Monday, April 5, 7:30 pm
Tomasz Stanko New Quintet from Dark Eyes

The Triple Door
216 Union Street (downtown), Seattle

$22 general; $20 Earshot members; $10 students
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Tomasz Stanko: Jazz as a Synonym for Freedom

By Peter Monaghan

Tomasz Stanko, the preëminent Polish jazzman, and one of the greatest trumpeters in the art form, has called Chet Baker “my first trumpet love, followed by Miles, who continued as my guru until his very end.” He also acknowledges the influence of a wide variety of other trumpet innovators of the modern era: Clifford Brown, Kenny Dorham, Fats Navarro, Booker Little, Don Cherry...

That covers a good deal of the trumpet waterfront. But Stanko, who appears at the Triple Door on Monday, April 5, at 7:30pm, also nods to other essential jazz heroes: John Coltrane, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, the Jazz Messengers...

But you can gain a further sense of how the Polish trumpeter’s aesthetic works from his comment that “as far as my sound is concerned, I believe that [painter Vincent] Van Gogh, [saxophonist] Coleman Hawkins, [writer William] Faulkner, [trumpeter] Roy Eldridge, [artist Amedeo] Modigliani, [writer William S.] Burroughs, and [trumpeter] Buck Clayton might have helped in its build-up.” Stanko once said: “Various media, such as film, theater, painting, literature, and poetry, as well as philosophy and humanity, in its broad sense, have had an effect on me as a composer, improviser, and artist.”
At his performance here, we’ll get another chance to hear why Stanko has become, through 40 years of playing in many of the most important bands and moments of European jazz — in fact, of any jazz — a true individualist. He is, nonetheless, rooted in and resonant with the course of modern jazz.

After a decade of working with his Polish quartet, he is leading a 13-gig tour around the U.S. with a startling new Scandinavian quintet, supporting the 2009 ECM release, Dark Eyes. With Alexi Tuomarila (piano), Jakob Bro (guitar), Anders Christensen (bass), and Olavi Louhivuori (drums), the band is performing new Stanko compositions, music for Lars Noren’s theatre play Terminal 7, new movie compositions, and other new pieces.
Stanko’s distinctive lyrical, piercing tone stands in even sharper delineation in the new lineup, freshened by guitar and electric bass and a more northern sound. Unchanged is the trumpeter’s riveting execution and mastery of mood.

Stanko was born in 1942 in Rzeszow, a small medieval city and industrial and cultural center in Southeast Poland. With his parents, a lawyer/violinist and a teacher, he moved in 1948 to Cracow, a much older and larger southern city. There, 10 years later, at age 16, his life was profoundly altered when he attended a Dave Brubeck concert. It prompted him to take up the trumpet.

At age 20, Stanko formed his first band, Jazz Darings, which jazz historian Joachim E. Berendt described as “the first group in Europe to play free jazz.” Its main influence was Ornette Coleman. The band attracted the attention of pianist and composer Krzysztof Komeda (1931-1969), the most sophisticated of Polish jazzmen, a towering figure then as now who tragically died from a brain injury sustained during a visit to filmmaker Roman Polanski in California. Stanko joined Komeda’s group in 1963, and was on the historic 1964 album Astigmatic, which sewed some of the seeds of Eastern European jazz. Stanko has since paid tribute to his early “guru” in various ways, including with a 1997 album of Komeda’s music, Litania, on ECM.

In 1968, Stanko formed his own acclaimed first quintet, which included violin sensation Zbigniew Seifert. In the quintet, which won Stanko the title in Poland of “musician of the decade,” he fully developed his distinctive, moody, and technically advanced style. That approach, at once highly evolved but free of bluster or showiness, has stayed with him throughout his illustrious career. Early on, he hooked up with key figures and forces not only in Eastern but also Western European jazz – the Globe Unity Orchestra in 1970, and, from 1974 to 1978, the quartet Unit that included Finnish percussionist Edward Vesala and compatriot and old collaborator, pianist Adam Makowicz. Stanko also appeared on Vesala’s 1977 tentet recording Satu (ECM). The disc captures perfectly the amalgam of what is often deemed Scandinavian reserve and Stanko’s own remote, keening beauty.

Among Stanko’s other high points was the 1980 solo record he made at the Taj Mahal in India (by climbing over the fence). In the West, he played in Heavy Life with Chico Freeman, James Spaulding, and others in 1980, and with Cecil Taylor’s big band in 1984. Along the way, Stanko continued to work as a leader, first recording for ECM in 1976 (Balladyna), then playing more straightahead jazz and jazz rock in the early 1980s, even forming the electronic band Freelectronic in 1985. In the 1990s, he often worked in film and theater music while renewing his association with ECM (with the CD Matka Joanna, 1995), a label that seems tailor-made for his at-once intense and vulnerable sound.

