Ökrös Csaba 1960-2019.

Ökrös Csaba, my fiddle teacher and good friend, passed away on Wednesday night,  two days ago. Csaba was, perhaps, the definitive fiddler of the Hungarian folk music revival after the late Béla Halmos. He was a band leader, a teacher, a field collector in the tradition of Béla Bartok, an arranger of music for theater and films. In a word, he was generally acknowledged as the best damn fiddler in the Hungarian folk scene. The shock wasn’t so much that he was young - he was 59 – but he seemed indestructible. Csaba was an absolute original, and on the fiddle he was a genius.

Ökrös Csaba was in high school he first heard Béla Halmos - the father of the Hungarian folk music revival. Halmos provided the teenage Csabi with the address of folklorist Zoltan Kallos in Transylvania. Csaba hopped on a train and was soon off with Kallos to the village of Bonchida and being introduced to the world of the archaic instrumental tradition of Transylvania. 

The fact that Csaba was exposed to the real thing at an early age was what made his approach to the music special: he learned it at the age a local musician would, he played it naturally. Csaba could articulate the subtle differences that define style in Hungarian and Transylvanian folk fiddle in a way that older fiddlers, working backwards from notated music, could not. He also had a talent for teaching: he would break down a piece into its most basic parts, showing the simplicity of what, to the modern, urban ear, sounded like some incredibly difficult deluge of bow slurs and trills. When he formed the band Ujstilus with Antal Fekete, Adorjan Pityu, and Géza Pénzes they were the first to perform the different repertoires of folk music in the local styles – Kalotaszeg, Mezoseg, Gyimes - before Ujstilus people simply fiddled up a generalized, trill filled “Transylvanian” fiddle. Csaba took the specifics of each village style and translated them into a form young non-villagers could understand.

I first heard the sound of Transylvanian village string bands while visiting Hungary in the early 1970s, and while I played old-time Appalachian fiddle in the New York area old time scene I could never quite make my instrument phrase and play in a way that even came close to the original recordings of music from Transylvania which I had brought back from Hungary as a kid. Then, in 1983 in Boston, Ökrös and Ujstilus showed up America to teach workshops in Hungarian folk fiddle with Ujstilus. Hungarian-American dancer Eva Kish arranged for the band to spend a month in the USA based at her home in Medford, Mass. They gave a workshop at MIT in Cambridge, Mass, and when Csaba asked if anybody could play Hungarian music I stepped up and played some tunes I had learned from a recording from Szék. From then on we were buddies.  

The workshop led to a small tour with the band staying in Boston for a couple of weeks. At the time I was involved with a lot of African music, specifically Yoruba Juju music (I studied Yoruba language for several years.) and had been playing fiddle with Demola Adepoju, the pedal steel guitar player of Sunny Ade’s African Beats. Demola got an invite to play a recording session in New York for Paul Simon and wanted me to come along. I told him, sorry, there is this Hungarian band in Boston this week, so I ain’t going anywhere, have fun with Paul Simon and try and get a copy of whatever you guys record because obviously it will never be released commercially. Sometimes I make regrettable life choices. (Demola can be heard playing pedal steel on Paul Simon’s “Graceland”) Csaba went on to form his own band, the Ökrös group, and also spent a lot of the 1990s as a guest fiddler with Muzsikas.

A few years later I moved to Budapest, ostensibly to learn more fiddle, covertly to do linguistics fieldwork in Transylvania, and overtly to teach English in the ELTE Law school. I lived around the corner from Csaba in Buda and became his least accomplished student. There was perhaps, too much partying. In his earlier years Csaba was the embodiment of a Dionysiac madman: he loved music, parties, women, and drink, preferably all at the same time and in large quantities. Especially women and drink. He was a small guy – and yet he could out-drink anybody he met. Not that this was ever a good thing. I’m just saying. I have seen it. I once took him out to an R&B club in Boston where he jammed with the band on stage, then decided he was going to jump ship and stay and become an R&B star and play rock and roll in America for the rest of his life. That phase lasted about an hour. At other times he would get melancholic in that classic Hungarian way and muse about the losses of Trianon and the unfairness of communism and end up smashing things, including several of his (less valuable) violins. He often punched close friends in the nose during arguments (not me!) Just about everybody in the old guard of the Dance House scene has a few wild “Csaba stories.” And yes, he pissed me off as well, but I always considered him my friend. 

He seems to have calmed down in later life – getting married and a degree in folk violin pedagogy definitely tamed him. Csaba defined a generation of folk fiddlers Hungary – he was the link between the village fiddlers and the younger city kids trying to wrap their heads around the soul and technique of the old style Hungarian fiddle tradition. We may miss Csaba but each time we reach for a violin we will always bring him back in spirit.

