When Poland's effervescent jazz trumpet star Tomasz Stanko toured the UK last year, the veteran's young trio turned as many heads as Stanko himself - particularly the spirited playing of pianist Marcin Wasilewski. "In the entire history of Polish jazz, we've never had a band like this one," says Stanko, "I'm surprised by these musicians every day." Now ECM has released the group's international debut without Stanko (though they've been recording on Polish indies as the Simple Acoustic Trio since the mid-1990s), featuring Wasilewski with bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz and drummer Michal Miskiewicz. All three are still under 30 and expand on the promise they showed on that trip and on Stanko's Soul of Things album.
A key element of Stanko's music, caressed at every turn by these three, was the subtlety of movement between moods and grooves, and the way the cumulative impact built over time. The same thing happens here, with Wasilewski opening in a very low-key manner and moving slowly to and from a softly intense, somewhat Brad Mehldau-like swing. In fact, Mehldau's group and the Jarrett Standards Trio represent the most useful points of contact for new listeners, since the Polish ensemble displays much the same facility for moving in and out of orthodox idioms and for improvising collectively - and is also a group with a long-term, stable membership.
Most of the pieces are originals, though Wayne Shorter's Plaza Real (an old Weather Report feature) gets a visit, with an hypnotically ticking chordal undertow and shuffle of brushes from which the romantic melody emerges in liquid harmonies, eventually turning into accelerating free-swing. Bjork's Hyperballad starts like Three Blind Mice played over and over very slowly in low chords, with the playful melody gradually forming on top of it. Karol Szymanowski's Roxana's Song (from the 1920s opera King Roger) is a tone-poem of almost absent-minded trickles and distant rumbles of mallets, and Wasilewski's Shine is a lightly skipping Mehldau-like feature that highlights the deft empathy of the drummer. Stanko's Green Sky, provides an equal dialogue for all three, and Miskiewicz's brushwork is as crucial to the urgency of Sister's Song as Wasilewski's freshly turned improvisations.
The later tracks (most of the pieces are short) get jazzier and looser, with Free-bop a scintillating Ornette Coleman-flavoured clamour. A three-way free conversation, and the meditative group-composition Entropy take the music back to the fragile ambiances of the opening. Not an album to knock you out of your chair at first, but one that grows with each listening. - John Fordham (The Guardian, April 15, 2005)
Tracks
01. Trio Conversation [Introduction] (Trio)
02. Hyperballad (Björk)
03. Roxana’s Song (Karol Szymanowski)
04. K.T.C. (Marcin Wasilewski)
05. Plaza Real (Walyne Shorter)
06. Shine (Marcin Wasilewski)
07. Green Sky (Tomasz Stanko)
08. Sister’s Song (Ewa Wasilewska, Marcin Wasilewski)
09. Drum Kick (Trio)
10. Free-Bop (Marcin Wasilewski)
11. Free Combinations For Three Instrumnets (Trio)
12. Entropy (Trio)
13. Trio Conversation [The End] (Trio)
MARCIN WASILEWSKI piano
SLAWOMIR KURKIEWICZ double bass
MICHAL MISKIEWICZ drums
Recorded March 2004 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
ECM 1891 982 0632