Marcin Wasilewski Trio

Marcin Wasilewski Trio & Joakim Milder – Spark Of Life (2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · June 16, 2023 · Comments off

The fourth ECM album for the Wasilewski Trio adds a special guest, the lyrical Swedish saxophonist Joakim Milder, whom the Poles came to know through performances with Tomasz Stanko’s Litania project. Amongst other affinities, the players share a love of Krzyzstof Komeda’s music, and Komeda’s “Sleep Safe and Warm” theme, written for Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby makes a reappearance here. As ever, the Wasilewski group balances original material – intensely melodic new tunes by Marcin (including two variations of the beautiful title track) – with a daring range of covers, embracing Herbie Hancock, the Police’s “Message In A Bottle” and Slawomir Kurkiewicz’s arrangement of a composition by Grazyna Bacewicz, and reinforces its status as one of the most resourceful groups around.

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Marcin Wasilewski Trio – Live (2018) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · June 16, 2023 · Comments off

For years, fans of Poland’s Marcin Wasilewski Trio have been asking for a live album. Here it is. Recorded at the Jazz Middelheim Festival in Antwerp, Belgium, in August 2016, it captures the trio in energetic, extroverted mode, fanning the flames of their Spark of Life repertoire and drawing on the deep understanding Marcin Wasilewski, Slawomir Kurkiewicz and Michal Miskiewicz have established in the course of a quarter century of shared musical endeavour. As UK magazine Jazz Journal has noted, “Wasilewski’s music celebrates a vast dynamic range, from the most deftly struck pianistic delicacies to gloriously intense emotional exuberance, the chords pounded with unrestrained joy, yet always within a marvellously melodic concept.”

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Marcin Wasilewski Trio – January (2008/2017) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · June 16, 2023 · Comments off

The members of this young Polish trio — pianist Marcin Wasilewski, bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz, and drummer Michal Miskiewicz — have been working together since they were teenagers, and listening to January makes it clear that the band members know each other inside out. (The group also serves as a backup band for one of Poland’s most well known jazz artists, the trumpeter Tomasz Stanko.) The choice of material is intriguing: how many albums include pieces by Gary Peacock (“Vignette”) and Prince (”Diamonds and Pearls.”)? Overall, January has the reflective mood and strikingly clear sound that is emblematic of the German-based ECM label. On the title track, Wasilewski’s dreamy playing is sensitively accompanied by just-so drums and bass. But other cuts find the band in a different mode. The Stanko-penned “Balladyna” starts off quietly enough, but the band eventually brings an edgy, dramatic intensity to the music, and on the next track, Carla Bley’s “King Korn,” the threesome take off. January closes as quietly as it opens: “New York 2007” evokes a low-key sense of wonder right up to its last brushed drum sound.

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Marcin Wasilewski Trio – En attendant (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · June 16, 2023 · Comments off

“There’s a galaxy of piano trios in today’s jazz universe,” the BBC Music Magazine has noted, “but few shine as bright as Marcin Wasilewski’s”. On its seventh ECM album the multifaceted Polish group illuminates a characteristically wide span of music. On En attendant, collectively created pieces are juxtaposed with Wasilewski’s malleable “Glimmer of Hope”, Carla Bley’s timeless “Vashkar”, The Doors’ hypnotic “Riders On The Storm” and a selection from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Fluidity is the hallmark , allied to the deep listening made possible by more than a quarter-century of collaborative music-making by pianist Wasilewski, bassist Kurkiewicz and drummer Miskiewicz. En attendant was recorded at Studios La Buissonne in the South of France in August 2019, and produced by Manfred Eicher.

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Marcin Wasilewski Trio – Arctic Riff (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · June 15, 2023 · Comments off

Marcin Wasilewski has been a resident at ECM for sixteen years. And for 25 years, the Munich label has turned the Polish pianist and his trio of fellow countrymen (Slawomir Kurkiewicz on double bass and Michał Miśkiewicza on drums) into an intimate and pure workshop. To celebrate this anniversary, the band invited tenor saxophone giant Joe Lovano to their cosy fiesta. The American’s lyricism, which is never raucous, is perfectly lined up in the piano inherited from Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett from the Polishman who always expresses himself economically. But it’s not only wisdom and recollection that we find here. Wasilewski knows how to be voluble and even unpredictable, like on the determined Cadenza, and even mysterious like his improvisations on Vashkar, the only cover on the record by Carla Bley. – Max Dembo

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