Tatvamasi - The Third Ear Music (2020)

Tatvamasi

Grzegorz Lesiak - guitar
Tomasz Piątek - tenor saxophone
Łukasz Downar - bass
Krzysztof Redas - drums
with guests

The Third Ear Music

AUDIO CAVE 2020/013

By Adam Baruch

This is the sixth album by Polish quartet Tatvamasi, which documents a series of music meetings held under the slogan of the album's title, recorded over a period of couple of years by the four members of the ensemble: guitarist Grzegorz Lesiak, saxophonist Tomasz Piątek, bassist Łukasz Downar and drummer Krzysztof Redas and a plethora of guests from Poland and abroad, including Avant-Garde drummers Vasco Trilla from Spain and Peter Orins from France. The album presents seven compositions, all uncredited and assumed to be a result of improvisations by the participating musicians.

The music, as expected from the underlying concept, is a series of extended improvisations, based on sketchy melodic fragments and rhythm patterns, which characterizes Improvised Music. It preserves to some extent the usual Jazz-Rock Fusion modus operandi of Tatvamasi that was dominating their earlier recordings, but expands the horizons and embraces Free Improvisation, basically letting things happen on the fly as they develop. The three pieces recorded by a quartet, with vocalist Marta Grzywacz (and without Piątek) are definitely the high point of the entire album pointing to a direction worth pursuing.

To be perfectly honest, as much as I like Tatvamasi, this stuff just doesn't work for me as well as I expected it would. I admit to being somewhat fed up with the Improvised Music recordings that the Polish scene produces en mass and often without any selective process on one hand, and the fact that throwing a group of unrelated musicians in one room and let them play whatever comes to mind very rarely guarantees a spectacular result on the other hand. I appreciate the will to explore and search, and the courage to try something new, but hope this is a one time extravaganza, and the music will return to more productive exploration in the future.

Overall this is an interesting experiment, and as such worthy of appreciation, but the resulting music, stripped of the circumstantial excitement, is rather pale summa summarum, with just occasional interesting moments. Sorry guys, it's just me.