Specs & Pricing

Music
Jazz
Extraordinary
Excellent
Good
Fair
Poor
Music
Sonics
Tomasz Stanko
Quartet: Lontano.
Manfred Eicher, producer. ECM 1980.
Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko has been on
a roll since 1994, when he renewed his ECM
affiliation with Matka Joanna, his first album as
a leader in two decades, and followed it up with
Litania (a tribute to the late pianist/composer
Krzysztof Komeda) and From the Green Hill.
In 2002, after being teamed with such ECM
regulars as Bob Stenson, Anders Jormin, Terje
Rypdal, John Surman, and Edward Vesala,
Stanko settled into an especially fertile groove
with his young countrymen Marcin Wasilewski
(piano), Slawomir Kurkiewicz (bass), and
Michal Miskiewicz (drums).
Lontano is the third and most representative
128 December 2006 The Absolute Sound
document of this ensemble’s live sensibility.
The previous Quartet discs, Soul of Things
and Suspended Night, were essentially extended
theme-and-variation suites, an approach
partially echoed here in the three noncontiguous
sections of the title track. While
lush with the group’s trademark long lyrical lines
and contemplative moods, Lontano explores
a wider variety of ideas—reinterpreting
“Kattorna” from the Komeda quintet’s 1965
LP Astigmatic, and “Tale,” from Stanko’s 1975
Balladyna—and captures more of the quartet’s
edginess.
A European free-jazz pioneer who played
in Komeda’s groundbreaking quintet and
Alex von Schlippenbach’s Globe Unity
Orchestra, the 64-year-old Stanko nonetheless
remains faithful to melody, albeit fractured,
and internal harmonic structure. He builds
tension in his music by abstractly aligning
those elements at often exquisitely unhurried
but not exactly relaxed tempos and in vast,
yet somehow intimate spaces, and also by
injecting the occasional mercurial run after
long-held notes and legato phrases. Wasilewski
(who’s rightly been cited as a latter-day Bill
Evans), Kurkiewicz, and Miskiewicz, who
have recorded together as Trio, are as in-synch
with Stanko as Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter,
and Tony Williams were with Miles Davis,
whose bittersweet expressiveness Stanko
nearly matches.
Manfred Eicher’s transparent production
places the instruments in realistic threedimensional
relationships on a perfectly
proportioned, deep, and not-too-wide
soundstage, with warm, round bass and piano
tones, shimmering cymbals, and glorious
reproduction of Stanko’s typically silky
trumpet. Derk Richardson
Further Listening: Tomasz Stanko
Septet: Litania: The Music of
Krzysztof Komeda; Edward Vesala:
Heavylife