Sphinx

I’m in Berlin this week – a quick visit to meet collaborators and a PhD student, and try to get an article written – and, unusually, part of me wishes I could go back home immediately, for the simple reason that the great Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko, one of my musical heroes, has just died, and I need to binge on his records. Unfortunately I have just the one out here with me, and isn’t one of my favourites; I have had to fight the urge to buy duplicate copies of a load of cds I already own.

What has this got to do with antiquity and modernity? Probably not a lot – but it’s my blog, and anyway I can’t find my log-in details for the music blog I occasionally contribute to. But I do think there are some connections. I’ve long maintained that jazz offers a model for academic discourse – the accumulation of enormous technical skill and knowledge through countless hours of effort, as the basis for spontaneous, playful invention in the moment, with books/articles/records capturing a specific moment in an ongoing process of creation and dialogue, rather than ever being a definitive statement. There’s the complex relationship in both cases between tradition and innovation and between elitism and populism (echoes of the first piece I ever published in German, on ‘Friedrich Nietzsche als Jazz-Kritiker’).

Stanko epitomised this as well as anyone: constantly moving between styles and groups and collaborators, yet always recognisably himself, and at times apparently working through countless variations of the same couple of tunes in multiple settings. It’s especially interesting to think of his status as not just a European working in an idiom that was still, when he began, dominated by the ongoing African American tradition, but as someone from the margins of ‘Europe’, where jazz retained its status as rebellious, subversive music, the sound of freedom in multiple senses. (Something which continues, I think, to judge from the number of contemporary Polish jazz groups who emphasise multicultural influences, especially klezmer and gypsy traditions).

I saw Stanko in concert only three times, only one of which was actually great (at St George’s in Bristol in the late 90s, on his first tour with the brilliant young group that’s become the Marcin Wasilewski Trio). The second time was a slightly odd multimedia thing at the Barbican with a bigger, rather unsympathetic group (or maybe it was the acoustic); finally, last year in Poznan, with a superb group but clearly old and easily tired, if not already ill.

But I have all the records, bar one of the electric fusion things he did in the 1970s and some of his early recordings with the great pisnist and composer Krzysztof Komeda (think of the soundtrack to Rosemary’s Baby). Almost all of them wonderful; often quiet and meditative – the common comparison to Kind of Blue is arguably not entirely a compliment – but with sudden bursts of noise and dissonance, playing with texture and tone in the manner of the later Miles. If there’s a recurring mood, it feels to me like a desperate sadness and sense of loss – and certainly one doesn’t gave to look far for a song that can serve as his own lament…