Wisława

Tomasz Stanko New York Quartet

EN / DE

Like his early hero Miles Davis, Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko has a gift for shaping great bands, and this one, formed in the world’s jazz capital, overflows with promise. The bass and drums team of Thomas Morgan and Gerald Cleaver is one of the most sensitive in contemporary improvising, and Cuban-born pianist David Virelles, inspired by ritual music as well as by Thelonious Monk and Andrew Hill, seems particularly well-attuned to the brooding darkness and sophisticated dread of Stanko’s free ballads. In the uptempo pieces all four players seem to enter new territory, with very exciting results. The double-album programme of new Stanko compositions is inspired also by the poetry of Wisława Symborska, the Polish poet, essayist and Nobel Laureate, who died in 2012. As Stanko writes in the CD booklet, “Reading Wisława Szymborska’s words gave me many ideas and insights. Meeting her and interacting with her poetry also gave impetus to this music, which I would like to dedicate, respectfully, to her memory.”

Wie sein frühes Vorbild Miles Davis hat auch der polnische Trompeter Tomasz Stanko eine Begabung dafür, spezielle Bands zu formieren – und sein neues New York Quartet ist besonders vielversprechend: Das Bass-und-Schlagzeug-Gespann aus Thomas Morgan und Gerald Cleaver ist eines der einfühlsamsten in der heutigen improvisierten Musik, während der in Kuba geborene Pianist David Virelles feine Antennen für das dunkle Brüten in Stankos freien Balladen besitzt. Dieses Doppelalbum voll neuer Stanko-Kompositionen ist von den Gedichten der 2012 verstorbenen polnischen Literatur-Nobelpreisträgerin Wislawa Symborska inspiriert. Stanko schreibt dazu im Booklet: „Die Lektüre von Wislawa Symborskas Worten vermittelte mir viele Ideen und Einsichten. Sie zu treffen und mich mit ihrer Poesie zu beschäftigen, gab mir den Anstoß zu dieser Musik, die ich nun respektvoll ihrem Andenken widmen möchte.“
Featured Artists Recorded

June 2012, Avatar Studios, New York

Original Release Date

08.02.2013

  • CD 1
  • 1Wisława
    (Tomasz Stanko)
    10:19
  • 2Assassins
    (Tomasz Stanko)
    07:45
  • 3Metafizyka
    (Tomasz Stanko)
    07:36
  • 4Dernier Cri
    (Tomasz Stanko)
    10:16
  • 5Mikrokosmos
    (Tomasz Stanko)
    08:20
  • 6Song For H
    (Tomasz Stanko)
    04:38
  • CD 2
  • 1Oni
    (Tomasz Stanko)
    06:30
  • 2April Story
    (Tomasz Stanko)
    07:06
  • 3Tutaj - Here
    (Tomasz Stanko)
    08:29
  • 4Faces
    (Tomasz Stanko)
    08:04
  • 5A Shaggy Vandal
    (Tomasz Stanko)
    07:31
  • 6Wisława, var.
    (Tomasz Stanko)
    13:13
A dream-ticket jazz meeting between a cutting-edge European legend, and an equally honed triumvirate of pioneering New York-based youth. Miles Davis-inspired Polish trumpeter Stanko has been a jazz hero in Europe since the 1960s; advanced Cuban pianist David Virelles is a partner of the musically demanding Steve Coleman; and bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Gerald Cleaver embody a two-man summary of the 21st-century jazz rhythm section. The trumpeter has dedicated this double album to the late Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, and two versions of the meditative title track, or a quietly ecstatic rhapsody such as April Story, typify the Stanko many listeners will recognise, with his gruff, tone-bending phrasing and melancholy tenderness. But no New York rhythm section is likely to camp for ever in Stanko's brooding landscapes, and the trumpeter is driven to improv squeals, warbles and crisp post-bop lines on uptempo burnups such as Assassins. There are echoes of the 1960s Miles acoustic quintet in the time-stretching Mikrokosmos and the impatiently surging Faces; the brushes-swung, bass-walking Oni is a masterly trumpet-improv balance of poised long runs and richly nuanced short figures. Virelles, Morgan and Cleaver are very seductive listening on their own, and the 70-year-old leader sounds in great fettle, fast or slow.
John Fordham, The Guardian
 
Recorded in June not long after a brief tour in Europe the theme of the album ties in with the poetry of the great Wislawa Szymborska, hence its title: Wislawa. Stanko performed with the Nobel laureate late in her life, and a number of the album’s compositions are inspired directly by her work. And they are sublime, particularly the title track ballad and ‘Mikrokosmos’. Stanko can stop you dead in your tracks with the honesty and emotion of his playing, the blues connotation, and the sheer abstraction of it all. Wislawa is this and much more, his best albu since Leosia and a potent reminder of the artistry of the man.
Stephen Graham, Marlbank
 
