Lublin Jazz Festival

Reinterpretation of the album:

Andrzej Trzaskowski Sextet – Seant (Polish Jazz Series, 1966)

Piotr Damasiewicz with his line-up took on quite a challenge – the reinterpretation of Andrzej Trzaskowski’s album “Seant”, which is a determinant of what in contemporary music, not only jazz, is the essence. It is a combination of swing, harmony, melody and virtuosity with conceptual thinking, including composition, free individual expression, drive, but also a place to breathe and think. The musicians led by Piotr Damasiewicz have to deal with the 55-year-old, extremely important publishing label in the European history of jazz, thus reaching the heights of this genre.

Piotr Damasiewicz – trumpet / David Murray – tenor saxophone / Adam Pindur – soprano saxophone / Franek Pospieszalski – bass / Grzegorz Tarwid – piano / Samuel Hall – drums

History:

The “Polish Jazz” series is one of the key elements of the heritage of modern Polish culture. Music recorded in the “Polish Jazz” series, published by Polskie Nagrania since the 1960s, over the years gained a rank similar to the Polish Film School or the Polish School of Posters in Polish culture. It is no accident that the artists who co-created these phenomena were inspired by the performers who created this series, who were bound by the bond of artistic understanding. Jazz entered the film and visual arts, and artists such as Rosław Szaybo created the covers of albums released under the banner of “Polish Jazz”. The series includes milestones of Polish jazz. The next albums of the series presented, among the others, Krzysztof Komeda, Zbigniew Namysłowski, Michał Urbaniak, Tomasz Stańko, Janusz Muniak, and shaped the aesthetic tastes of the next generations of musicians and music lovers. From the beginning of the Festival, the organizers were accompanied by the thought of presenting and recalling the greatest achievements of Polish jazz. At the beginning of 2014, it took the form of new interpretations of the albums from the “Polish Jazz” series arranged for the festival. The organizers of the festival ask young Polish musicians to rework the material recorded years ago, which is performed at a special premiere concert. This idea fits in with the global tendency to revitalize classical music recordings through their renewed performance. During subsequent editions, we recalled Jerzy Milian’s album “Baazar”, Zbigniew Namysłowski “Winobranie”, “Constellation in concert” by Michał Urbaniak and “Polish Jazz Quartet”, whose leaders were Wojciech Karolak and Jan “Ptaszyn” Wróblewski. During the 12th edition of the Festival, we would like to present the”Seant” album recorded by The Andrzej Trzaskowski Sextet.

The record came out in 1967 as the 11th volume of the Polish Jazz series and gained the rank of a classic, equal to Krzysztof Komeda’s Astigmatic. You can hear both excellent knowledge of the latest achievements of American jazz (modality), and the interest of A. Trzaskowski, the so-called New Music (operating with a twelve-tone scale and aleatoric waveforms), as well as Polish folklore (Variations on the theme “Oj tam u boru”). All these elements, supplemented by a well-chosen line-up of excellent instrumentalists, explain Seant’s high position in the Polish jazz discography. The emphasis on sophisticated compositions, which is not obvious in jazz, makes the material from this album exceptionally readable. The organizers of the Lublin Jazz Festival chose Piotr Damasiewicz, an outstanding composer and soloist for this role. Damasiewicz, like Trzaskowski, places emphasis in his work on compositions and an appropriate selection of instrumentalists. The artist has a dozen pieces to his credit, which he arranged for large instrumental ensembles, primarily for his band Power of the Horns (an enlarged rhythm section and a wind instrument quintet). He was the winner of “Fryderyk” for the album Hadrony recorded with the Aukso chamber orchestra.

The project “Polish Jazz Series in New Performances” is part of the modern trend, wehich is reading of our national heritage. For a long time, it has also included outstanding phonographic achievements, including classic jazz recordings of Polish musicians.

David Murray – Few musicians in jazz history have proven more vigorously productive and resourceful than
David Murray. During the past 45 years, from the moment he first visited New York as a 20- year-old student, playing in a
walkup loft, in 1975, David has careened forward in a cool, collected, rocket-fueled streak. He has released over 150 albums under his
own name. Yet more impressive than the numbers is the constancy of two abiding achievements: as a tenor saxophonist, he has perfected an instantly recognizable approach to improvisation that even in its freest flights acknowledges the gravity of a tradition he honors more than most; and he has altered the context for his improvisations as an infinite mosaic of musical challenges and explorations. David Murray goes down as a worthy successor for some of the biggest names in jazz, and he is now contributing to the rise of young talents.An impossible task for the young David, at the time of the free jazz and civil rights movements, the last adventure of the end of century jazzman. Impossible, too, for the son of Baptist parents, discovering the Negro spiritual style in the time of Coltrane and during Ayler’s best period, not
to be political right down to his tenor-playing fingertips. David Murray, now in his sixties, has 130 albums to his name and contributions to around a hundred other recordings as a guest artist behind him.

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