Muzycy:
Charles Gayle - alto sax, tenor sax, piano
Szilárd Mezei - viola
Ervin Malina - double bass (right)
Ernő Hock - double bass (left)
István Csík - drums

Recorded live during 15th Jazz, improvised music festival, Magyarkanizsa, Serbia, on 12. 09. 2009. by Lazar Živanac.

In the second half of the eighties, I heard the duo of Charles Gayle and Peter Kowald at the Jazz Days in Novi Sad. A few years later, when Szilárd Mezei and I met, and played music together, I told him a lot about the experience that this concert had given me. I remember that the intensity, the density, the strikingly different quality of Gayle's music-making was beyond my comprehension, or even my measure.
And then the world changed, and what seemed unattainable at the time became reality. A joint concert could be created. This was, of course, due to the importance of Szilárd and his fellow musicians in improvisational music. He told me that during the negotiations, the only stipulation Gayle had was that he should receive a bottle of olive oil on arrival. This inspired Szilárd's title. The titles are playful variations on olive oil, like a children's story, a poetic miniature. Szilárd Mezei's scores are themselves works of art in their own right. That is how this recording came to be, as a beautiful, clear-cut score by Szilárd Mezei.
Thinking of the work of Szilárd Mezei and Charles Gayle, I am reminded of Bresson's films, which are clean to the core. "There can be no relationship between an actor and a tree. They belong to two different universes. (The theatrical tree is only a simulation of the real tree)," he writes. This could be the difference between a musician and a Musician.
Elsewhere, Bresson writes of the human voice: "His voice draws before me his mouth, his eyes, his face, his complete external and internal portrait, more perfectly than if he were standing there before me. The most accurate means of cognition is mere hearing."
Charles Gayle's music is of transcendent origin, it is soul music, an Artaudian rite of passage and a spiritual. His life's journey is not that of a conventional jazz musician, but rather a modern-day mystical quest, and it is perhaps by understanding this that his music can be interpreted (if music i.......
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Fragment noty Szabolcs Tolnai:

"...zastrzeżeniem Gayle było to, że po przyjeździe (na festiwal) powinien otrzymać butelkę oliwy z oliwek. To zainspirowało tytuł Szilárda. Tytuły są zabawnymi wariacjami na temat oliwy z oliwek, niczym bajka dla dzieci, poetycka miniatura. Partytury Szilárda Mezei same w sobie są dziełami sztuki. I tak powstało to nagranie, jako piękna, wyrazista partytura Szilárda Mezei."