Gloomy Sunday: The Suicide Song Down the Street.

(all photos by Fumie Suzuki)

Back in the 1980s, Hungary had the world’s highest suicide rate, a sad statistic that has been, happily, dropping over the decades to the present point where Hungary is now in 31^th place in World Suicide standings, far behind Russia (#1 for males) and Lithuania (#2) and oddly, Guyana at number three. While Hungary’s standing as the suicide champions of the world is long past, we still have the “Hungarian suicide song” Szomorú vasárnap “GloomySunday” to remind us of yore. Composed in 1933 by Rezső Seress (with lyrics added later by poet Ferenc Javor) Szomorú vasárnap is a massively depressing little ditty that eventually became one of the most widely recorded songs to come out of Hungary. A translated version recorded by Billy Holiday proved so traumatizing that the BBC banned it from their airwaves for twenty five years. 

The song is reputed to have inspired a series of suicides, beginning in Hungary where lovelorn youths jumped from the Danube bridges with little white flowers pinned to their lapels, just like in the song, and gained international fame as “The Suicide song.” The song, is, as you may have surmised, quite gloomy.  

Sunday is gloomy,
My hours are slumberless
Dearest the shadows
I live with are numberless
Little white flowers
Will never awaken you
Not where the black coach of
Sorrow has taken you
Angels have no thought
Of ever returning you
Would they be angry
If I thought of joining you?

A Gloomy Sunday on the roof of 46/b Dob utca

Hungarians are famously gloomy. You might not notice this if you are just visiting, at least for the first hour or two, but nobody wants to be caught smiling. And even activities that Hungarians find absolutely delightful, such as drinking wine, telling political jokes, cursing French football (“soccer”) teams, can be done without the simple simian facial communication we call “smiling.” It is not that Hungarians are a dour lot. They most definitely are not. They are loud, raucous, and tend to be almost hyperactive in the pursuit of pleasure, but they rarely smile where you can see it. They might sneak a smile in if they think nobody is watching, but essentially, the Hungarian’s moon is always blue. A deep, dark blue. 

Klauzal Sqare. Nobody smiling in this picture.

Which brings me to the building on the corner of my street. Rezső Serres was born Jewish in 1889 - as Rudolph Spitzer – and like most Hungarian Jews he magyarized his name with an eye to social assimilation. After his initial career as a circus trapeze artist ended in a fall he turned to songwriting. Seress was sent into the forced labor camps during WWI and his mother was deported to Auschwitz. Seress would have died as well if not for a Hungarian officer who recognized him as the famous songwriter and took possession of Seress from a Nazi guard. After the war Seress went back to the 7^th district, and spent his days composing songs (he played one finger piano) and evenings drinking and socializing with writers and theater folk in the cafes and bars of the seventh district. He wrote hundreds of popular songs, many of them quite good, in fact, but he is remembered only for “Gloomy Sunday.”

"This house is celebrating" 100 years of history.

Serres lived at #46/b Dob utca in Budapest’s 7^th district. Built in 1938 on the northeast corner of Klauzal ter, is an example of the Hungarian Bauhaus era - a unofficial knockoff of the movement that produced some wonderful and quirky architecture. The building housed a series of famous artists: actors, singers, and the young rock idol Gabor Presser, whose memory of Seress is that he would spend each Sunday afternoon seated in his living room with a stack of records of his famous song in different languages, which he would listen to one by one, for hours.

The Wall of Fame, with Gabor Presser sporting an impressive Jewish Afro.

Seress rarely left the Klazuál tér neighborhood: he would visit the Kispipa restaurant on neighboring Akácfa street, and occasionally the Kulács on Osvát utca (sadly, both are now closed) but beyond that, he didn’t travel much outside of the 7^th district. His famous song accumulated millions in hard currency royalties but Seress never went to America to claim them. Some say he was simply too scared to fly in an airplane.

Ever want to peek in on the neighbors?

In 1968 the then 78 year old Seress attempted to go the way of his most famous composition. He jumped from the balcony of his flat in a suicide attempt, but since he was only on the second floor he survived the fall with only a broken arm. Seress was taken to the hospital where he managed to strangle himself with one of the wires suspending his cast. He was nothing if not determined.

Open house with historian N. Kosa Judit. 

In early May the Budapest100 society held an open house visit to Seress’ building – five doors down the street from us – so we had to go. Budapest100 comprises local historians and urban activists who sponsor an annual weekend of open houses in historical buildings, with free lectures and visits to some of the urban treasures hidden inside the courtyyards and flats of the city. N. Kosa Judit is a local journalist and historian who specialized in the history of Klauzál tér, and just happens to live in the building. Her knowledge, informed commentary and personal connection made spying on our neighbors buildings just that much more enjoyable..