TOMASZ STANKO QUINTET DARK EYES

							                                        TOMASZ STANKO QUINTET
                                        DARK EYES

release Date: NOV 09                     File under: JAZZ




Tomasz Stanko’s smouldering improvisations and grainy-toned trumpet find a new
context on Dark Eyes. Like Miles Davis (a major influence) before him, the Polish jazz
master also has an impressive record as talent scout and mentor, and his latest ensemble
pools young players from the North of Europe.

Tomasz has had strong connections to Finland in particular since the early 1970s when
he was part of Edward Vesala’s creative circle. Now he welcomes two prodigiously
gifted Finns into his group, pianist Alexi Tuomarila and drummer Olavi Louhivuori,
both expressive and imaginative players. Jakob Bro, the young guitarist heard on Paul
Motian’s Garden Of Eden is cast most often in the role of subtle colourist, while fellow
Dane Anders Christensen provides the band’s throbbing pulse on electric bass.

If the band is ‘Nordic’, Stanko’s inspirations are more broadly cosmopolitan. These days,
he splits his time between homes in Warsaw and New York, and two of the titles on Dark
Eyes – ‘Grand Central’ and ‘Amsterdam Avenue’ - are directly inspired by New York
locales.

A third, the album’s title track, takes its cue from an encounter with an Oskar
Kokoschka canvas at the Neue Galerie on Fifth Avenue. Stanko was struck by the
expressionist intensity of Kokoschka’s painting ‘Martha Hirsch (Dreaming Woman)’ and
the haunted, hollowed-eyed gaze of its subject, subsequently “translating”, as he says,
the emotional impact of the work, its “dimension of feeling”, into sound. “Everything you
experience gets into the music, but I’ve always been touched as much by art as by
anthing else in life. Fiction, poetry, film, the theatre. The visual arts especially. The way a
painter uses paint, or the way he approaches form – distorting it to abstraction, or
painting naturalistically or poetically...these aspects can be paralleled in my musical
language, in the way I shape a melody line”.

Over several ECM sessions Tomasz has returned, too, to music first put down on his
debut for the label, 1975’s Balladyna. This time it is the piece ‘Last Song’ that is
reinterpreted and, in the best jazz tradition, made new.


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