Clementine Gasser - cello
Tomasz Szwelnik - piano
Clayton Thomas - bass
Michael Zerang - drums
KILOGRAM 018
By Adam Baruch
Polish musician / composer Mikolaj Trzaska is an iconic figure on the local scene and one of the most influential trend setters in the last two decades. Starting with the pioneering ensemble Milosc, which defined the concept / genre called Yass, shaking the local scene profoundly and making many musician to re-examine their paths and return to experimentation and exploration, which was always associated with the Jazz idiom. In time Trzaska became one of the leaders of the Polish musical Avant-Garde / Free Jazz / Improvised Music movement and by mid-2000s he shifted his attention again discovering the Jewish musical tradition and incorporating it in his milieu.
The music included on this
album was created as a soundtrack of the sinister thriller directed by Wojciech
Smarzowski and called "Dom Zly" or "The Dark House" in
English. Therefore listening to the music separated from its cinematic
reference is a priori problematic or at least should be judged by completely
different set of parameters. The album includes ten tracks most of which are sub-divided
into several sub-motifs, which together create a collage of short themes
following each other rapidly. The music was created by a quintet with Trzaska
playing saxophones, clarinets and keyboards, with cellist Clementine Gasser,
pianist Tomasz Szwelnik, bassist Clayton Thomas and drummer Michael Zerang. Not
all the players participate on all the tracks and Trzaska is the primary
performer as well as the composer of all the pieces.
Stylistically the album covers
a wide range of diverse sub-genres, like Musique concrète, Ambient, Free Jazz, Experimental, Industrial and other
avant-garde soundscapes. There is very little melodic content per se or
conventional soloing or playing for that matter. Like with abstract painting,
where the Artists uses patches of shapes and colors combining them on a canvas
and playing with their aesthetic relationships on a two-dimensional plane,
Trzaska plays with sounds and tones and time, to create a sonic
"picture" in the listener's brain, which either works of doesn't,
depending on the listener, his momentarily moods and reflections. It works for
me, but it might not work for others.
This music is obviously not for
everybody, not even for most people who listen to music on a regular basis.
Many listeners might enjoy this as part of a cinematic experience, heard in the
background, but might find this extremely difficult on its own. This does not
mean, of course, that Trzaska is not entitled to experiment and do his own
thing – au contraire he should be praised for doing just that. A healthy
Culture has always space for being different and the ability to embrace those
who are different. Life would be simply unbearable if everybody would just play
the same music.
