With the album Fermentum, a new generation of Hungarian folk jazz makes its mark: Kovász – Sourdough in Hungarian – renews the genre’s decades-old tradition with its instrumental lineup as well as its approach. The band leader, Gergő Kováts, had got a foothold both in the world of jazz and folk, so his compositions do not simply approach folk music from the perspective of a jazz musician, but unbreakably combine all the influences that he and his bandmates have experienced so far, almost creating a new genre.

Since the iconic figure of Hungarian free music, György Szabados, the second generation of musicians knows that “we can quite safely replace the base material of jazz, Afro-American folk music, with the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic formulae of Hungarian folk music – all while maintaining the creative freedom of jazz”, as Gergő Kováts puts it. Kovász’s first album Fermentum differs fundamentally from the work of first-generation folk-jazz greats: while Mihály Dresch or Mihály Borbély aimed at developing a characteristic, organic and folk-focused jazz sound working in parallel with the traditional dance house movement, the members of Kovász explore the now readily accessible traditional musical knowledge with a similar commitment, but approach it rather through intuition and bold associations, which yields more eclectic results. The music of Kovász, like the ancient folk practice of sourdough baking that they chose as their name, is in the constant motion of change; band members break down different musics into molecules, then set up their interaction based on well-established musical analogies. As they themselves say: they put hard bop and free jazz in their jars, fed the pre-ferment with characteristic elements and dances of Hungarian folk music, and of course some hip-hop and funk mixed in from the air. All this calls for an unusual instrumental lineup, with synthesizer and prepared gardon decisively shaping the band’s sound.

Bandleader and saxophonist Gergő Kováts is a highly skilled improviser and authentic interpreter of folk music at the same time, having added the essence of jazz to the sound of some of the most important Hungarian world music bands like Tárkány Művek, while as a member of Geröly Trio, Decolonize Your Mind Society or Máté Pozsár Septet he remained a stable and inescapable figure on the Hungarian creative music and free jazz scene. His bandmates come from a similar background: Ábel Dénes, for example, leads his life across genres with the Emma Nagy Quintet and Söndörgő, while Máté Pozsár, a musician and professor, and Attila Gyárfás, active on the international scene including his collaboration with Magic Malik, are highly regarded participants of the experimental contemporary, improvised and free jazz scene.