Meadow Quartet - The Erstwhile Heroes (2013) ***

Meadow Quartet (band)

Marcin Malinowski - klarnet, klarnet basowy
Michał Piwowarczyk - altówka
Piotr Skowroński - akordeon
Jarosław Stokowski - kontrabas

Special guest:

Tomas Dobrovolskis - perkusjonalia, the brass globe, the glass

The Erstwhile Heroes (2013)

After the release of their debut album "Unexpected" (which was reviewed by Maciej Nowotny on our blog: link) the band has been described as one of the most promising on the contemporary neo-klezmer scene.

(...) Meadow Quartet proves that Jewish culture is not a fossil, but a source of inspiration. Although it reaches for literary allusions to the history of the Jewish people (‘Das Schloss – A tribute to F. Kafka’ or ‘Goldene Medina’ – America as the ‘Golden Land’ in the imagination of nineteenth-century Eastern European Jews), what we have here is the atmosphere, the game of colour rather than drawing from the source directly. (...)

Gazeta Wyborcza, 21st June, 2012 – Tomasz Handzlik

The music may not be as such unexpected as the title suggests. The same features could be found in the Radical Jewish Culture series from Tzadik Records. However, the way musicians combine improvisation with chamber music, not losing at the same time any natural expression of Jewish themes, is on one hand the most interesting and on the other, the most unexpected.

Uważam Rze, 26th February 2012

(...) Meadow Quartet, though firmly anchors their works in the Jewish canons, gives them the jazz edge ultimately, so that there are times to move away from the subject, as well as spinning the thread through each of the instruments individually. They are able to do that in an excellent manner, because the quartet are great musicians. ‘Unexpected’ is an magnificent debut, confirming that as regards klezmer music not everything has been said (...)

t-mobile-music.pl, 14th March 2012 – Dominika Węcławek

Marcin Malinowski, the band leader, is consistently expanding the scope of his artistic pursuits. To illustrate this it is enough to mention the album Osvaldo Golijov: The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind recorded with a string quartet. What is more, he also took part in the recording of the new album of Bester Quartet, which has been recently released by Tzadik Records.

Meadow Quartet – the winners of 16th Festival of Polish Radio Nowa Tradycja 2013 invited an excellent Lithuanian percussionist – Tomas Dobrovolskis to cooperate. This musician directs the music to a completely new areas. He is an inventor and designer of the new percussion instrument The Brass Globe, which allows to combine different techniques of playing drums (such as the djembe, tabla, darabuka) to one percussion instrument. In Europe he does a growing career.

On the album The Erstwhile Heroes there are nine compositions of the band leader – Marcin Malinowski. These compositions performed in almost traditional klezmer orchestration, allow the listener to extract the timeless beauty composed to measure the early twenty-first century.

Source: Multikulti