What a little melancholy can do

For Poland's leading jazz export, trumpeter Tomasz Stanko, jazz was as much about freedom as music, writes Ray Comiskey

Born In Rzeszow, Poland, on July 11th, 1942. Father a judge and professional violinist

Music studies Violin and piano; later, trumpet at music school in Cracow

Career Co-founded with Adam Makowicz the mainstream/bop group Jazz Darings, in 1962, which then evolved into free jazz, becoming one of the first European groups to be influenced by Ornette Coleman.

He worked with the pianist and composer Krzystof Komeda, a major figure in Polish jazz (1963-7) and led an acclaimed quintet (1968-73) that played at many European jazz festivals. Other significant musical associations include the Globe Unity Orchestra (1970) and various ensembles involving Don Cherry, Michal Urbaniak, Edward Vesala and Adam Makowicz in the 1970s.

During the 1980s he performed and recorded with Americans Chico Freeman, James Spaulding, Jack DeJohnette and Cecil Taylor, among others.

In the 1990s he led a trio with Arild Andersen and Jon Christensen, a quartet with Bobo Stensen, Anders Jormin and Tony Oxley, a sextet that included John Surman and Dino Saluzzi, another ensemble of varying size that played the music of Krzystof Komeda, and in 1993 started a quartet, using the Simple Jazz Trio - Marcin Wasilewski, Slawomir Kurkiewicz and Michal Miskiewicz - as his rhythm section, with which he continues to perform and tour. This quartet made its recording debut for ECM with Soul of Things in 2001; its second ECM album, Suspended Night, was released this year.

Recordings Balladyna (ECM, 1975), Bluish (Power Bros, 1991), Bossanossa and Other Ballads (GOWI, 1993), Matka Joanna, Leosia, Litania, From The Green Hill, Soul of Things and Suspended Night (all ECM, 1994-2004)

Some jazz musicians, such as the great tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims, seem born to play; they simply go on stage and let their talent do the rest. Others, such as the remarkable Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko, have a different perspective. To a casual ear the results, allowing for stylistic differences, may not reflect this; music is an abstraction capable of being all things to all people. But artists such as Stanko march to a different drummer.

It's as much a reflection of place as of personality. Stanko grew up in the communist-ruled Poland of the 1950s, where anyone interested in the music faced enormous difficulties, including possible arrest. Involvement in jazz was both a political act and an artistic one. "Jazz for me was not only music," he says. "It was a kind of synonym of freedom and also a synonym of a kind of artistic life. This is very difficult for me to explain, because it's more a kind of philosophy and presents a position for a style of life. Jazz was everything that wasn't around me then."

With his father a judge who also played violin, Stanko would have been more aware than most teenagers of the implications of this. But he persisted. A relative thaw in Poland from the mid-1950s helped, but jazz records remained almost impossible to find.

His lifeline was Willis Conover's Voice of America radio broadcasts. "I remember until now, you know, how I stayed close to the radio at night time - my parents were sleeping - listening to Chet Baker and then Miles Davis. From the beginning I was interested in modern jazz."

Baker and Davis were trumpeters, but Stanko had studied piano and then violin. So why did he switch to the trumpet? "I remember that I was also in the scouts and that a friend of my father was a trumpet teacher, so everything came together. Later I recognised that it was a good decision, because the trumpet is most close to the voice: it has not too many valves and by mouth you can build your sound just from your heart. But all this was probably instinct."

His instinct - and Conover - took him to a series of trailblazers: John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, George Russell, Max Roach and the marvellously individual but ill-starred trumpeter Booker Little. Then "a family connection or something" got him Something Else! and Tomorrow is the Question, seminal late-1950s albums by the saxophonist Ornette Coleman, which set him on the road as a "free" player.

Though he followed this route for much of his career, he has gradually moved away from it, to the point where he's not an out-and-out "free" player any more. In any event is the word not a contradiction? Strictly speaking, the term implies no pre-ordained structure. If free playing discovers any structure, or improvisers respond to each other - and all relationships involve compromise - however briefly, surely it's not free at those times? "Recently I've been thinking a lot about free playing, and this problem is just starting to clear up in my head. That 'unclear', rather poetic-philosophical denomination Ornette Coleman offered for his music - the harmolodic system - even if I could not understand what did it mean, still I feel that was the best and most precise description of his stuff; that it was not the 'traditional' meaning of the terms that mattered but rather its 'sound', its 'mood' and, first of all, its 'groove'.

"So the very contradiction you have pointed out is the logical. 'Free jazz' cannot be described with any standard terms. For me it's a philosophical attitude rather than a musical style. It's a 'pure idea', something that rather should not be implemented but only appreciated, known and 'loved'. The more I think about 'free jazz', the more I explore it and try to get the feel of it, the less I actually play it in practice, even if I can't imagine my music without its presence and spirit."

