Memory Palace

All About Jazz

Vocalist Szandra Szoke and pianist Gabor Cseke co-wrote the music to all but one of the songs on Memory Palace. With the singer contributing the lyrics to six of the nine tracks. Szoke has a talent for writing lyrics (in English) that are filled with imaginative imagery and enough ambiguity to maintain an air of mystery in many of her stories.

The original songs are filled with striking lyrical imagery and atmospheric music. Three of these originals are especially impressive. “This tune is the sum of what I’ve become,” sings Szoke on “Memory Palace“.

Cseke’s fluid, pretty, piano lines contrasting with the dark-edged and enigmatic lyric. “Wool” takes musical inspiration from Folk Traditions as well as Contemporary Jazz. Pustai’s percussion is central to the song’s somewhat mystical air. Lyrically it resembles the changeling ballads of Scotland, imagination replacing sorcery, as Szoke asks a lover (or a would-be lover, or an ex…) how they think of her – like wood, like smoke, like wool, “like the sky,… galaxies born in my eyes“?

The sultry “In Between The Lines” shifts between its waltz time opening and sections in 7/4 and 4/4. Echoing changes in the narrative and in the intensity of Szoke’s vocals. It’s a superb coming together of music and lyrics, of voice and instrumentalists.

Memory Palace ends on another high note. On “Now Sleeps” – lyrics from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s sonnet “Now Sleeps The Crimson Petal” – Szoke’s voice is at its purest, accompanied only by Cseke’s gentle piano phrases.”