The First 50 Years A Zeneakadémia saját szervezésű programja

Fifty years is a considerable period in music history terms. For example, the births of Johannes Brahms and Béla Bartók are separated by a half century, as are those of Thelonius Monk and John Medeski. When the ‘jazz department’ was formed under the aegis of the Bartók Conservatoire and the leadership of János Gonda in 1965, jazz had only recently been re-categorized from ‘forbidden’ to ‘tolerated’. According to a comment from György Aczél in 1958, the genre leads to “sentimentalism, pessimism and exultation; it diverts the attention of youth from the important questions of society and propagates an American lifestyle,” but by the 1960s beat had raised its head, considered an even greater threat from the perspective of cultural policy. This and the growing international recognition of the Kodály music teaching method probably played a role in the institutionalization of Hungarian jazz tuition as one of the earliest such examples in Europe. It is no exaggeration to state that János Gonda and his colleagues, indeed later flag bearers (heads of department following on from the founder: Mihály Borbély, Károly Binder and their colleagues) acted in a historically significant way, since the most important figures in Hungarian jazz life today were all hatched from this jazz department. Now these artists take the opportunity to pay tribute to their alma mater in the frame of a unique jazz festival.