JÁNOS MÁSIK

composer, singer, musician (main instruments: bandoneon, piano, guitar, percussion)

János Másik is a multi-instrumentalist and a versatile artist who excels in several musical genres and instruments should he perform alone or with fellow musicians and compose for ensembles or orchestras. He also writes poetry and paints/draws.

János Másik was born in Kisbajcs, Hungary and had his music studies in Győr and in the Jazz Department of the Béla Bartók Music Conservatory in Budapest. He won the national music contest with the later famous Interbrass group in 1972 that he had been leading for many more years.

He graduated as a voice-technique teacher at the Liszt Ferenc Music Academy as a student of László Dobszay (folkmusic, music theory) and Imre Földes (music history).

In 1974 and ’77 he was invited to join the world famous jazz guitarist, Gabor Szabo in his two legendary concerts in Budapest as a pianist/keyboard player together with other leading Hungarian musicians being the youngest of all of them.

In 1975 along with musician Tamás Cseh and writer Géza Bereményi they created the album „Letter To My Sister” that would become one of the most influential albums of Hungarian popular music. In this cooperation that gave birth to two other albums later on, they reinvented the genre of the „song” in Hungarian culture featuring topics and performing styles that noone had used before.

He taught Improvisation Techniques and Analitics of 20th Century Music at the Jazz Department of the Béla Bartók Music Conservatory.

In 1977 he became the pianist of the Kőszegi Group, a leading Hungarian jazz formation and toured Europe’s best festivals and jazz clubs for years.

He became interested in underground music in the 80’s and played in the main Hungarian underground groups in the country (Trabant, Balaton, Európa Kiadó). He became one of the emblematic figures of the 80’s Hungarian underground movement.

He made his first solo album, Peepshow Heaven (Peepshow Mennyország) with songs written for poetry of István Bálint, member of the well-known Squat Theatre.

In 1980 he was invited to write music for a feature animation movie, Habfürdő. Since then he has composed music for numerous Hungarian and Western-European movies. A few examples from the long list of those films (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0617362/): Hunky Blues, Looming Fire (video installation presented in the Eye Museum in Amsterdam), Another Way (1982), Meteo (1990), The Bridgeman (2002), Stream of Love (2013), The Troupe (2018).

At the end of the 80’s he formed his band Trance Balance that was considered one of the first real world music groups in the country.

Currently he plays with his own group The Heart Rock Company that features musicians from several fields of music. He performs solo concerts with his own songs (both music and lyrics composed by him) where he sings and plays piano, bandoneon and guitar.

He composed Fantasies for Bandoneon and String Orchestra a three-movement piece that was premiered in June 2019 with the Budapest String Ensemble and Hungarian bandoneonist Eszter Vörös.

His main driving force for future projects remains discovering new ways of musical expression often with mixing genres.