Tomasz Stanko Quartet
Suspended Night

Tomasz Stanko trumpet
Marcin Wasilewski piano
Slawomir Kurkiewicz double-bass
Michal Miskiewicz drums
Recorded July 2003 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Two years after the classic Soul of Things, trumpeter Tomasz Stanko and his young Polish sidekicks took things to the next level—by going deeper into the night. Stanko’s uniqueness comes through his ability to be at once atavistic and novel. He turns an ear to those spaces in between notes and shows us just how musical they truly are. This is to say nothing of the fact that his tone only seems to get more fluid as he ages, sometimes burrowing its way through a thickly described sentiment, at others swooning from the percolations of its discovery. He is sly and cool, and with the committed trio at his side there is nothing to fear on either end of the brass.

“Song for Sarah” spreads its roots into an earthy prologue for the ages. Like “Nicolette” (from a different classic, Angel Song), it sinks its teeth into a cloud, one that finds absorbent life here through the ten “Suspended Variations” that follow. In the first there is already an album’s worth of material to unpack. As he has done before, pianist Marcin Wasilewski brings the rain, only now its colors speak as much as they sing. Set aloft on Michal Miskiewicz’s popcorn snare and with Slawomir Kurkiewicz’s netted bass, Stanko’s subtle panoply of pops and whispers turns the ingredients of the solo into a home-cooked soliloquy.

The more you get to know this music, if not the other way around, the more its gradations clarify. What at first, for instance, feels like a tracing of that indefinable border between flying and falling in Variations III and IV reveals more domestic light with every listen. It is the kind of playing one can only dream about, wrapped as it is in a cloak of lens flare to stave off the half-hearted imitators of the world. The seemingly straightforward groove aesthetic of II and V pulls another curtain to the dawn, finding in every crosscurrent a decodable sigh. The responsive playing from the rhythm section here is something of a marvel. The pianism of VI wraps around us like skin and for the first time brings palpable darkness to the album’s palette. Stanko’s restraint is such that we can’t help nodding our heads and squinting our eyes into the billowing smoke that welcomes us.

Variation VII just might be the jewel of the set. Short and sweet, it reveals the breadth of the quartet’s subtleties in a sleek and compact package. VIII is likewise studded with microscopic touches from Wasilewski. Stanko, meanwhile, threads the needle with a hand so intuitive that his fingernails blur into the inlay of the valves until X fulfills the promise of suspension at last.

There is a veiled spirit to Suspended Night. Touched by the hesitations of a melancholy philosophy, it dispels the myth of origin and creates one for itself. This is the scar of maturity, the infant’s cradle chopped into firewood and burned until smoke and a few lullabies are all that’s left to prove its having been here.

Tomasz Stanko Quartet
Soul of Things

Tomasz Stanko trumpet
Marcin Wasilewski piano
Slawomir Kurkiewicz double-bass
Michal Miskiewicz drums
Recorded August 2001 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“I’ve been playing the same song my whole life,” says trumpeter Tomasz Stanko, who puts his claim to the test in thirteen numbered tracks under the title Soul of Things. Together they are not variations on a theme, but are a “balladesque suite” built around the theme of variation. And who better to weigh this theory than the all-Polish backing of Marcin Wasilewski (piano), Slawomir Kurkiewicz (bass), and Michal Miskiewicz (drums)? For perhaps no one else has internalized every aspect of Stanko’s career with such commitment and chased it down with a healthy ECM diet to boot. Being in the legendary space of Oslo’s Rainbow Studio, under Manfred Eicher’s careful and deepening guidance no less, stirred their blood to permeating, concerted action in a timeless document.

Even if I wanted to resist contextualizing Stanko’s music against a silver screen, one can almost feel the tick of raindrops on gabardine as Variation I bathes us in film noir atmosphere. Stanko’s protagonist is recognizable from the first curl of fog that precedes him. The band’s attunement, down to the molecular level, is also palpable in Kurkiewicz’s attention to space, finding in Wasilewski’s pianism fertile ground for unmitigated ideas beneath a sprinkling of drummed dew. Variation II glides along with an ice-skaterly flow. Stanko’s gentility here astonishes, though even the more upbeat variations like III and X maintain an elasticity of time that softens our ears. From lullabies of empathy (IV) to heart-wrenching spotlights on closed curtain (XII), we feel every hidden thing as if it were already inside us.

