As usual, Zavod Jazz Cerkno concludes the year with some album releases, which recordings were made at the festival. The new album Young Researchers V. — Oskar Longyka — καλός is the work of the violinist Oskar Longyka with his international band καλός. The quartet also includes Alberto Mastracci (viola), Tobias Kochseder (bandoneon) and Jure Bergant (piano). With this discographic release, our festival fulfills one of its missions: to encourage the creativity of younger, mostly not yet established Slovenian musicians. They gather within the residence under the mentorship of Dré A. Hočevar, form a band and prepare a concert program that is then performed at the festival.
At this year’s Young Researchers residence, which took place at the Jazz Cerkno festival for the fifth time in a row, we hosted the Slovenian-Italian-Austrian band ĸαλός by violinist and composer Oskar Longyka, a student of the Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Graz. He has also perfected his skills in the tango department in Rotterdam, which is one of his areas of musical interest. The band ĸαλός also performed at the Ljubljana Jazz Festival and MENT. “I have not searched for substance beyond what happened: all there is is entailed in the sound,” wrote Longyka in the liner notes for the album, which is available on CD and on bandcamp.