30 YEARS OF MANDOKI SOULMATES!

Fulminant anniversary concert of Leslie Mandoki and his „band of bandleaders“ for common values, freedom and a better world with the vision of virtuosity and responsibility.

Last Friday evening, August 19, the Mandoki Soumates celebrated the start of their anniversary year „30 years of Soulmates“ with a grand open-air concert in front of many thousands of enthusiastic people in Budapest in the middle of the historic Castle District. 

For this very special occasion, band founder, producer, drummer and singer Leslie Mandoki played with a large contingent of Soulmates, all world-class rock and jazz icons such as Nick van Eede, Al Di Meola, Mike Stern, Randy Brecker, Till Brönner, Richard Bona, Tony Carey, Deobrat Mishra, Fausto Beccalossi and Budapest jazz and Roma music legend Szakcsi. 

Unfortunately, the exhilarating interplay of these legend-making icons under the Budapest sky had to end after a good hour due to an approaching thunderstorm.

Bandleader Mandoki:

“We were so hungry to play for you more! We had our best times at my teenage band JAM’s club in Bem Rakpart in 1975 where the musical concept was born to fuse British prog rock with American fusion jazz of the seventies and bring that artistic idealism into our time to create a musical answer in those difficult times. We had a four-hour set… we were so hungry to play our best concert to start our anniversary year. According to the decision of the operatives and the organizer, the concert was stopped for the safety of our audience even before we started playing our 90-minute progressive jazz-rock suite based on the themes of Béla Bartók entitled „Hungarian Pictures“, which I wrote. The rain is an issue and the storm is another one, the meteorologists predicted a hurricane, so no matter how much we wanted to play the best concert of our lives to start our jubilee year, we had to follow the instructions for the safety of the audience. But nevertheless, thank you Budapest and we hope to come back in not so long time!”