Some ramblings about the music I love, about the concerts in Krakow or elsewhere I get to witness, about cds I manage to get my hands on and particularly like. Stay tuned.
Jazz Alchemist
Raphael Roginski has appeared quite a few times on the blog already and the reason for this is quite simple, I believe he's one of the most original artists around, his guitar playing sound is completely unique and he's quite a multi-tasker leading a handful a different project. Named, with a reason, the animator of the revival of jewish music in Poland in recent years. A trend which treads its beginnings to the release of "Shofar" cd in 2007 - a trio with Mikolaj Trzaska and Macio Moretti playing together music that Roginski found in the archives of ethnomusicologist Moshe Beregovsky. It so happens that, after quite a long hiatus, two of Roginski's bands released new music in 2013 so I decided to gather them together.
Cukunft (yiddish for "Future") is quite a band of madmen on stage (you most definitely need to see, whilte it's still on the web, their concert with Maria Raducanu that took place on Krakow Jewish Festival 2013) - it's punk-rock energy and crazy circus madness applied by two raving clarinets, guitar and drums.
It would be hard to immagine the modern polish scene without Raphael Roginski and the entire plethora of his projects, idealized to bring back jewish culture, modern and vital, to a country where it used to thrive and where it disappeared completely after the tragedy of World War II. Roginski's vision of jewish music is modern and rebellious and Cukunft is the perfect vehicle to make it a reality - powerfull, tribal drumming, poignant guitar tones and absolutely furious clarinets chasing one another - that's Cukunft, in short.
For the concert at the festival Cukunft (expanded to a quintet with Piotr Domagalski on bass) invited a Ramanian vocalist Maria Raducanu, to sing with them. We are children of the borderline, said Festival's director Janusz Makuch, introducing the performance. And that's where the meetings happen, and where cultures influence each other, and we all can appreciate our differences, and be surprised of how much in common we have.
Watching Edvard - Kilogram Records 2011
Zikaron Lefanai - Kilogram Records 2012
Ircha Clarinet Quartet is truly an unique band. I wholeheartedly reccomend their first cd "Larks Uprising" recorded with Joe McPhee, but it did not really represent the band's music as it really is. The Quartet share double musical interest, first of which is the ritual jewish music heritage, secondly each member of the group compose their own music for the quartet and those compositions, delicate, poetic, minimalistic share the qualities of modern music by the likes of Steve Reich or Philip Glass rather than jazz or klezmer.
The Quartet second and third release present together an honest picture of the group's musical vision as the first cd "Watching Edvard" showing their "modern composition" side and the latter one "Zikaron Lefanai" focusing on their interpretation of the jewish heritage. What remains intact through the two albums is the band's wonderfully unique collective sound and sense of unity.
I've only recently praised the wonderful duo SzaZa (playing the music along the animated movies by W. Sarewicz) and the duo, in its trio incarnation comes back to Krakow to play with the vocalist Olga Bilinska for a set of interpretations of traditional sephardic music.
But, easy to foresee given how unique and original the band's music is, the interpretations are far from traditional and venture smoothly into the hypnotic regions of electronic drones, multiinstrumental layers and mystery.
The acoustic instruments are dwelling in electronic enviroment. Loops and filters create an impression of multiplied sound, overwhelming and spacious. The music is minimal, peacefull and meditative.
The mbira and metalofon timbre merge softly and reverb in the air creating a dreamy landscape. Perfectly atuned to the cold peacefulness of the winter time outside.
In complete opposition to the pre-Christmas frenzy madness that's outside as well.
The end of the world scheduled for the day after did not take place so hopefully there will be many more chances to hear this music again.
13th edition of Silent Movie Festival brought back Krakow's audience back in time to the black & white times of revolution, passion and prohibition. The times where the story to be told didn't need colour or voice. But let us not forget the fact that music was present since the very beginning. The movies were accompanied by live music, played by musicians representing a vast variety of modern genres including experimental electronica, post-rock, improvisation as well as traditional solo piano recital.
This way the art is revitalized and re-inserted into a modern context, and the artistic results, about which shortly below, prove it to be as vital and valid as ever.
