Mike Schwartz
March-4th-2005, 06:26 PM
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050314&s=morton
STANKONIA
by BRIAN MORTON
[from the March 14, 2005 issue of The Nation]
Fifty years ago, a young Polish journalist named Leopold Tyrmand lost his job at the
country's last surviving independent publication, the Catholic weekly Tygodnik
Powszechny, which was being liquidated for its anti-Communist stance. Tyrmand went
back to writing fiction, though it wasn't until the 1956 thaw that he was able to publish his
stories. The following year, his novel Zly-- pronounced "zhwee"--became a bestseller. It
was a sprawling, panoramic study of his native Warsaw, much influenced by the
proletarian fiction of American writers like James T. Farrell and the collectivist aesthetic of
the younger, radical John Dos Passos in Manhattan Transfer. Tyrmand's characters--a
young secretary, a journalist, a bookkeeper, a gynecologist, gangsters and other members
of the city's demimonde--are all connected through their relations, fleeting and otherwise,
with the title character, the "Bad Man." Throughout the novel, music--mostly bad music--
plays an important symbolic role, suggesting the regimented lockstep of the Stalinist
years, the thin gruel of popular movie culture and the dreary repetitiousness of life under
Communism. In one of the book's most powerful scenes, a band plays the waltz
"Adventure in Warsaw" eighteen times straight, too tired and enervated to stop or even
change their material.
Music was important to Tyrmand himself in his other role as Poland's leading jazz critic.
The story of jazz behind the Iron Curtain is a complex one, paralleling but subtly diverging
from the story of jazz under National Socialism in Germany. As the music of an oppressed
people, it had obvious appeal to a Marxist regime; as an American music, it was
problematic. S. Frederick Starr has traced jazz's history in the Soviet Union in his book Red
and Hot, while individuals like record producer Leo Feigin have written personal
testimonies about this essentially samizdat musical culture.
As in so many respects, Poland represented an exception. Politically and culturally
recalcitrant, Poland was the least pliable of the Warsaw Pact countries, an identity forged
over many centuries of being passed back and forth between competing empires. Though
jazz survived in both Czechoslovakia and Hungary, as well as under the very nose of the
Kremlin in the Soviet Union itself, the music put down particularly deep and early roots in
Poland. Perhaps something in it chimed with the libertarian Romanticism of Polish classical
music, from Chopin and Szymanowski to Modernists like Penderecki (who collaborated
with the American trumpeter Don Cherry), Witold Lutoslawski and Andrzej Panufnik, who
played in jazz cellars during World War II. Miles Davis's much bootlegged performances in
Poland in the 1980s were signature moments in the decline of Polish Communism,
symbols of a yearned-for freedom. And now one of Davis's followers and fellow
trumpeters has become the first Polish jazz musician to achieve a genuinely international
reputation.
The musical style of Tomasz Stanko, who is on tour with his quartet in twelve American
cities from March 9-24, has been described as "predatory lyricism." It's an enigmatic term,
until one hears Stanko's raw, dark approach to a jazz ballad on his latest ECM record,
Suspended Night. Its release last year coincided with that of a self-selected compilation of
his work for Manfred Eicher's label over a nearly thirty-year period--or rather in two very
distinct periods, starting in 1975 with the beautiful Balladyna and picking up again in
1994 with the film-inspired Matka Joanna. The music on Rarum XVII: Selected Recordings
is uniformly slow and mostly plaintive, with just a whisper of anger and fear informing
tracks like "Morning Heavy Song" and "Die Weisheit von Le Comte Lautréamont."
I have visited Stanko in his tiny apartment on the banks of the gray Vistula several times
over the years, an experience that always reminds me of the Warsaw in Zly. The streets
convey a mixture of threat and opportunity. They're better policed than under the old
regime, but they need to be. Goods are openly on sale rather than the object of furtive
negotiation. Stanko's phone no longer carries the hollow bong of a tapped line, and
nobody seems interested in the identity of visitors. Inside it's as sparse as one of his
Miles-like solos, which are as suggestive as the Modernist sculptures that take up a fair
share of his floor space. There are few records in evidence but many books. Indeed,
literary sources--Joyce, Rimbaud, Isidore Ducasse (better known as Lautréamont)--are as
important to him as musical ones.
