Music
Blow for liberty
by Graham Reid
Free jazz is a “way of thinking”, says trumpeter Tomasz Stańko
To hear trumpeter Tomasz Stańko tell it, life in Poland in the 1960s might not have been quite as grim and mono-chromatic as we believe. -Certainly there was the irony of playing free jazz in the politically repressive atmosphere, and he laughs knowingly when offered a quote by composer-pianist Thelonious Monk: “Jazz and freedom go hand in hand.”
“But you see in my time Poland was different from other countries in the Communist bloc,” he says. “Even in my diploma I was doing a jazz programme. Of course, in my younger time there was a different culture, very dark. Jazz was then forbidden.
“But in the 60s everything was a little more open. In the movies we had [director Roman] Polanski and there was [composer Krzysztof] Penderecki with Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima. So Poland was different.”
Today, Stańko – whose formative musical moment was seeing American pianist Dave Brubeck in 1958, before being inspired by Ornette Coleman and making the great leap sideways into free jazz – is one of Europe’s most prominent and respected jazz musicians.
He has been signed to prestigious European label ECM for the past 15 years, and has worked in Europe with many American musicians, including avant-garde players such as Lester Bowie and free-jazz piano genius Cecil Taylor.
Although grounded in the American tradition, Stańko injects a uniquely European quality into his music today. It can draw equally on contemporary classical traditions and folk elements, and his trumpet playing is notably influenced by Miles Davis’ poised style of his Kind of Blue period 50 years ago.
That complex sensibility was evident on Stańko’s Soul of Things album (2002), which critics consider his breakthrough, although it’s almost the 20th in his long career. An emotionally deep and often intellectual meditation, Soul of Things – unusually for ECM’s austere releases – comes with liner notes, which observe that one of the more introspective pieces refers to an old Polish melody that Stańko doubtless heard frequently when he lived in Kraków.
To attempt to draw him out on this often melancholy, occasionally vigorous and always melodic album is to run into both a language barrier and an amusing intellectual evasiveness.
Apologetic for his imprecise English, he sidesteps any attempt to have him explain his musical motivation. “But that is the world of a writer who wants to describe and put down words about this music,” he laughs. “A musician does not think like that; I cannot say in words something for you about the music.”
Which also explains why none of the pieces have titles other than Roman numerals. He didn’t want to have them refer to something outside of themselves.
Stańko lives a somewhat austere life: he practises yoga and is of modest means and desires. Acclaim in jazz doesn’t mean material wealth necessarily follows, and he recalls what he learned from being in Cecil Taylor’s big band in the mid-1980s. “He was very … poor, you might say. But he taught me that music is an art, an expression. That is the most important lesson.”
Last year, Stańko took a small apartment in New York, but his career has always been in Europe. He didn’t play in the United States for more than 20 years after 1984, but that distance from his original inspiration allowed him to find a unique and personal language in jazz.
Stańko’s search for expression with other like-minded players in his youth meant he became part of a small group that would enthusiastically share treasured recordings by American jazz -musicians.
“It was an adventure because it was hard to find records, but we were clever, we would always find a way. If someone was coming to Poland, we would tell them what we wanted. And we would only get the best, of course.”
He recalls the shared sense of community and how it included composer-pianist Krzysztof Komeda, who created soundtracks for many of Polanski’s films, among them Knife in the Water and Cul de Sac, and later Rosemary’s Baby when he followed Polanski to the US. Komeda was among the prime movers in creating a distinct, sometimes academic style of European jazz. Stańko joined Komeda’s quartet in 1963 and worked on a number of soundtracks with him, “but these were untypical”, he says, to distinguish them from his jazz work.
In the 1970s, he played with Ornette Coleman-alumnus Don Cherry and Penderecki, toured in Europe extensively – first with drummer Edward Vesala (latterly an ECM mainstay also), then with pianist Adam Makowicz, who moved to the US in the late 1970s, and increasingly with international players working in Europe.
His Matka Joanna album (1994) found him with British free-jazz drummer Tony Oxley, pianist Bobo Stenson and bassist Anders Jormin from Sweden. It was a typically difficult and sometimes dense affair, but in the past decade he has come to reconsider the nature of free jazz.
As with pianist Chick Corea, who abandoned it because of its emotional failure to communicate with an audience, Stańko now considers free jazz “a way of thinking”, rather than a musical result.
His analogy is distinctively European: that although free jazz offers many possibilities, as in politics “[possibilities] can also lead to Stalinism”, he laughs.
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