Dass Stanko ausgerechnet sein amerikanisches Album respektvoll der polnischen Dichterin widmet, mit der gemeinsam er auch aufgetreten war, und das Programm in zwei berückende Balladen-Interpretationen des Titelstücks ‚Wislawa’ rahmt, ist nur ein äußerlicher Beleg seiner Verwurzelung. Hier ist einer ganz bei sich, so dass dieses wundervolle Album wie ein weiterer Jahresring gewachsen ist, von innen leuchtet mit diesem harschen, schmutzig-schrundigen Ton, aus dem ein Leben spricht. Geheimnisvoll, markant und hoch emotional klingt das, um noch einmal die Poetin zu zitieren, wie mitten heraus aus dem „schwarzen Saum der Sonne“.
Ulrich Steinmetzger, Leipziger Volkszeitung
 
Trumpeter Tomasz Stanko has made many superb recordings for ECM, often with excellent musicians fromhis native Poland, but this new double albumis a truly inspired recording featuring pianist David Virelles, bassist Thomas Morgan and Drummer Gerald Cleaver. Stanko has a strongly individual sound, at times blending the brooding, passionate warmth of Miles Davis with the wild cries of Lester Bowie, but his style is very much his own.[...] The quartet works brilliantly as a unit, with trumpet soaring grloriously over the expertly controlled improvising of Virelles, Morgan and Cleaver.
John Watson, Jazzcamera
 
Was für Balladen! Sein weicher, atemreicher Ton prädestiniert Tomasz Stanko ohnehin für Melancholisches. Das New York Quartet des polnischen Trompeters – Pianist David Virelles, Kontrabassist Thomas Morgan und Schlagzeuger Gerald Cleaver – transportiert eine ähnliche Intensität des Zusammenspiels, wie sie in den 1960ern das Miles Davis Quintet auszeichnete. Stanko & Co wirken in den detailreichen Aufnahmen wie eine feste Einheit, so selbstverständlich greifen ihre Improvisationen ineinander. Zärtlicher als dieses Ensemble kann man der polnischen Lyrikerin und Nobelpreisträgerin Wislawa Szymborska kaum gedenken.
Werner Stiefele, Stereoplay
 
The title for the album reflects its inspiration: the poet and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska who died in 2012. Stanko had worked with the poet, responding on his trumpet to her new poems at Krakow Opera. And so, although there are no words here, the poetic spirit is felt throughout. There is swift, regular tempo, bop-nuanced stuff here, like the track Assassins, there is reflective rubato, as in Metafizyka, there is gently grooving, brush-propelled swing, like Dernier Cri. It’s all wonderful. Virelles, who also appears on the recent Sirens album from Chris Potter, also on ECM, brings a precise touch and that acute Cuban time awareness to this date, while Morgan and Cleaver are also strikingly assured and comfortable while stretching.
Over it all Stanko slides and smears, and pops out those notes that have just the righ mix of clean and dirty tone in them. It’s such a personal and readily identifiable sound, sometimes acerbic, sometimes slightly threatening, and then so lyrical and bittersweet. [...] The mood is remarkably sustained over the near two hours of this album – fairly gently paced and fairly reflective in nature. Yet this is not introspective music, rather it strips back any artifice to bare its heart and soul, to highly moving effect.
Peter Bacon, The Jazz Breakfast
 
The quartet’s sound reflects Mr. Stanko’s trumpet tone: clean, slow, blobby, vulnerable. [...] Tehere’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. [...] 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.
Ben Ratliff, The New York Times
 
Konzentriert und konsequent speist der inzwischen siebzigjährige Trompeter Tomasz Stanko seinen markanten Trompetenton in die moderne Jazzgeschichte. Rau, grell und von spröder Melodik ist seine Musik, die zum Niederknien schön ist, wenn sie in weise sich entwickelnde Balladen mündet. […] Stanko hat erneut ein junges Trio gefunden, dessen Mitglieder allesamt zum inneren Kreis des aktuellen Jazz vor Ort gehören. Ihr Zusammenspiel ergibt eine traumverlorene Musik, die auch in den Uptempo-Stücken ihre Relevanz behält und der polnischen  Lyrikerin und Nobelpreisträgerin Wislawa Szymborska (1923 – 2012) gewidmet ist.
Ulrich Steinmetzger, Berner Zeitung
 