Stanko belongs to a generation of classically trained Polish musicians who embraced the
innovations of American free jazz. While studying at the Krakow Music Academy, he co-
founded what is widely regarded as the first free-jazz group in the former Soviet bloc, the
Jazz Darings. Stanko made a name for himself on the 1966 recording Astigmatic, an
album of tough, asymmetrical themes, alternately abstract and lyrical, that still stands as
one of the most important European jazz records ever made. The leader of that session
was the late pianist Krzysztof--later Christopher--Komeda, who might be described as
the lost leader of Polish jazz. Despite a revival of interest in Komeda's work in recent
years, he remains better known as a film composer and associate of director Roman
Polanski, for whom he wrote the scores to Knife in the Water, Cul-de-Sac, and Rosemary's
Baby. Komeda was a stage name, adopted to disguise the identity of an ear, nose and
throat physician called Tyrczinski who feared that the authorities would frown on his
extracurricular activities. Komeda's style was, and is, unique, a rich synthesis of bebop
energy, classical harmonics and a strong measure of freedom. His original themes are
dense, often quite complex, but with an energy that sometimes recalls folk song,
sometimes the clear line of a Chopin étude. There is still nothing like it in contemporary
jazz, though interest in his work is spreading fast.
Komeda was lured to Hollywood by Polanski, and while there he was gravely injured in a
car wreck. He was returned to Poland in a coma and died there at 38. Had Komeda
survived, Stanko might have remained with him and made further classic albums in
relative obscurity, or he eventually may have made the journey west himself. In the event,
he found himself working with the Finnish drummer Edward Vesala and with the German
pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach's Berlin-based Globe Unity Orchestra, one of the
most ambitious improvising ensembles ever convened. The experience strengthened and
extended Stanko's interest in free-form balladry and led directly to the music heard on
Balladyna. Over the next decade, he continued working with Vesala, traveled to India,
where he recorded a series of deceptively simple, almost folky trumpet solos in the
extraordinary acoustics of the Taj Mahal, and extended his playing associations by
working with pianist Cecil Taylor.
The "predatory" dimension of his lyricism came to the fore when he recorded a series of
electro-jazz albums, loosely influenced by Miles's Bitches Brew, and now very difficult to
find. His groups of the time, Freelectronic and COCX, never established a reputation
outside Poland and Eastern Europe, and it was only when Stanko returned to acoustic
playing and recorded a fine trio record with the Norwegian rhythm section of bassist Arild
Andersen and drummer Jon Christensen that he began to re-emerge on a wider stage.
Bluish was released in 1992 on a small Polish label, but it acquired an international
reputation and brought Stanko back to the notice of ECM's Manfred Eicher, who never
forgets a powerful musical voice but is often happy to let a talent mature away from the
ECM studios before signing or re-signing him.
Stanko's return to Eicher's label in 1994 is one of the key moments in recent European
jazz. Working with a new quartet consisting of two more Scandinavians, pianist Bobo
Stenson and bassist Anders Jormin, and expatriate English percussionist Tony Oxley,
Stanko recorded the beautiful Matka Joanna and, in 1996, the more ambitious Leosia, on
which his balladry is as stark as it is beautiful. A year later, with Stenson, Christensen, new
bassist Palle Danielsson and saxophonists Joakim Milder and Bernt Rosengren, he revisited
the work of Komeda on a tribute album. Litania cannot rival Astigmatic for
adventurousness, but it matches it for elegance of execution. One wonders how Komeda's
group might have sounded with modern studio techniques and the high gloss of a label
like ECM.
There has been plenty of powerful work since, not least the unusual From the Green Hill,
but it was with the creation of his current quartet--heard on Suspended Night--that
Stanko cemented his position as a bandleader and compose, as well as a trumpet player.
