Sándor Benkó born 25 August 1940

Sándor Benkó (25 August 1940 – 15 December 2015) was a renowned Hungarian clarinet player, founder of the world-famous Benkó Dixieland Band. The Kossuth and Liszt Ferenc Prize-winning musician’s career spanned a period of close to sixty years. A jovial, approachable figure, he was fondly nicknamed “Professor Dixi” by his students.

Benko was born in 1940, lost his father early, and was raised by his mother alone with his smaller brothers. At the age of six he was a violin student at a music school, but he didn't really like the instrument. He received a clarinet from a folk musician and enrolled with Kálmán Elder Berkes to study classics.

 Benkó first learned how to play the violin, then switched to the saxophone, but became truly well known as a clarinet player. At the age of seventeen he listened to Louis Armstrong's records with his friend, and in February 1957, as a third-grader, he founded the Benkó  Dixieland Band.

Seventy-five musicians visited the band during the first six years, including László Benkő, Károly Frenreisz, József Laux, Antal Solymos and others. Their first album became a gold record.

In 1963, Benkó graduated from the Budapest University of Technology with a degree in electrical engineering, and later worked as an assistant professor in the department of electrical machines until 1995. Many of his books have been honoured with the Zipernowsky Medal. His research area is computer design of electrical machines and his Ph.D. in numerical simulation of electromagnetic fields. He was an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Engineering and the Chamber. In the late eighties, he started a cosmetics business and founded Sunfleur.

They travelled through the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, and traveled to Western Europe in the 1970s. In 1971, Montreux, Switzerland, became the first to perform at the jazz festival, in San Sebastian, in 1972, they won the audience prize, and in 1976, they were voted the Stars of the Year by the prestigious English Music Week magazine.

From the eighties they were also loved in America, winning the Grand Prix at the Sacramento Jazz Festival in 1982. For one month, they toured the genre's hometown, New Orleans to New York, and a two-hour movie about the road was broadcast worldwide by television stations. 

                              

In 1983, they became the International Jazz Band of the Year in California, and in 1987, President Ronald Reagan himself translated the American people's appreciation and gratitude for the high quality of American jazz. In 2007, the band was honoured by President George W. Bush.

The band leader received the Ferenc Liszt Prize in 1984 and the Kossuth Prize in 2006. In 1997, all members of the band received the Order of the Cross of Merit of the Republic of Hungary. In 2004 they received the Prima Primissima Prize, the Pro Urbe Miskolc Award and in 2005 the Pro Urbe Budapest Prize. Benkó received the Hungarian Cross of Merit on the 15th of March this year.

The Benkó Dixieland Band has no less than 1,800 professional recordings, including at least 500 evergreen tunes. Their repertoire is large enough to play for 25 hours without repetition, continuously. Beyond their 10,750 concerts, they have worked with seventy-two world stars, including a few names: Milt Jackson, Freddie Hubbard, Buddy Tate, Joe 

Newman, Buddy Wachter, Henry Questa, Joe Muranyi, Eddy Davis, Albert Nicholas, Wild Bill Davison, Warren Vaché. Benkó's greatest triumph was that he succeeded in preserving his original form and playing traditional New Orleans jazz at world-class level.

Benko died in Budapest 15 December 2015. Following his death, Benkó’s family was dissatisfied with the new musical direction of the group and did not allow them to use their founder’s name, hence the band choose the alternate name “Dixie Kings of Hungary”.

In 2019, a Budapest court has now allowed the band to use their original name, saying that “the name of the band is linked collectively to its members, the audience associates the name with their activity thus they are entitled to use the name in the future without any restrictions”.

(Translated and edited from Hungary Today & Origo)