This week's jazz reviews
TOMASZ STANKO QUINTET
Dark Eyes
ECM ****
With this, trumpeter Tomasz Stanko debuts a new working quintet, including four young Scandinavians: Alex Tuomarila (piano), Jakob Bro (guitar), Anders Christensen (electric bass) and Olavi Louhivouri (drums). Stanko also contributes eight originals to the repertoire, their typically bare, almost scalar lines being “blueprints” (his word) or sound pictures, moods, for the players to fill in the details. With Stanko taking less solo space than might be expected, his talented colleagues make their mark, particularly Tuomarila and the impressive Louhivouri. But Stanko’s is the primary voice in a band moulded to his liking. Throughout, including in his majestic theme statements on Krzysztof Komeda’s Dirge for Europe and Etiuda Baletowa No 3, he does more with less than most achieve in a lifetime. That unique tone and simplicity of manner say it all for Stanko. And he knows it. www.naxos direct.ie
EST
Retrospective
ACT ****
Sweden’s EST – Esbjorn Svensson (piano), Dan Berglund (bass) and Magnus Öström (drums) – was a rare jazz group that achieved international success outside the idiom without compromising ever their music. The proof is in this 13-track selection, starting with their 1998 breakthrough, From Gagarin’s Point of View, up to their final, free improv Leucocyte in 2008, taken from all their albums in that time except 2006’s Live in Hamburg. The early albums, with their clever use of electronics and other sonic devices, as well as pop and rock elements, have a freshness and rigour that gradually diminished as time went on. Yet the trio never quite surrendered to formula. They had an original sound, and if their frequent visits to Ireland (and their incendiary Hamburg album) are a guide, they continued to deliver live at a level few jazz groups could match. www.actmusic.com
KOMEDA PROJECT
Requiem
WM Records ***
Komeda Project is the brainchild of Polish veterans Krzysztof Medyna (tenor/soprano) and Andrzej Winnicki (piano), who, with US trumpeter Russ Johnson, have already made an album of Komeda’s music. For their second they brought in Scott Colley (bass) and Nasheet Waits (drums), who give a harder edge to some of Komeda’s best-known works. Winnicki and the ’Trane-inspired Medyna are forthright, capable players, passionately engaged with the music, but it’s Johnson who brings a poet’s sensibility to bear on the pieces. Colley and Waits are brilliant and flexible enough to make this more muscular take on the compositions work, and to a degree it does. But over it looms Stanko’s great ECM album Litania (1997), which illuminates the dignity of such as Night-time, Daytime Requiem, Litania and Ballad for Bernt in a way not quite answered here. www.komedaproject.com
