US musician Frank London receives state honour

Budapest, June 10 (MTI) – US musician Frank London, trumpet player of the klezmer band The Klezmatics, received the Hungarian state award Order of Merit, Knight of Cross, in Washington, DC, on Thursday local time.

The award was granted by Hungarian Ambassador Réka Szemerkényi at an event attended by London’s friends.

The New York-resident Grammy award-winning trumpet player was born in 1958. He has been a regular guest at Hungarian music festivals and maintained close links with Hungary’s music scene for thirty years. He leads the Glass House Project, involving five American and three Hungarian musicians, which was launched by the Balassi Institute in the framework of the Hungarian Holocaust Memorial Year 2014. The project which uses music to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust has regularly toured Europe and America.

He told MTI at the awards ceremony that he was greatly inspired by Hungarian music and very impressed by the rich cultural life of Budapest, the unique musical traditions of rural Hungary and generally the complexity of Hungarian music.

Source: http://mtva.hu/hu/hungary-matters