The new Marcin Wasilewski album Spark of Life is an extension of the pianist’s trio featuring double bassist Sławomir Kurkiewicz and drummer Michał Miśkiewicz as Stockholm-born saxophonist Joakim Milder, who played with the band's erstwhile mentor Tomasz Stańko on his groundbreaking 1990s album Litania, has now been added to the line-up. There isn’t a release date so far but it’s looking like early, rather than later, in the autumn.
The trio’s story goes back more than 20 years now, quite remarkable when you think about it, as they still seem so relatively new, and because so many groups break up before they really have had a chance to mature.
The trio in their early days photo: marcinwasilewskitrio.com
Wasilewski (front) and bassist Kurkiewicz (rear, left) first began to play jazz
together as teenagers later meeting in 1993 the young Warsaw drummer Miskiewicz
There are three distinctive phases to their career so far: the first going back to fairly obscure Polish Simple Acoustic trio days, as they were known then, before they were signed to ECM; then their steep learning curve phase touring widely as three quarters of the Tomasz Stańko quartet, which by extension brought them an international profile via the acclaimed beautiful albums Soul of Things, Suspended Night, and Lontano. But it also brought a solo deal, and led to the third stage as artists on the label under their own steam forging their own mature identity with Trio, picking up the quarterly prize of the German record critics; January, an album that featured pieces by Gary Peacock and by Carla Bley included in the trio’s repertoire; and arguably best of all Faithful named incidentally after a composition from Ornette Coleman’s 1966 trio album The Empty Foxhole, just one indication of the trio’s avant inclinations.
The cover of the new album Spark of Life
Rather like the way the Tord Gustavsen trio gradually got bigger, with the addition of Milder there are signs of change. The new album begins with three Wasilewski compositions ‘Austin’, ‘Sudovian Dance’, and the pianist’s title track ‘Spark of Life’. Then it’s the joker in the pack, an interpretation of Polish rock band Hey’s emotive anthem ‘Do Rycerzy, do Szlachty, do Mieszczan’ (‘For the Knights, the Nobility, the Townspeople’), followed by Sting’s ‘Message in a Bottle’, a risk surely given the huge familiarity of the song, but then landing on familiar ground of a different kind a theme from Rosemary’s Baby, ‘Sleep Safe and Warm.’
Hey’s ‘Do Rycerzy, do Szlachty, do Mieszczan’
The album is completed, according to a number of online listings of the tracks so far, by Wasilewski’s ‘Three Reflections’, ‘Still’, written by Joakim Milder, a version of Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters-era classic ‘Actual Proof’, and the Łodz-born classical composer Grażyna Bacewicz’s ‘Largo’, before the album is completed by the inclusion of a variant on the title track.
Grażyna Bacewicz’s ‘Largo’
The Wasilewski trio are neither a standards trio nor are they a trio that relies on rock or pop material primarily although their version of Björk’s ‘Hyperballad’ was an early success. They’re among the most acclaimed of all the great contemporary trios up there to have emerged since the 1990s along with Brad Mehldau’s trio, Jason Moran’s Bandwagon, the Vijay Iyer trio, the Tord Gustavsen trio, and the Michael Wollny trio [em] distinguished, above all, by their sensitive and subtle interplay that switches between avant jazz, the mainstream traditions, and even an art rock sensibility.
Wasilewski is a sensitive bittersweet romantic, in one sense a disciple of Bill Evans, but just as much a follower of Komeda, the great Polish film composer. And it’s fitting that one of Komeda’s most compelling melodies is included on the new album.
You can listen to selections from the trio's last album Faithful here; ‘The Cat’ from the earlier January here; and ‘Hyperballad’ from the trio’s first album for ECM Trio here.