Working with players a generation or more his junior--Marcin Wasilewski on piano,
Slawomir Kurkiewicz on bass, Michal Miskiewicz on drums-- he is content to leave much
of the playing to his colleagues, restricting himself on some tracks to minimalist
interjections, mysterious phrases that seem to have no bearing on the theme being played,
soft accents and brush strokes rather than developed solos. (Wasilewski, Kurkiewicz and
Miskiewicz have just released a record of their own, Trio, also on ECM.) If Miles Davis were
still alive and not playing hip-hop, he might well sound like this.
Stanko's apotheosis as an international star is not just a personal triumph. Though he has
often felt isolated from his musical compatriots, and has complained of less than generous
attention from the Jazz Jamboree organizers, his success has thrown into relief the Polish
jazz scene as a whole--not just the still-to-be-absorbed Komeda canon but the work of
figures like Tomasz Szukalski and fellow saxophonist Jan "Ptaszyn" Wroblewski, whose
nickname makes him the Polish Bird. Before Stanko, and with the luminous exception of
Komeda, the only Polish musicians to make a mark were those who left for America:
tragically in Komeda's case, and in that of the brilliant, short-lived violinist Zbigniew
Seifert, who once played with the folk-jazz ensemble Oregon; more successfully in the
case of another violinist, Michal Urbaniak, who along with singer Urszula Dudziak made a
certain splash in the 1970s fusion scene.
What makes Stanko unique is his avoidance of fashion, though not entirely of fusion. His
commitment to a single musical vision is remarkable, his creation of a highly personal
musical language reminiscent of his beloved Joyce's in Work in Progress, the working title
of Finnegans Wake. At times, Stanko has been similarly myopic, or astigmatic, in his
perspective on modern music and the music business. There is a curmudgeonly strain to
his speech, fueled by isolation and the multiple ironies of achieving real success and
critical recognition only after his sixtieth birthday. He remains a defiant individualist, a
romantic predator of song who, with Suspended Night, has clinched not just his own place
in jazz history but also that of his Polish peers and predecessors.
STANKONIA
by BRIAN MORTON
[from the March 14, 2005 issue of The Nation]
Fifty years ago, a young Polish journalist named Leopold Tyrmand lost his job at the
country's last surviving independent publication, the Catholic weekly Tygodnik
Powszechny, which was being liquidated for its anti-Communist stance. Tyrmand went
back to writing fiction, though it wasn't until the 1956 thaw that he was able to publish his
stories. The following year, his novel Zly-- pronounced "zhwee"--became a bestseller. It
was a sprawling, panoramic study of his native Warsaw, much influenced by the
proletarian fiction of American writers like James T. Farrell and the collectivist aesthetic of
the younger, radical John Dos Passos in Manhattan Transfer. Tyrmand's characters--a
young secretary, a journalist, a bookkeeper, a gynecologist, gangsters and other members
of the city's demimonde--are all connected through their relations, fleeting and otherwise,
with the title character, the "Bad Man." Throughout the novel, music--mostly bad music--
plays an important symbolic role, suggesting the regimented lockstep of the Stalinist
years, the thin gruel of popular movie culture and the dreary repetitiousness of life under
Communism. In one of the book's most powerful scenes, a band plays the waltz
"Adventure in Warsaw" eighteen times straight, too tired and enervated to stop or even
change their material.
Music was important to Tyrmand himself in his other role as Poland's leading jazz critic.
The story of jazz behind the Iron Curtain is a complex one, paralleling but subtly diverging
from the story of jazz under National Socialism in Germany. As the music of an oppressed
people, it had obvious appeal to a Marxist regime; as an American music, it was
problematic. S. Frederick Starr has traced jazz's history in the Soviet Union in his book Red
and Hot, while individuals like record producer Leo Feigin have written personal
testimonies about this essentially samizdat musical culture.
