Before I moved to jazz I was immersed totally in classical music for more years than I remember. But even then I was always hungry for what was avantgarde and improvised in classical music. It must be in my genes since my stepbrother Witold Nowotny, living in Holland, was composer of avantgarde classical music. So although I went through all usual steps of being affascinated by Mozart, Beethoven and Bach, I then traveled by Wagner and Mahler stations straight to Schoenberg, Webern, Berg and other demigods of European avantgarde of the first half of the previous century. They all came too early: misunderstood, disrespected and despised they became rejected by audiences. But fortunately some people carried on their work among them many Polish composers like Witold Lutosławski, Krzysztof Penderecki, Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Grażyna Bacewicz and others.
Of all those Polish excellent artists music of Bacewicz has always appealed to me most, especially her strings quartets, which for their restrained, elegant and open form were simply unsurpassed as far as Polish modern music is concerned. Listening to this highly refined music I never imagined that one day I will dedicate all my heart to jazz and that I will discover there the same adventurous, all-or-nothing and radical novelty-seeking attitude.
As Paweł Baranowski likes to say, whose point of view on modern jazz is very close to mine, there is no jazz other than forward thinking and experimenting. That means that all stylistic boundaries between genres are insignificant and all that counts is simply GOOD MUSIC. From such a perspective you should not be at all surprised that today I recommend to you one of the best Polish jazzman Krystian Zimerman improvising on standards by legend of Polish jazz Grażyna Bacewicz...
Check this link for a fragment of above mentioned quartets of her. Stellar!
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