Csaba Palotaï, Steve Argüelles & Rémi Sciuto - Antiquity (2019)

Csaba Palotai's guitar has a wild DIY feel of people who prefer setting out to arriving, who can breathe more easily in a messy cellar than in a renovated chateau. A guy whose sound has some personality, some verve, who isn't neat and tidy, waxed smooth or with a short-back-and-sides. No, Csaba Palotai's sound scratches, rubs, and grates. It's a sound that can't be domesticated: you let it kindle itself like a wood fire. Guitarists (jazz ones particularly, but not just them) often like to show that they are guitarists. Csaba Palotai tries rather to make us forget that. Plurality of sound, elegance, and modesty, this is the trinity that could define this Hungarian, now based in France for more than twenty years. For him, the musician (and above all the improviser) discovers the sounds that he has within him, rather than creating them out of nothing. And the most striking thing is that the lineup he makes on Antiquity with the French saxophonist Remi Sciuto and the British drummer Steve Arguelles could also be described with these three characteristics.