As in so many respects, Poland represented an exception. Politically and culturally
recalcitrant, Poland was the least pliable of the Warsaw Pact countries, an identity forged
over many centuries of being passed back and forth between competing empires. Though
jazz survived in both Czechoslovakia and Hungary, as well as under the very nose of the
Kremlin in the Soviet Union itself, the music put down particularly deep and early roots in
Poland. Perhaps something in it chimed with the libertarian Romanticism of Polish classical
music, from Chopin and Szymanowski to Modernists like Penderecki (who collaborated
with the American trumpeter Don Cherry), Witold Lutoslawski and Andrzej Panufnik, who
played in jazz cellars during World War II. Miles Davis's much bootlegged performances in
Poland in the 1980s were signature moments in the decline of Polish Communism,
symbols of a yearned-for freedom. And now one of Davis's followers and fellow
trumpeters has become the first Polish jazz musician to achieve a genuinely international
reputation.
The musical style of Tomasz Stanko, who is on tour with his quartet in twelve American
cities from March 9-24, has been described as "predatory lyricism." It's an enigmatic term,
until one hears Stanko's raw, dark approach to a jazz ballad on his latest ECM record,
Suspended Night. Its release last year coincided with that of a self-selected compilation of
his work for Manfred Eicher's label over a nearly thirty-year period--or rather in two very
distinct periods, starting in 1975 with the beautiful Balladyna and picking up again in
1994 with the film-inspired Matka Joanna. The music on Rarum XVII: Selected Recordings
is uniformly slow and mostly plaintive, with just a whisper of anger and fear informing
tracks like "Morning Heavy Song" and "Die Weisheit von Le Comte Lautréamont."
I have visited Stanko in his tiny apartment on the banks of the gray Vistula several times
over the years, an experience that always reminds me of the Warsaw in Zly. The streets
convey a mixture of threat and opportunity. They're better policed than under the old
regime, but they need to be. Goods are openly on sale rather than the object of furtive
negotiation. Stanko's phone no longer carries the hollow bong of a tapped line, and
nobody seems interested in the identity of visitors. Inside it's as sparse as one of his
Miles-like solos, which are as suggestive as the Modernist sculptures that take up a fair
share of his floor space. There are few records in evidence but many books. Indeed,
literary sources--Joyce, Rimbaud, Isidore Ducasse (better known as Lautréamont)--are as
important to him as musical ones.
Stanko belongs to a generation of classically trained Polish musicians who embraced the
innovations of American free jazz. While studying at the Krakow Music Academy, he co-
founded what is widely regarded as the first free-jazz group in the former Soviet bloc, the
Jazz Darings. Stanko made a name for himself on the 1966 recording Astigmatic, an
album of tough, asymmetrical themes, alternately abstract and lyrical, that still stands as
one of the most important European jazz records ever made. The leader of that session
was the late pianist Krzysztof--later Christopher--Komeda, who might be described as
the lost leader of Polish jazz. Despite a revival of interest in Komeda's work in recent
years, he remains better known as a film composer and associate of director Roman
Polanski, for whom he wrote the scores to Knife in the Water, Cul-de-Sac, and Rosemary's
Baby. Komeda was a stage name, adopted to disguise the identity of an ear, nose and
throat physician called Tyrczinski who feared that the authorities would frown on his
extracurricular activities. Komeda's style was, and is, unique, a rich synthesis of bebop
energy, classical harmonics and a strong measure of freedom. His original themes are
dense, often quite complex, but with an energy that sometimes recalls folk song,
sometimes the clear line of a Chopin étude. There is still nothing like it in contemporary
jazz, though interest in his work is spreading fast.
Komeda was lured to Hollywood by Polanski, and while there he was gravely injured in a
car wreck. He was returned to Poland in a coma and died there at 38. Had Komeda
survived, Stanko might have remained with him and made further classic albums in
relative obscurity, or he eventually may have made the journey west himself. In the event,
he found himself working with the Finnish drummer Edward Vesala and with the German
pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach's Berlin-based Globe Unity Orchestra, one of the
most ambitious improvising ensembles ever convened. The experience strengthened and
extended Stanko's interest in free-form balladry and led directly to the music heard on
Balladyna. Over the next decade, he continued working with Vesala, traveled to India,
where he recorded a series of deceptively simple, almost folky trumpet solos in the
extraordinary acoustics of the Taj Mahal, and extended his playing associations by
working with pianist Cecil Taylor.
