneous layers, one by its fine and elegant chamber jazz with elements of classical and world music brought to life by an excellent team-work of a balanced melodic and rhythmic section, and a second through its inward spirituality, transmitted by the textual testimony of the personal poetics of Kari Sál or even by the apocryphal gospels of James and John from the mid of the 2nd century, inspiring the title compositions Betesda I-II. 

Stanisław Słowiński Quintet (PL) – 07.09 | 8 p.m.

Winner of the Audience Award at the 1st International Zbigniew Seifert Violin Competition, along many other prices, violinist Stanisław Słowiński is one of the most creative musicians on the young Polish music scene. The debut album of Stanisław Słowiński Quintet Landscapes Too Easy To Explain, the group lead by the violinist, was released in 2016 on Hevhetia. The follow-up, Stanisław Słowiński Sextet's Visions | Between Love and Death, inspired by various improvisational approaches and contemporary chamber, film and experimental music, hit the market a year later, in 2017, earning again serious critical acclaim both to Słowiński and his group. 

Improvision Quartet (PL) – 08.09 | 8 p.m.

Improvision Quartet is a collective composed of leading musicians of the Polish jazz scene, each of whom has different experiences and own developed brand, three of them known by visitors of Opus already. Their album Free-Folk-Jazz, released on Hevhetia in 2017, is the most recent project of the Improvision Quartet, inspired by Polish folk music that becomes a starting point for brand new and original compositions. The album is a compilation of jazz, classical music, traditional music and modern improvised music.