I could not follow the entire festival's schedule but I'd like to mention two brilliant duo performances. Here's the first one:
The SzaZa duo (Patryk Szamburski and Patryk Zakrocki) played music for Wladyslaw Sarewicz. If you have never heard before the name, make sure to look it up. Wladyslaw Szarewicz's movies are the very first animations ever filmed, introducing the frame-by-frame method and insects (!) as the story's heroes (a movie about ants and beetles in 1912? beat that, Pixar!). The duo's main instruments are clarinet and violin but those were assorted by entire bag of pipes, ocarinas, marimbas, mout-harmonicas, nose-flues, loops, filters etc to create music that brilliantly completed and commented the picture - the evil beetle would sound slightly like a Darth Vader, the heroic lilly's melody would be joyfull and light as the sunshine, the Santa would laugh jovially, the grasshopers would play bass and fiddle swinging brightly.
One of the most brilliantly entertaining musical performances of the year I've heard, musicians enjoing themselves and the audience equally. Pictoresque, hillarious, cartoonish, positively crazy and seemingly (deceivengly) simple though in fact carefully woven and layered together.
Enjoy the duo's poetic music as well as one of the short films screened that evening - the "Revenge of the Camera Man".
"SzaZa play Starewicz"
Pawel Szamburski (clarinet) & Pawel Zakrocki (violin) and whistles, toys, electronics and objects
Wladyslaw Sarewicz - short movies
Kino Pod Baranami. 13th Silent Movie Festival. Krakow. 08.12.2012
Imagine a foggy night at the sea, and the sound ships sirens emerging from the silence and the darkness, five of them, calling each other out, responding to voices coming from all the directions. Finding a freindly waters, where they can exchange some personal stories, with the listening choir commenting on those all the time. They reach an agreement and start singing together (absolutely stunning and oh so peacefull harmonies in the middle of the track) and then move back and forward between the solo narration, duos and the entire choir parts, with everyone finding a role to play and never looking for a front spot. That is how this albums starts on "Ant-hill Builder".
Cukunft is a polish group which, until yesterday, I had a pleasure of only hearing once, couple of years back, performing as a trio. Now they perform as a quartet led by Raphael Roginski on guitar, with Pawel Szpura on drums, Michal Gorczynski and Pawel Szamburski on clarinets (the first doubling on tenor, the latter on bass clarinet). The band's name means "future" in yidish and they are playing a mix of traditional jewish tunes and compositions by Raphael based on klezmer scale.
While the music is very traditional, the playing is definitely not, the band spicing the klezmer music with some rock tinges, punk attitude, free-jazz blowing improvisation and to simple put it a lot of madness. Hypnotic tunes are driven by powerful yet very imaginative drumming by Pawel Szpura. Great unisono lines by clarinets. Raphael is definitely one of the most original guitar players I've seen, capable of both lyrical understatement (preparing the strings with pieces of paper) and hard rock powerful chords or soloing, also some noise feedback playing. Two-clarinets frontline is very expressive and energetic, too bad it would sometimes get lost because of no amplification (especially the bass clarinet would suffer).
All music is getting frenzy, crazy and whole lotta fun. Shame there was no dancing floor. While I'm not really sure if there were any originals among the songs played that night, two citations included in two very groovy improvisations were great - riff lines from "Paint it, black" by Rolling Stones and "Break on through" by The Doors. Amazingly hypnotic and energetic.
The title of the Madman of the evening goes to Michal Gorczynski who plays sometimes jumping into the air, sometimes on his knees, dismantling the instruments and playing (like in 'having fun') with all the different parts of them (example: whistling into the bottom end of saxophone).
No point in writing anything more since You can heard some tracks on band's myspace page and their latest double-cd release comes easily recommended - recorded live is it is quite honest to the band's playing in front of the audience, when energy and passion, and fun come first before the perfect execution of material (although there are some lyrical and quite melancholic songs in the repertoire too).
Couple of things to say about the Bomba place - too bad the (quite tiny, but that's not the problem) stage is placed right next to the entrance. Since the concerts was free (which is definitely great in itself) this caused a presence of a lot of people casually walking in and out or chatting by the bar and disturbing the audience (filling all the space available) and getting really annoying sometimes (especially during the quiteter passages). Still it's nice to have new place where one can see some good concerts so I guess one shouldn't complain too much about it, at least for now.
