Product Description

The celebrated Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko returns with a new band comprising David Virelles (piano), Thomas Morgan (double bass) and Gerald Cleaver (drums) - his New York Quartet - and an album paying homage to the Polish poet, essayist and Nobel Laureate, Wislawa Symborska.

Like his early hero Miles Davis, Stanko has a gift for shaping great bands, and this one, formed in the world's jazz capital, overflows with promise. The bass and drums team of Morgan and Cleaver is one of the most sensitive in contemporary improvising, and Cuban-born David Virelles, inspired by ritual music as well as by Thelonious Monk and Andrew Hill, seems particularly well-attuned to the brooding darkness and sophisticated dread of Stanko's free ballads. In the up-tempo pieces all four players seem to enter new territory, with very exciting results.

The 2-CD programme of new Stanko compositions is inspired by the poetry of Wislawa Symborska, who died in 2012. As Stanko writes in the CD booklet, "Reading Wislawa Szymborska's words gave me many ideas and insights. Meeting her and interacting with her poetry also gave impetus to this music, which I would like to dedicate, respectfully, to her memory."

Wislawa was recorded in New York - where Stanko now lives for part of each year - at the Avatar Studios in June, 2012. It is his first ECM album since Dark Eyes in 2009.

Personnel: Tomasz Stanko (trumpet), David Virelles (piano), Thomas Morgan (double bass), Gerald Cleaver (drums)

Review

'Stanko is playing as strongly as ever, aided and abetted by the quicksilver, universally excellent Virelles, Morgan and Cleaver. Archetypal, essential music from one of Europe's most striking - and affecting - poets of his instrument.' -- Jazz Journal, (Michael Tucker) * * * * *

'Wislawa is a dream-ticket jazz meeting between a cutting-edge European legend, and an equally honed triumvirate of pioneering New York-based youth...the 70-year-old leader sounds in great fettle, fast or slow.' -- The Guardian, (John Fordham) * * * *

'Sublime...at 70 Stanko is inspired all over again. Wislawa is music of the night, a dream to feed the imagination.' -- Jazzwise, (Stephen Graham) * * * *

'The resulting two albums, containing over 90 minutes of quietly dramatic Stanko compositions ranging from the plaintive, woozily lyrical to the brisk and boppish, are at once uniquely affecting and compulsively listenable, and the overall band approach is definitive ECM.'

--LondonJazzNews, (Chris Parker)