Improvising in the dark

Elemér Balázs with young son. Photo courtesy Elemér Balázs.

Hungarian jazz on long road to mass appeal

By Nóra Lakos

(Budapest) In Hungary, only classical music enjoys several billion HUF in financial state support, while pop, rock, jazz and folk music must rely on the rather modest domestic market for their livelihood. At the same time, popular music in the broad sense constitutes some 20 percent of programming at Hungarian festivals abroad. In other words, it has become a flagship representative of Hungarian culture internationally. Despite this fact, the genre fails to enjoy due respect, in the financial and moral sense. During the past 40 years, artists playing jazz or high-end pop music have received little or no official recognition.

To illustrate the priorities of the state’s financial support programs, the National Cultural Fund (NKA), the only funding mechanism for musicians aside from Hungary’s Ministry of Culture, will spend HUF 300 million out of a total HUF 6 billion available to finance music this year alone. Of that amount, 15% is earmarked for popular music.

Should the state be financing popular music?
Incensed at their treatment, well known pop music personalities recently gathered and wrote a pointed letter to the Culture Ministry complaining that, as opposed to film, theater or literature, popular music is the only field which is supposed to support itself from the market even though, just like many other financed artistic genres, it cannot survive on the marketplace alone.

The signatories of the open letter cited many examples in European countries where state financing mechanisms are in place for the domestic and international popularization of popular music. In Finland, for instance, authorities recognized that in a country of five million, non-mainstream musical types are financially not viable, so they set up a transparent system for supporting classical, jazz and folk music from revenues of blank audiotape sales and broadcasting fees. This financial support enables artists to record albums, perform live domestically and internationally, and export their music.

Similarly, in the United Kingdom, the Artcouncil received GBP 2 billion from the government and the National Lottery, which it will gradually distribute through 2006 among different artistic fields. From this fund, the International Jazz Festival this year received GBP 100,000. This amount is expected to rise 10% by 20006.

In Hungary, protest by the musicians stirred up a media storm, but failed to elicit substantial results.

Jazz musicians did it
Hungarian Jazz has a bright future: Elemér Balázs with young son

In the meantime, a body consisting of leaders of the Hungarian Jazz Alliance and a number of outstanding domestic jazz musicians have been quietly negotiating for more than a year with the Culture Ministry with the hope of persuading the government to treat improvisational contemporary and jazz music in the same category as classical music, and to acknowledge it as an integral part of Hungarian culture. Last May, they put a voluminous proposal to the Culture Ministry which suggested the creation of a jazz center, the setting up of a fund separate from NKA for the support of improvisational contemporary and jazz music, and to proliferate jazz clubs.

In the music center, planned for downtown Budapest, hundreds of albums would be available for hearing free of charge as would a library of music publications. The music center would manage domestic jazz and improvisational contemporary music though Internet databases made up of hundreds of domestic musicians as well as international live performances and reviews.

« While we are internationally recognized, we are forced to perform at Hungarian festivals for one-quarter of the fee that international performers receive, » said Kornél Horváth, vice president of the Jazz Alliance who has been an active musician for some 30 years.

Horváth hopes that a website promoting domestic musicians would, in the long run, change the mentality which labels them music’s « second class citizens. » However, they need to make a living in the meantime, and musicians performing in domestic festivals have been granted some HUF 11 million by the Culture Ministry to supplement their fees this year.

The most important result of the yearlong negotiations, hinged on parliament approving its draft budget, is that the Culture Ministry will contribute HUF 30 million toward the creation and operation of jazz clubs throughout the country. So far, 20 clubs have indicated their intent to participate in the program, which would cover half of the cost of operation, while the clubs must provide the other half.

According to Horváth, this kind of club system can function as a base for domestic jazz music, providing an opportunity for musicians to showcase their talents and make jazz a competitor in the mainstream styles of today.

The world over, jazz enthusiasts number far less than pop or rock fans. In Hungary, jazz has had a peculiar career in recent times. During socialist times, it was associated with the illegal political opposition, which made it very popular. In recent years, since the collapse of communism, its audience base has wasted away and fewer jazz festivals have been organized. The presence of jazz in the media was also limited.

While in most European countries, there are jazz radio stations and television programs, Hungarian authorities several years ago rejected the frequency application of a Budapest jazz radio. Public television also airs no jazz programs. This may change, however, in the next few months as the programming director of Hungarian State Television (MTV) has promised to start airing a monthly jazz series at nights.

Skip dinner and buy the CD?
The only significant domestic record label distributing jazz is BMC Records, with 40 jazz titles in its 80-strong offering. The publishing house received some HUF 80 million from the national cultural fund to put out records this year, which covered 20% of costs, while BMC had to come up with the balance. Of the 80 titles, an annual 200 to 300 are sold in Hungary. The production costs of an album, depending on the number of musicians, ranges from HUF 2 million to HUF 8 million, and thus only two-to-three of the total number of CDs produced have recouped their investment. BMC Records, meanwhile, is present on the music markets in Western Europe and the Far East through its international distributors. Sales in France are significantly higher than in Hungary.

According to László Goz, head of BMC Records in Hungary, the lukewarm domestic atmosphere is not due to the lack of musical culture, since concerts are usually well attended. The recent BMC Music Flash festival with such performers as the Balázs Elemér Group, Gábor Gadó, The Dresch Quartet and Szakcsi Lakatos Trió enjoyed great success. However, the 800 visitors only purchased a total 12 albums, half of which was sold to one person who apparently fell in love with the label and its music.

« Concertgoers will invest that HUF 3,000 that a CD would cost in a dinner after the concert, » Goz explains.

« The entire music industry is struggling with the problem that young people, especially those under 25, download their music from the Internet or copy their CDs to each other, » he adds.

Initially, only pop music was proliferated en masse on the Internet, which, by now is home to the most divergent musical styles.

Goz says the new proliferation technology hurt music the most, since people continue to go to cinemas to watch movies and buy books to read, rather than squint at them on the computer screen. In contrast, music can be listened to anywhere, in any form, in the same sound quality.