He has since made many albums for the German label, one of which, Leosia (1996), was honored by the Penguin Guide to Jazz as one of an armfull of greatest jazz recordings of all time. Almost as luminous is the merger of disparate yet sympathetic sensibilities on From The Green Hill (ECM), which features accordionist Dino Saluzzi, saxophonist John Surman, violinist Michelle Makarski, bassist Anders Jormin, and drummer Jon Christensen. It won the coveted German Critics Prize as Album of the Year in 2000. The ensemble perfectly complemented Stanko’s playing, whose earmark, whether in free mode or not, has been a fixation on communicativeness – never a given in free jazz, but always a hallmark of its best examples. That feature of his work perhaps stems from the social conditions that drove Stanko to the music in the first place, in a Poland that, while less oppressive than some other parts of the communist bloc, was locked-down, nonetheless. Stanko once told Jazziz magazine: “Jazz was like freedom for us, the opposite of communism.” As, ideally, on these shores, jazz was a music that mattered.

As was evident in these excerpts from a 2004 interview, Stanko remains enthusiastic about the possibilities of his music, even 50 years into an always searching, exciting career.

Earshot: A lot of people write about your music over the years as having some qualities of cinema, but in a sense it seems that it’s been almost a cinema of emotions.

Tomasz Stanko: Maybe. I like cinema. It’s for me a very important, beautiful art — maybe the future of art, syncretic art with a lot of things like music and pictures and photos and stories, and everything together. I am a film composer also, and I wrote music for film and theater in the past, but a special kind of music — my music, I’d have to say, with my mood. But in my compositions that I use mostly for playing, for example the last quarter of Soul of Things, these variations are from the leitmotifs from movies, and from the theater, also.

Earshot: In addition to drawing on film and literature, does your music exemplify a different, Eastern European tradition?

TS: That’s very difficult for me, myself. It’s logical that if I’m born here in Eastern Europe, and I have influences from this part of the world, that makes for differences between myself and other artists, Western European and American artists. But also, today is different times. Communications between people are very fast. And I think more and more we are in one global city. We know everything. So in 1963, I got the first two Ornette Coleman records and I was pretty fast into the free jazz that Ornette was doing at that time. So, it’s difficult to know. Of course, I’m interested in the European tradition, because I’m from Europe, but I love jazz — jazz for me is a very special kind of art, and a very democratic art, and improvisation by the band is also a democratic side of art, more than earlier in the history of art. Of course, I’m interested in the way you ask about, but it’s not for me to say. I can make an opinion about this, of course, but I think you can do that.

I have many melancholy aspects in my music such as are in Polish and Slavic music also. I have something of that inside me. But I don’t make copies from the melodies or pieces. If I have this element, and maybe it’s from within me, this kind of melancholy mood perhaps can come from Polish history. We were not free for many, many years. But I think also many northern countries, like, for example, Scandinavian countries — Scandinavian people have also inside of them this special kind of melancholy. Maybe it’s coming from the light. I don’t know.

Earshot: You worked closely also with Krzyzystof Komeda, and I know he was very important to you, and he would seem to have been in some ways the ultimate modernist, coming from a more cosmopolitan standpoint.

TS: Exactly, exactly.

Earshot: You mentioned Ornette Coleman, too, and the influence of free jazz very early on in your life and in the history of free jazz. How did that music strike you, at that time?
TS: When I was young, I was interested in every kind of modern art. Also in jazz. I was looking not for traditional jazz, but for really modern composers, like Ornette. Also George Russell. I remember I was very much into his stuff. Also later Cecil Taylor. I heard him in I think ’65 at the Jazz Jamboree Festival. It was a real shock for me. This energy. Pure energy. He was playing like today, I think, the same, at that time. This part of my heart really drives me to looking for this kind of art. But also at the same time, I was a listener, and I was really into the Miles modal system — Miles, Coltrane, Kind of Blue and Milestones, these records. I loved this music. But I didn’t really play this. I was more a listener to this music, and I played it at home to check the changes, and so forth. But on stage, I started to play free music, because instinctively, it was much easier for me to build my own language not from Miles, but more from Ornette. For the beginning of my way, that was instinctive. Then I started to compose a little, and because I read somewhere an interview with Coltrane, and the sense of what he said was that if you want to build your music, you have to write your own compositions to play this. And that was very logical for me, and I very soon started to write compositions. Together that built my style of playing.

Earshot: When you were doing that, there were a number of players in Poland who now, in the US, we can see were very important, like Zbigniew Siefert, Ursula Dudziak, Michal Urbaniak...

TS: Yes, the climate was very good for us. In the Communist part of Europe, we in Poland were the most free, because they didn’t really care about music, especially about jazz, and we had pretty big freedom in those times, in the end of the ’50s and the ’60s. And jazz was a kind of synonym for freedom. So jazz had a very big position in Poland, as art. With every film director, like Roman Polanski, and with actors and artist, jazz musicians were kings in this society. And maybe that made a label of intellectual, or label of artist, came with jazz. But I think that happened everywhere, only earlier, in Poland.