After Montreux, Jazzbois Conquers Montreal Too

After performing at the world’s most famous jazz festival in Montreux, Jazzbois is now set to appear at the world’s largest jazz festival, the Montreal International Jazz Festival. The trio will open the very first day of the ten-day music extravaganza with a headline concert on June 26. Previous editions of the festival have featured icons such as Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, B. B. King, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Sting, and David Bowie.

Last year, the Jazzbois trio broke into the forefront of the international jazz scene with their performance at the legendary Montreux Jazz Festival. During their fourteen-date European tour in the autumn, they played to sold-out crowds at several venues, including London’s Jazz Café and Paris’s Le Hasard Ludique.

On May 6, Jamie Cullum devoted an entire hour of his show on BBC Radio 2 to Hungary’s most internationally streamed band and, through them, to Budapest’s emerging new jazz scene — a development that is unprecedented from a nation-branding perspective as well. In addition, Jazzbois will perform at London’s Cross the Tracks festival, before heading out on another European tour this November.

The freshly Fonogram Award-winning band plays a new-generation fusion sound that can loosely be described as “jazz,” although — just as contemporary pop music increasingly moves beyond rigid genre boundaries — jazz can no longer be narrowly defined either. As a result, their musical style is difficult to capture with a single label.

In Hungary, Jazzbois has already performed at Müpa Budapest with their collaborative production alongside Kaláka, and recently played a sold-out show at A38. Their real strength, however, lies in the fact that they can now sell more than four hundred tickets in many major European cities. Their audience is genuinely international: at their concerts abroad, it is rare to encounter Hungarian attendees, while orders for the band’s merchandise arrive from all over the world — further proof that what they represent resonates strongly not only in Hungary, but across Europe and overseas as well.

“At our international shows, we see that the reach of our music is almost surreal. We played to sold-out crowds in London, Amsterdam, Paris, Utrecht, and Warsaw — and it wasn’t Hungarians living abroad attending, but international fans. We’re spending a lot of time overseas now, exploring just how far we can take this,” said Viktor Sági, the band’s bassist.

This article was originally published on kultura.hu.