The "predatory" dimension of his lyricism came to the fore when he recorded a series of
electro-jazz albums, loosely influenced by Miles's Bitches Brew, and now very difficult to
find. His groups of the time, Freelectronic and COCX, never established a reputation
outside Poland and Eastern Europe, and it was only when Stanko returned to acoustic
playing and recorded a fine trio record with the Norwegian rhythm section of bassist Arild
Andersen and drummer Jon Christensen that he began to re-emerge on a wider stage.
Bluish was released in 1992 on a small Polish label, but it acquired an international
reputation and brought Stanko back to the notice of ECM's Manfred Eicher, who never
forgets a powerful musical voice but is often happy to let a talent mature away from the
ECM studios before signing or re-signing him.
Stanko's return to Eicher's label in 1994 is one of the key moments in recent European
jazz. Working with a new quartet consisting of two more Scandinavians, pianist Bobo
Stenson and bassist Anders Jormin, and expatriate English percussionist Tony Oxley,
Stanko recorded the beautiful Matka Joanna and, in 1996, the more ambitious Leosia, on
which his balladry is as stark as it is beautiful. A year later, with Stenson, Christensen, new
bassist Palle Danielsson and saxophonists Joakim Milder and Bernt Rosengren, he revisited
the work of Komeda on a tribute album. Litania cannot rival Astigmatic for
adventurousness, but it matches it for elegance of execution. One wonders how Komeda's
group might have sounded with modern studio techniques and the high gloss of a label
like ECM.
There has been plenty of powerful work since, not least the unusual From the Green Hill,
but it was with the creation of his current quartet--heard on Suspended Night--that
Stanko cemented his position as a bandleader and compose, as well as a trumpet player.
Working with players a generation or more his junior--Marcin Wasilewski on piano,
Slawomir Kurkiewicz on bass, Michal Miskiewicz on drums-- he is content to leave much
of the playing to his colleagues, restricting himself on some tracks to minimalist
interjections, mysterious phrases that seem to have no bearing on the theme being played,
soft accents and brush strokes rather than developed solos. (Wasilewski, Kurkiewicz and
Miskiewicz have just released a record of their own, Trio, also on ECM.) If Miles Davis were
still alive and not playing hip-hop, he might well sound like this.
Stanko's apotheosis as an international star is not just a personal triumph. Though he has
often felt isolated from his musical compatriots, and has complained of less than generous
attention from the Jazz Jamboree organizers, his success has thrown into relief the Polish
jazz scene as a whole--not just the still-to-be-absorbed Komeda canon but the work of
figures like Tomasz Szukalski and fellow saxophonist Jan "Ptaszyn" Wroblewski, whose
nickname makes him the Polish Bird. Before Stanko, and with the luminous exception of
Komeda, the only Polish musicians to make a mark were those who left for America:
tragically in Komeda's case, and in that of the brilliant, short-lived violinist Zbigniew
Seifert, who once played with the folk-jazz ensemble Oregon; more successfully in the
case of another violinist, Michal Urbaniak, who along with singer Urszula Dudziak made a
certain splash in the 1970s fusion scene.
What makes Stanko unique is his avoidance of fashion, though not entirely of fusion. His
commitment to a single musical vision is remarkable, his creation of a highly personal
musical language reminiscent of his beloved Joyce's in Work in Progress, the working title
of Finnegans Wake. At times, Stanko has been similarly myopic, or astigmatic, in his
perspective on modern music and the music business. There is a curmudgeonly strain to
his speech, fueled by isolation and the multiple ironies of achieving real success and
critical recognition only after his sixtieth birthday. He remains a defiant individualist, a
romantic predator of song who, with Suspended Night, has clinched not just his own place
in jazz history but also that of his Polish peers and predecessors.