The third CD on the BMC label by the Trio Kontraszt

Cryptic Scattered Images of Time Forgotten, is a musical memorial of pianist and band leader Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer. Like Sinbad, he roams through time, browsing through the chapters of his life with the expansive calm of bygone times, from his years in Novi Sad, through he time at the Budapest free music school, to his studies in the Netherlands, and this way free and contemporary music, dance music, and the jazz idiom all find a place next to one another. He is accompanied by credible witnesses: saxophonist István Grencsó has long been a fellow-musician, and Szilveszter Miklós, having been born in Vojvodina and embedded in the free music school, speaks the same musical language as Tickmayer: the language of musical multilingualism.
Born in Szabadka (Subotica), pianist-composer Tickmayer's position on the current CD is that of the (self-)narrator who writes of the past from a distance. One who, just when he drifts into his nostalgic reverie, deploys his humour, pinning quotation marks in front of emotive, pathétique musical sentences. Long-cherished musical ideas and compositions matured for years are put into a new light in this narrator's bird's-eye view: the first important concerts of Tickmayer the classical pianist, within Hungary and without, the inspiring milieu of the Budapest free music school, his work composing for theatre, his studies in composition in the Netherlands, and the impression made by the teaching of the Kurtág couple, though unusual in this juxtaposition, form a unified picture from this perspective. Yet characteristic of the album is the contrast referred to in the name of the trio. Tickmayer and co. wander in the more shadowy spaces of the consciousness with a bright pocket torch: characteristic musical motifs, the typical stylistic traits of different genres flash before us with surprising clarity, only then to dissolve in the criss-crossing rays of light the improvising musicians direct at one another.

Cast & Crew

Director: 

Track Listing

• The Garden of the Wizard (In memoriam Márta Kurtág)
• Dark Ramifications
• Different Divisions and Rags
• Night Song of Icicles on the Banks of the Danube
• Passamezzo zoppo
• Sinbad Waltz
• Nocturnal Zones
• In the Garden of the Wizard
• Trash Tango

Additional Details

Label: BMC Records

Genre: Jazz

Language: English

Run Time: 53:41 mins

Region: 0

Release Date: 09/11/20

UPC: 5998309302909