TOMASZ STAŃKO — Tomasz Stańko Quintet : Wooden Music I (review)

TOMASZ STAŃKO — Tomasz Stańko Quintet : Wooden Music I album cover Live album · 2022 · Avant-Garde Jazz Buy this album from MMA partners
3.5/5 ·
snobb
Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stańko, who passed away in 2018, was one of the best European jazz musicians of the last half-century. For a few decades, his recordings, released by the prestigious German ECM label, were sort of the label's etalon of contemporary European jazz of the highest class. Stańko's early music is lesser known outside of Poland, and not every fan knows that more than a half-century ago Stańko started as a free-jazz artist. His first release as a leader came in 1970 (“Music for K”), and then Stańko spent months with his quintet touring Germany.

At that time Stańko played day-to-day firstly in a hippies commune in Würzburg, then in clubs of Darmstad. If the quintet's debut contains quite a composed music (with a lot of free improves as well), the quintet of exactly the same line-up on the German tour plays much freer, in fact fully improvised music. True, alto sax player Zbigniew Seifert switches from sax to violin here.

This, new for band music, played on tour by the collective, based on "wooden instruments" with only the metallic addition of Tomasz Stańko's trumpet (and flutist Janusz Muniak's occasional use of tenor saxophone), Stańko called a "wooden music". The album of the same title offers never-before-released music, recorded in the summer of 1972 and found in Radio Bremen archives.

Five album's pieces, lasting between 3 and 21 minutes, are all free and burning. Heavily based on double bass and acoustic violin free soloing against each other, there is a lot of fire in this album's music. Stanko plays extended fast-tempo free solos, anchored by a rock-heavy drummer. Fully improvised music contains tuneful snippets and is well framed in a jazz-rock fashion, which makes it quite accessible.

Soon the same quintet (with a new bassist German Hans Hartmann) will record in Germany their first significant album "Purple Sun", already much better organized and with a strong fusion influence."Wooden Music I" is important evidence of a great artist's formation period. Not recommended to numerous fans of Stańko's chamber ECM music though.
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