Wednesday 5 February 2020

Csaba Deseo's Blue String (1984)








This guy made two pretty good fusion albums back in the day (by that of course I mean the seventies) that are well known and then this lesser known Orwellian album, which turned out to be not so bad, albeit marred by the inclusion of some of those ludicrous jazz standards.  Briefly, as per the ever-succinct discogs:

Hungarian jazz musician.  Born 15 February, 1939 in Budapest, Hungary.  Plays violin, viola, whistle & saxophone.  Founder of the band Deseő Csaba Jazz Quintet.

There they list the first two as the Four-String Tschaba from 1975 and then this album from 1984.  With the aforementioned Jazz Quintet he made Ultraviola in 1977, mostly interesting for the quarter hour Suite that finishes it up. The subsequent album with the title Nuages I have no desire to hear, having learned from bitter experience that any LP which includes an interpretation of that particular Reinhardt composition, not to mention is named after it, is inevitably terrible.  It was thought at one time, by the best jazz critics, that a cover version of this song could reliably indicate awfulness as a symptom much the way a pus-filled cluster of lymph nodes (called a bubo) was a hallmark, pathognomic in medical terms, of the bubonic plague.  In those early days of science, of course, the jazz critics could not ascertain for sure what was the reason for this odd finding--was it the simplicity of the song, its ancient origins, the fact it was French with gypsy influences, or its being associated with the second world war and all its horrific suffering, but anyways this association has been elevated today into a universal theorem much like the cell theory, or evolution, or facebook.  As a conjecture it does remain unproved, much like the Goldbach conjecture, but it is believed to be true by a large majority of experts.  Moving on now, first of all the remarkable track, For Children, from the 1975 opus:





We are reminded of so much of the best of Euro-fusion-- especially Didier Lockwood, or his enemy and Deseo's World War II ally Seifert, etc.

Then, Carole from the 1984:





What a difference a decade makes.  But it's not that bad, overall.


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