It's happened many times before: a musical child prodigy is dreaming of becoming a famous composer or a performing artist in classical music and proceeds to study at the conservatory full of ambition. There, the child prodigy runs into jazz, a meeting that most of the time is so intense, that classical music soon gets wiped from the table. The Hungarian pianist Béla Szakcsi Lakatos was one of those children. He started playing the piano at the age of nine and fell head over heels in love with jazz at the Béla Bartók Conservatory. Lakatos developed into a top pianist. American greats like Chick Corea have praised him more than once. At North Sea Jazz he's one of the stars of the East European jazz concert series. He's performing with a group of friends, featuring soloists like the Hungarian star saxophonist Tony Lakatos and the British trumpeter Gerard Presencer.