Wasilewski, in his first ECM appearance, is the session’s golden child, spreading out every wrinkle with iron fingers. He paints a forest one branch at a time in VI, drums quivering like the wind-touched foliage. Likewise in VII. Billowing like a curtain in a summer breeze, it manifests the flexibility of our well-being and weaves its thread count to translucent density. The contemplative solo from Miskiewicz here is something of a transition point, a hidden portal through which Stanko breathes his undying love for the unspoken lyric. Like the cover image—a still from Jean-Luc Godard’s 2001 masterpiece Éloge de l’amour—it opens a sky in the mind’s eye, a rift of flame and critical reasoning.

So often Stanko comes close to the edge, hanging only by a finger, but pulls himself up just in time, filling every chasm with hope before stepping confidently on his way to the next. We hear this in IX, when after an ascending line he waits for the implications to settle before auguring their full-blown fate. Such profundity abounds also in XI. It is filled sublime moments, as when Stanko unleashes a raspy cry and Miskiewicz responds not with a rise in intensity but a flowering of cymbals, gentle yet sure. From a long solo intro, the final variation plies the studio’s reverberant space as one might a deity with questions that are their own answers.

Soul of Things only grows more ponderous as it develops, trail-marking its passage not with breadcrumbs but with delicacies far more edible by heart. This quartet, while formidable, is never confrontational, even when Stanko is blatting his golden song across the stratosphere. His titles may always come after the fact, but the soul of these things has been there from the start.

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Tomasz Stanko
From The Green Hill

Tomasz Stanko trumpet
John Surman baritone saxophone, bass clarinet
Dino Saluzzi bandoneón
Michelle Makarski violin
Anders Jormin bass
Jon Christensen drums
Recorded August 1998 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

A burning ridge. Gills of flame in the dark. Smoke rises; ashes sink. This is the visual manifestation of all that resounds From The Green Hill, yet another leap of profundity from Tomasz Stanko after the Polish trumpeter’s four-album ECM panorama. To achieve this, he couldn’t have asked for a more appropriate band: John Surman (dipping into his characteristic low reeds), bandoneón maestro Dino Saluzzi, violinist Michelle Makarski, bassist Anders Jormin, and drummer Jon Christensen decode the cover photograph as a meta-statement of Stanko’s bite and his underlying deference to the spirits lurking within his instrument. Of those, the ghost of Krzysztof Komeda opens its mouth most widely and unleashes its lachrymose glow at 24 frames per second in two versions of “Litania.” Saluzzi plays each alone, keying from them a vital thematic thread of Stanko’s sound-world, a floating lily with no destination but its will to bloom. Saluzzi thus adopts a narrative voice, without which the story would lack a vital organ.

Surman contributes the album’s frame tale in the form of “Domino,” which opens the set and also makes a penultimate reappearance. In the former incarnation, it constitutes a viscous introduction in which the free considerations of the band’s rhythm section (to which the bandoneón is bonded) are the matchbook strip to Stanko’s strike. “Stone Ridge,” also by Surman, puts his bass clarinet in the spotlight. Flowering from a solo violin before Stanko’s muted strains pull up the others in his net, the ensuing groove gives plenty of hooks for its chain of soliloquys, of which Makarski’s is utterly remarkable.

The compositional skin that keeps this all embodied is writ large by Stanko, despite the fact that he seems relatively absent. What he lacks in airtime, however, he makes up for with a honed improvisatory laser that etches every nook of this shadowy house in which we find ourselves. It all reaches a nadir in “Love Theme from Farewell to Maria” and in the title track. The level of attunement to every change in both offers hope against the somber charge. Not to be ignored, Jormin stands out for his restless solo in “…y despues de todo” and for the inversions of “The Lark In The Dark.” Christensen’s drumming, too, with its microscopic and sparkling current, sets off a halting sort of poetry. (Note also his free talk with Saluzzi in “Buschka.” Brilliant.) We end in “Argentyna,” which confirms the presence of a magnifying glass in Stanko’s Swiss Army knife, though with no loss of intensity—if anything, more of it. Stripped to the core of their melodic undertaking, his powers of recollection gnaw at the arbitrariness of intellectual border zones. His are not cerebral toys, but direct methods of communication, their raw rubato the touchstone of an unrelenting lyricism…and all of this with hardly a trace of aggression.

The genesis of From The Green Hill can be traced back to ECM’s May 1997 Whitsun concerts at the Hotel Römerbad in Badenweiler, Germany. It was there that Stanko found himself performing at the behest of producer Manfred Eicher, who dropped his weight into new and exciting pools. Several performances and one all-night jam session later (oh, to have been there…), we arrive in this masterfully interwoven place, where ebb and flow have only one name: you.

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