His performances on his current quartet's most recent album and in concert with the group are good examples of the last point. But why does he also say that playing free is no longer a good idea for him? "I envy Cecil Taylor a lot," he answers. Taylor, a pianist, is the perennially unswerving free player. "His uncompromising attitude impresses me. But I can't be that uncompromising. Life is for me full of compromises, and as time goes by my music is getting softer and more and more simple and articulate. But I'll always love 'free', and 'free' will always count for me the most. The 'pure idea', the unavailable target, which I'll always pursue, although seemingly it cannot be heard in my music, as this is inside it, adds power and 'depth' to it."

To hark back to his roots, artistic freedom and political repression don't make good bedfellows, and, despite the gradual thaw from the mid-1950s in Poland, artists had to be circumspect at times. Kazimierz Braun, for example, a fine director who brought his company from Wroclaw to Dublin Theatre Festival in the 1980s, admitted privately that his company included several government people with what he euphemistically called "special duties". Did Stanko have any experience of that when he was allowed to travel abroad? "I know," he almost shouts, acknowledging that he knew such things were going on then. "But as jazz musicians we didn't have this kind of person inside our group, because jazz was too small and too abstract and not dangerous." He also believes that the then Polish government may not have felt quite as strongly about jazz as the authorities in, say, Russia or the former Czechoslovakia.

Nevertheless, it wasn't an easy atmosphere to operate in. But he seems too rooted in the culture and climate, social and otherwise, of his native country ever to have been seriously tempted to move abroad. So what impact do that culture and place have on his music? "Two days ago I was doing a session with Manfred at ECM," he answers. Manfred Eicher is the long-standing owner, producer and guiding spirit of the great German label. "We were talking about jazz. He likes very much myself because of my melancholic sound, and he said melancholy is part of every kind of good music, even Mozart's. Because, really, melancholic is not sad or happy.

"I am from a country where the light - we have this f***ing cold light, dark light, for long periods, and this mood probably comes from this light. This is a kind of eastern melancholic sad, and I have this. Melancholy has helped me to realise that just this volatility and passing-by" - the transience of all life - "are the values that make human life meaningful. I believe that the blues is a form of melancholy. Melancholy has no definite features. It is rather a condition of soul, which enables a deeper exploration of things."

Exploration and change are questions he turns to time and again. And it's noticeable that, as he has matured, his playing has grown simpler: the idea that less is more. So have his compositions. "The simplicity of my tunes follows from the simplicity of the means that I like to use. I've got a few favourite chords, mostly with minor sixths and thirds, which I treat as scales rather than chords, just a few favourite harmonic and melodic movements. Often there is a 'literary' quality that rules my selection of chords and scales, developed just for a particular composition. A minor sixth is melancholy, a minor fifth mystery, etc. But this is very fluid and not particularly important, as it's just a form of inspiration."

Nevertheless, it usually takes him a long time to write a piece. Jazz composing, he says, is rather like a poet's work. The pieces have to have a special kind of intensity within to be strong vehicles for improvisation. "I like comparing my pieces to computer software. I'd like them to live their own lives, slowly, very slowly evolving and gathering 'power' with time, as fine wine, in their capability to inspire their performing live on stage. As a matter of fact, they are good for 'nothing' themselves. All they are good for is to inspire the process of improvising."

His current quartet seems an excellent vehicle for this. Although he has reached a personal peak of maturity as an artist, with a string of superb albums for ECM and some smaller labels since the early 1990s, it's only in the past couple of years that his popularity outside Poland has grown dramatically. This has coincided with his leadership of an all-Polish quartet with musicians much younger than himself: pianist Marcin Wasilewski, bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz and drummer Michal Miskiewicz are all in their late 20s or so.

The quartet's 2002 début album, Soul Of Things, on ECM, is a best-seller in Poland, where it recently went gold, and their recently released second ECM album, Suspended Night, is also doing well internationally. Last February's London concert by the quartet at the Queen Elizabeth Hall was ecstatically received by a capacity audience.

He says he was aware of his young countrymen as much as 10 years ago, picking them up together or separately from time to time for a job. "Then I recognise they play good. After me playing with people like Bobo Stenson" - the outstanding Swedish pianist, who performed here last year, is a friend - "and such, I was not tired with them, which means something.

"Then I start to work with them, first in Poland and then slowly going to more and more serious jobs - and after that even Manfred proposed them to me, because he heard from somebody about them. I mean, I didn't want to suggest anything to Manfred." He laughs conspiratorially. "I make a little strategy." The strategy shows every sign that it's still working.

Tomasz Stanko Quartet headline Bray Jazz Festival, Co Wicklow, on Sunday, May 2nd. See www.brayjazz.com