Szolidaritás Orchestra – Addāt Fōyya (2025; PMGJazz/Inverted Spectrum) – Avant Music News

The Szolidaritás Orchestra is the latest project of Deni Omeragić and Ninoslav Spirovski, two-thirds of the Macedonian punk-jazz outfit Svetlost. Svetlost’s 2024 release, Everything Was as It Had Been a Minute Ago, was one of the highlights of the year. An expanded 11-piece version of the band is responsible for 2019’s Odron Ritual Orchestra, an album I like even better.

For Omeragić (bass) and Spirovski (reeds), Svetlost is just the tip of the iceberg. Their label claims that one or both of the two men have appeared on a quarter of the label’s output. The PMGJazz Bandcamp catalog spans 57 titles, so this is no cheap boast. There’s a dark edge to much of the music coming from Skopje, and the prolific pair appear on records tagged as metal and grunge, in addition to the improv found here.

Szolidaritás is more than just Macedonian. The hook is that it partners Omeragić and Spirovski with the best of the Budapest scene. The resulting band is a septet, adding two more reedmen (Viktor Kapusi and David Karla, who shines on bass clarinet), the American trombonist Christopher Cox, Attila Gyárfás on drums, and a second bassist, Péter Ajtai. Three of the “Hungarians”–Cox, Ajtai, and Gyárfás–teamed up earlier this year for their own PMGJazz release, Urgent.

As the instrumentation suggests, the focus here is on the low register. Omeragić is credited with electronics as well, but he mostly serves as half of the bass section. Karla favors the bass clarinet over his alto sax, and Cox spends a good deal of time in the bottom half of his range. Even Spirovski’s clarinet rarely chirps. While there are few of the minor-second scales that define the Balkan sound, his tone shades dark, sounding a like a guy who could indeed play clarinet with a metal band.

With that orientation, the three tracks of Addāt Fōyya unfold like a lot of improvised music. There are tunes, but as with the Odron Ritual Orchestra, you have to wait. And they are little more than modal riffs: a destination, but more for the purpose of getting there than enjoying your stay. The final track is the most subdued of the bunch, starting with a gentle drone, decorated with Omeragić’s bird-call samples.

The bottom-heavy effect is that of a bigger group. While each of the horn players makes occasional moves skyward, straining at the edge of their registers, it’s usually just one at a time, and it doesn’t last long. It’s an ensemble effort first, often a dense one at that.

Except in the choice of forces, there’s not much of Svetlost’s punk on evidence. It’s just a solid free-jazz effort, a reminder that we could all listen to more music from Macedonia–and budget some time for a refresher on the Budapest scene, too.