Bio

Kristóf Bacsó was born in 1976 in Budapest, and started studying the saxophone under Dezső Lakatos Ablakos and Mihály Borbély in 1989. He graduated from the jazz department at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music, then continued his studies first at the Conservatoire de Paris and later at the Berklee College of Music in Boston; his teachers included François Jeanneau, Joe Lovano, George Garzone, Hal Crook and Bill Pierce. He won first prize at the talent contest organised by Hungarian Radio for young saxophonists in 1999.

For five-and-a-half years he lived and worked in France, then the United States, while he also performed in many European countries including the London Jazz Festival, the Pescara and Barcelona Jazz Festivals, and in several famous jazz clubs (Sunset, Sunside, Porgy and Bess, Pizza Express, New Morning, etc.). He has played in line-ups of a wide variety of styles from mainstream jazz, through ethno music, to contemporary music, with renowned musicians such as Eddy Henderson, John Patitucci, Nico Morelli, Giovanni Mirabassi, Tony Lakatos and Gerard Presencer.

He has been working with Gábor Gadó since the end of the 1990's; he participated on the record Modern Dances, and was a soloist on the releases Agent Spirituel and Different Garden by Gábor Winand, which were composed by Gábor Gadó. He has regularly played with Kálmán Oláh since 2004, and in 2006 they released a trio album entitled Fitting, with Sébastien Boisseau on bass. As a soloist he performed the piece of Oláh Concerto for Symphony Orchestra and Jazz Band. He frequently works with the Kálmán Oláh Sextet, the Miklós Lukács Quintet, the East European Artsemble, and the Modern Art Orchestra, in which he featured as a soloist, arranger and composer.

With his quartet he performs his own compositions, in which jazz and contemporary music are combined with a central-eastern European spirit. They played in many festivals in Hungary and in Europe. Their last album – called Alteregos- is released in 2008 at BMC Records, and received excellent reviews:
" …he has come up with a work that has an individual and fresh tone, does not investigate the past at all, rather we feel that the this is a phase in process of ripening, and we are now presented a Grand Opus … presentation and refined structures make the whole material fluent, we get a neatly rounded-up complete piece, and right away we are led smoothly into the smartly designed world of Bacsó… all in all the debut of the Bacsó Quartet is a tough challenge for not only the domestic but also the international jazz world."
Revizoronline
"Great individual performances come together in a truly collective, consciously formed presentation that nevertheless feels spontaneous. Melodies of the trumpet and saxophone complement, substitute, embellish, comment and counterpoint each other in a way that very rarely happened in the history of jazz. The debut CD of Bacsó is appealing by being playful, elevating while being solemn, and captivating with its creativity."
Gramofon – Klasszikus és Jazz

Since 2008 he has been a teacher in the arts department of the Kodolányi College, and since 2004 has been the artistic director of the jazz department of the Egressy Music Secondary School. In 2007 he received the Artisjus Music Foundation Prize.