The New York Times review & preview

March 26, 2013
NEW MUSIC; Tomasz Stanko

By BEN RATLIFF
“Wislawa”

(ECM)

Tomasz Stanko’s New York quartet needs at least an hour of your time: Mr. Stanko, the Polish trumpeter, is that kind of jazz musician, implying his music is a reflective and melancholy state of being rather than a set of tunes.

Still, even on a first listen, you can quickly get to know the landmarks on “Wislawa,” the new double-disc album made with a great band Mr. Stanko started up last year, almost as if you’ve been briefed in advance. How does that work?

The quartet’s sound reflects Mr. Stanko’s trumpet tone: clean, slow, blobby, vulnerable. Most of the time the playing stays almost exaggeratedly soft and loose, a studio-based, silence-valuing, meditative sort of jazz that has long marked his own small-group style, as well as the core identity of ECM records — the label for which Mr. Stanko has been recording on and off since 1976 — and which, in a larger sense, owes its life to Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue.” There are templates on top of templates here.

But even in the structure of the music, a finite set of options holds steady. First a theme determined by a melody line, played collectively by the band and led by Mr. Stanko: troubling and irresolute sentence with a beautiful chord as its period. Then Mr. Stanko improvises for a while, in soothing melodic shapes interrupted by flutters and harder intervallic stabs, and stops completely.

Next, usually, David Virelles plays a piano solo, in long-decaying chords and one-hand lines of his own private tempo, all counter to the changeable rumble made by the bassist Thomas Morgan and the drummer Gerald Cleaver. There’s generally a free-improvising stretch, minus the trumpet, where the action among the rhythm section runs deep and wild, breaking loose from the song’s guiding mood. At some point during the song and again the end, the theme and the mood returns, with Mr. Stanko as its proprietor. The songs wrap up nicely, and so does the album, with a variation on the beautiful first track, “Wislawa,” at the end. (The album is dedicated to the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who died last year, though Mr. Stanko has never needed prompting to make elegies.)

But it’s in the intuitive, unprogrammed middles of the songs — the places where Mr. Stanko falls silent — where the music loses its security and doubles its risk. There are two different records here — one of themes and one of collective improvisation, one of ends and one of middles, one of sorrow and something much less nameable.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9904E1D7113AF935A15750C0A9659D8B63&ref=benratliff

****

Preview of the concerts at Birdland, March 28-30, 2013

Tomasz Stanko New York Quartet
One of Europe’s most heralded jazz musicians, the Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko has earned his accolades with an intimate and haunted style. As on a new double album, “Wislawa” (ECM) — a valedictory tribute to the poet Wislawa Szymborska — he teams up with several of the more restlessly inventive musicians on the New York scene: the pianist David Virelles, the bassist Thomas Morgan and the drummer Gerald Cleaver. — NATE CHINEN
http://nytimes.com/events/jazz/tomasz-stanko-new-york-quartet-11256.html