French jazz brings wonderful colours to the European scene. The 2025 edition of 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 in Opus Jazz Club between 2 and 4 October. One of the special features of this year’s festival is the artistic residency of Hungarian-French guitarist Csaba Palotaï, who will participate in all three concerts.

Four musicians who have shared a close bond for many years join forces in Impérial Quartet, which came into existence in 2010, and will open the festival on 2 October. Built around rhythms from double/electric bass and drums – responsive, generous, solid, and always on the alert – the group’s strength lies in the unique nature of the unmistakable bond which has united the saxophonists for over fifteen years. Inspired as much by traditional and trance-like music as the driving force behind rock, this search for organic material creates a rhythmic nerve centre for ethereal melodies and soaring lyricism. 

The first half of the double-bill concert on 3 October features Laura Perrudin, who ventures into sound worlds evoking Amon Tobin, Björk, Portishead, Mica Levi and Flying Lotus, as well as the winding, impressionistic harmonies of Debussy, Ravel or Wayne Shorter – with the help of the electric chromatic harp, an instrument tailor-made for her. In the second half of the concert, we welcome Csaba Palotaï, resident artist of this year's Vive le Jazz festival. The guitarist's new program, Soulbread, is a response to his solo album The Deserter, released ten years ago, which is not only one of the brightest gems in the BMC Records catalog, but also received great international acclaim. 

Following the acclaimed album Moving Cities, produced with Makaya McCraven, Antoine Berjeaut returned with Chromesthesia in 2022, crafted together with some of the most innovative musicians of the French jazz circuit and to be presented at Opus on October 4. Chromesthesia (or sound-to-color synesthesia) is a type of synesthesia in which sound involuntarily evokes an experience of color, shape, and movement. Antoine Berjeaut seeks synesthetic resonances between sound and colors, guided by the intuition that he can write music while using concepts and processes inherent to graphic art; playing with contrasts and nuances the way he plays with scales and keys, and tracing melodic lines in a constantly moving world, both graphic and sonic.

Tickets for the three concerts of the Vive le Jazz festival are available on the spot, online at bmc.jegy.hu, and at InterTicket Jegypont partners across Hungary.