Im Sog von Miles Davis: Das dunkle Brüten, das der polnische Trompeter Tomasz Stanko für seine fragilen Balladen ersonnen hat, ist längst legendär. Nun breitet es sich dank eines späten, verdienten Wohlstands – Stanko hat seit fünf Jahren neben seinem Hauptwohnsitz Warschau ein Apartment in New York City – auch auf dem amerikanischen Kontinent aus. Mit seinem formidablen New York Quartet erforscht er auf ‚Wislawa’ ganz behutsam die Topgrafie der menschlichen Seele, wie sie ihm die Lektüre der Gedichte der Lyrikerin Wislawa Szymborska nahegebracht hat. Bald aufwühlend, bald sedativ lotet dieses Werk mutig die Extreme aus.
Samir Köck, Die Presse
 
Some projects deserve two CDs. Here’s a new group celebrating its brilliant chemistry over the course of a double-disc set, with no flagging in interest, personality or vitality. The towering figure of Polish jazz, Tomasz Stanko has succeeded in establishing himself as a trumpeter to reckon with on the world stage. Together with three terrific New Yorkers, he’s on the front of one of his greatest bands. [...] Stanko’s playing has never sounded better. Possessed of a soft sound, his signature is a vortical altissimo shriek, never out of control but quite effectively alarming. Down in natural range, he’s got a dark tone well suited to the smoky emotional tenor of the music. He is economical but not perversely restrained. To hear him articulate one of his open-tempo ballads is to hear him enter the zone.
John Corbett, Downbeat
 
...the eminent Polish trumpeter never had a rhythm section that could give his music the lift, flexibility and soulful grounding he gets from pianist David Virelles, bassist Thomas Morgan and Drummer Gerald Cleaver in his New York Quartet. Of course he’s never required their brand of support before, having for much of his career devoted himself to moody, slow-moving , thickly atmospheric pieces. What makes Wislawa (pronounced vees-WAH-vah) striking is Stanko’s ability to push into a more assertive, wide-awake style, rhythmically as welll as melodically, without sacrificing the dark-glowing, middle of the night emotion for which he’s known. [...] Having opened a new chapter with his edgy, textured 2009 album ,Dark Eyes, he writes an even more entrancing story with Wislawa.
Lloyd Sachs, Jazz Times
 
This quartet, which includes bassist Thomas Morgan and Gerald Cleaver on drums, may qualify as Stanko's most effective and complemental group to date from an already impressive ECM collection. The double album set of originals incorporates a diverse range of moods, from the vulnerable anguish of the title piece in two variations to the driving energy of Assassins, with its high-register virtuosic trumpet excitement.
The sidemen stand out in that latter track as Virelles's solo explores and expands the post-bop theme with progressive ingenuity. Cleaver's drums roll like the sound of speeding horses. Virelles's extreme sensitivity of touch is a suitably soft beginning for Dernier Cri, where a rubato ballad tempo breaks almost imperceptibly into double time as Stanko probes and pushes the melody, the piano roams sympathetically. A bass solo introduces another compassionate dimension. Song for H is an insightful, out-of-tempo, highly descriptive tone poem, while Oni, an introspective ballad, displays every member's brilliance, especially in Stanko's soaring and cascading solo -- genius trumpet without exhibitionism. It's hard to imagine any trumpet-led quartet album outshining Stanko's this year.
John McBeath, The Australian
 
Trumpeter Tomasz Stanko splits his time between musical worlds. As one of Poland’s premier instrumentalists, he’s led bands featuring some of the best improvisers in Europe. He also lives in New York City for part of the year, where he’s built ensembles from the deep pool of talent available on this side of the pond. This two-disc offering captures  this geographic duality – it’s the leader’s first recording with one his NYC bands, while simultaneously drawing inspiration in title and substance from the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska.
Stanko remains a consistent if idiosyncratic musician. He’s said that he never stops playing the same song, and his sound is built upon a tableau of dark hues and cutting trumpet vocalisations. Here, those smoky sighs and trembling wails pierce his warm ballads and bop-noir themes as clearly as ever. But it’s the rhythm section that frames the music anew. The distinctive voices of pianist David Virelles, bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Gerald Cleaver combine to create a reactive, stormy atmosphere for improvising.
Warren Allen, Jazziz
Tomasz Stanko introduces a new and exciting quartet, in a double album full of strong themes, inspired playing, and improvisational daring. The album was recorded in June 2012 in New York, a city in which the great Polish trumpeter has become a familiar presence in the last decade. Five years ago he took an apartment there, and since then has been splitting his time between the US and Warsaw. New York has become a base for writing music, soaking up the city’s art scene, and monitoring developments in the music. At 70, Stanko has lost none of his willingness to take aboard new ideas, while also keeping the old ideas firmly in view. An innovator of European improvising, he has maintained a strong sense of jazz’s history and knows the importance of renewing contact to the music’s sources. “Originally, I wanted just to enjoy the city of New York, where jazz has been so important and which continues to be the most important jazz city in the world. The city where Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Duke Ellington made great music, and where much great jazz history was made...” But it wasn’t long before he was interacting with local players, experimenting before settling on the line-up of his quartet. “In New York I found three fantastic cats,” he says of David Virelles, Thomas Morgan, and Gerald Cleaver.

