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Tomasz Stanko's New York Quartet
December Avenue
(ECM)
AURALLY and visually, Tomasz Stanko’s New York Quartet live was startling.
The tiny Polish-born trumpeter, who died last year, produced notes that were sometimes terse, sometimes tender and his unique tone was full of a troublesome power as he stood out front of his confreres, his horn pointing outwards under a cloth cap.
With him on his final album was drummer Gerald Cleaver, pianist David Virelles and bassist Reuben Rogers and on opener Cloud, Virelles’s numinous Cuban notes preface the dark, breathy and beautiful Stanko horn, floating over Rogers’s pulsating bass and Cleaver’s distant-sounding brushes.
Blue Cloud is overcast by Stanko’s melancholic and fretful tone, his sound like no other trumpeter. Cleaver’s flickering cymbals lift the delving bass heartbeat and Virelles makes soft and beguiling keyboard patterns beside them.
The quartet’s final notes make a sound which brings Europe and the Americas together, all their histories in an aspiring road to peace.
Rogers’s deep-plucked strings create the foundation for Stanko’s swift aural essay in Burning Hot, with a Caribbean fire to Virelles’s solo, a preface to the high-pitched trumpet volley. These neighbours from Cuba and St Thomas palaver in the conversational David and Reuben, as if the stretch of sea between them were but an illusion.
There’s an ominous yet loving lyricism in Stanko’s tribute to the Polish-Jewish writer, Ballad for Bruno Schulz. He was shot dead by an occupying nazi SS officer in Poland in 1942 and the stark and personal tenderness of Stanko’s notes for a countryman of powerful creative genius murdered by fascism is both elegiac and deeply moving.
The connections to Schulz by Stanko’s three musical compadres of another generation from Cuba, the Virgin Islands and Detroit are fused by the community of the jazz cosmopolis.
Stanko’s homage to Schulz continues in The Street of Crocodiles, the title of one of the writer’s works. Its theme brings echoes of Ellington’s All Too Soon and Stanko’s tune has sadness and pathos too but also a grandeur and pride, his lingering last note one of love and longing.
