Milan Bajovich
Budapest
The beginnings:
He was born in 1982 in Budapest, Hungary. Driven by his own desire, he decides to start to learn playing the violin at the age of five. He studies classical music in a Budapest conservatory. And during those years he was trying to search of his own unique style he starts to play, improvise and learn in bands of diverse styles. He sets out to explore the music of different subcultures such as “the traditional folk blues of the pre-war years, ragtime, spirituals, doom, dark-goth and Arab folk music” in which violin was not a typical instrument, and its role and function was yet to be created. The years following his graduation see him as a vital or founding member of even more bands, and his urge to experiment drives him on to play Arab classical music, different branches of klezmer, hard rock, alternative and psychedelic music, jazz, standard jazz, Latin music, and trip-hop.
Besides bluegrass, boogie, modern, contemporary, experimental and fusion music, country, cross-over and psychobilly he also tried his hand at folk music of African and other origin. While deepening his musical and improvisational skills through the wide spectrum of these genres, he was the first and only one in Europe to find a place for the violin in most of them.
Playing about a thousand and five hundred concerts with these bands makes him an accomplished stage musician and the subject and participant of various video clips, albums, news articles and press conferences. He is invited to numerous international musical get together, and is often seen in jam sessions and workshops as a guest musician. He appears on the stages of numerous countries and becomes an internationally acclaimed musician.
Besides pursuing his desire to experiment through the aforementioned genres he returns to classical music and learns to play a number of other instruments.
Self-reliance in music/A unique sound:
The techniques he absorbed, his ideas in music and his notions about varied orchestration get so unique and complex that they would be harder to realize in a band than on his own.
On the occasion of his first individual concert he is invited to be the regular violinist and composer of a Budapest gallery.
He has been composing music for the ongoing exhibitions of the gallery since 2004, and performs at the opening ceremonies. These compositions soon become popular on their own rights among visitors and artists.
His first album “Meetings” is released by the gallery in 2007. For his first performances he invites guest artists, later he plays material pre-recorded by him on a loop station pedal with various instruments, and adds the violin part on stage.
Up to 2011 he has composed music for the works of over a hundred and twenty renowned artists. He takes part in auctions, action art and merged arts performances where he gives way to his urge to evolve his affinity to fine arts and is allowed a free hand to compose without the restrictions of musical styles.
It is during these years that his own music and playing, his skill to compose and orchestrate clears and crystallizes. As a proof of his success he is often invited abroad along with the material of the exhibitions, and appears as a guest artist in other well-known galleries. The audience’s unbroken interest in his music and the scope of material so amassed during these years urges him to revise the pieces composed so far and to treat them as independent material. His band performances are replaced by solo concerts.
His Music:
Violin is always featured as the highlight of his music, and its part (apart from some leitmotifs, recurring themes and scales) is always improvised. His play is characterized by a cleared, easy to approach improvisational style lacking unnecessary notes. Its tune (often supported by pentatonic progressions) evolves using the scales of classical music, Arab maqams, Indonesian, Indian, Moldvan, African, Japanese and other folk music.
It is basically instrumental. If vocals appear, they do so more as instruments, rather than linguistic structures conveying verbal meanings.
His music is an unparalleled alloy of different styles. It is not hard to discern traces of world music, jazz, trance, meditation and psychedelic music, ambient, trip-hop, oriental music, programme and progressive music, sound painting, repetitive music, ambient, lounge, down tempo, nu(future), experimental, fusion and world fusion jazz, crossover, different kinds of folk music, elements of modern and electronic music and artificial panels all worked into it in a strikingly unique way.
To give an example, in one of his compositions a traditional blues tune appears consecutively as meditation music, a mantra, then in Indonesian scale, even later backed by an Arabic rhythm and finally spiced by a gong – all this in the midst of a folk chant used for achieving a state of trance.
In another one he colours a Hungarian folk tune with African djembe, South American panpipes and electronic parts. In certain pieces traces of further genres are absorbed in his own personal style almost in discernibly. This ever-changing music, as it takes in new elements from an always widening circle of styles, abounds in surprises and unexpected turns. Its world is impossible to get to know for good and all, its deep spirituality is the only constant feature by which one can always recognize it.
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