Stanko’s New York Quartet makes its debut with a programme inspired also by the poetry of Wisława Symborska, the Polish poet, essayist and Nobel Laureate, who died in 2012. As Stanko writes in a short note in the CD booklet, “Reading Wisława Szymborska's words gave me many ideas and insights. Meeting her and interacting with her poetry also gave impetus to this music, which I would like to dedicate, respectfully, to her memory.” In 2009, late in Symborska’s life, she gave a reading at the Krakow Opera at which Tomasz Stanko responded to her new poems with trumpet improvisations. Some of those poems, in turn, have influenced Stanko’s new music and provided some titles here – specifically, “Tutaj – Here” (the title of Symborska’s last collection) and poems contained within it, including “Assassins”, “Mikrokosmos”, and “Metafizyka”. The pieces “Faces” and “A Shaggy Vandal” take their cue from Symborska’s poem, “Thoughts that visit me on busy streets”, a wry meditation on old and new forms.

Old and new forms, indeed, could be a subtitle for the present disc. The soulful free balladry of the title track –which appears twice in different versions to open and close the album – would not have seemed out of place on Stanko’s ECM debut, and is a piece very much in Tomasz’s own distinguished tradition. The trajectory of a piece like “Assassins”, on the other hand, packs some unexpected events as a breezy boppish melody implodes into freely contrapuntal playing of enormous drive, detail, and streaming energy. There is interactivity inside the new structures but also the maintaining of individual lines: producer Manfred Eicher speaks of a “parlando” approach to collective improvising at work here, advanced conversations taking place as the music continues to hurtle forward, and a sense of shared responsibility analogous to the roles of players in a string quartet.

David Virelles (born 1983 in Santiago de Cuba) is one of the most strikingly original pianists to have emerged on the US jazz scene in recent years, his playing informed early on by study of Monk and Andrew Hill alongside classical music, contemporary composition and Cuban and Haitian ritual music. Quote: “With anything that I’m a part of I’m trying to get to the same feeling that I get when I listen to McCoy Tyner or [Afro-Cuban singer] Lázaro Ros or Bartók – there is a certain timeless quality to all of that.” “Wisława” is Virelles’s second ECM appearance in as many months and follows his contribution to Chris Potter’s “The Sirens.” Stanko says of Virelles that he “draws on African roots of the music, and there’s a drop of South American melancholy in his playing which also feels very familiar to me.”

Bassist Thomas Morgan (born 1981 in Hayward, California) and drummer Gerald Cleaver (born 1963 in Detroit) have a number of ECM recording credits. Morgan has been heard with John Abercrombie and with Masabumi Kikuchi, Cleaver on dates with Roscoe Mitchell, Miroslav Vitous and Michael Formanek. Together they comprise two-thirds of the Craig Taborn Trio (and have latterly recorded with Craig for ECM, the album being due for release in Spring 2013). Morgan and Cleaver comprise one of the great bass and drum teams of new jazz history, generating a seemingly effortless sense of musical support, liberty and independence, shoring up the soloists yet free at any second to offer their own perspectives as the work unfolds: “An absolutely unique bassist, and an incredible drummer”, in Stanko’s assessment.

All three of his new associates inspire Tomasz Stanko to some of his most exciting playing. “It’s good to see an elder artist chase after a new idea.” wrote the New York Times’s Ben Ratliff of the group’s early performances. “Until quite recently, Tomasz Stanko made beautiful dirges, rubato soul-ache ballads with rumblings of free jazz. They came out on a string of fine records for the ECM label over a dozen years or so, and he changed bands several times during that period. But the work had an overall unity of mood and purpose... Both as a soloist and as a bandleader, he can pull off the dark emotions in his music. His trumpet tone is steady and stark, crumbled around the edges, and he makes his strong, short themes anchor the arrangements... Without radically changing the character of his music – he still loves ballads, still foregrounds a lonely melody – Mr Stanko is allowing its balances to shift. [The] music was hard to define, in an excellent way. It used steady rhythms and vamps as well as free improvisation; it was both a collection of solos and a sequence of careful chapters (...). Some extraordinary passages unfolded without any of the musicians making them seem formal, almost as if natural forces were moving the musicians’ hands.”