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Written in
fRoots
issue 309, 2009
ST. NICHOLAS ORCHESTRA
Old Music
Ferment, no number (2007)
New Music
Ferment, no number (2007)
JANUSZ PRUSINOWSKI TRIO
Mazurki
Sluchaj Uchem, no number (2008)
ZYWIOLAK
Muzyka Psychodelicznej Switezianki
Karrot Kommando KK28 (2008)
TREBUNIE-TUTKI & TWINKLE BROTHERS
Songs of Glory – Piesni Chwaly
Kiton Art K0360-RPK (2008)
In pointing out that there’s more to the Polish folk music revival than the
deservedly celebrated Warsaw Village Band, I’ve more than once mentioned the St.
Nicholas Orchestra (Orkiestra sw. Mikolaja) from Lublin, and reviewed several of
its albums.
The band formed in 1988, and since then has worked at
spreading the traditional music virus with an annual festival (Mikolajki
Folkowe), a magazine (Gadki z Chatki) and eleven albums in which strong,
energetic female and male vocals are surrounded by muscular acoustic
instrumentation that borrows from beyond the Polish traditional, as do the
arrangements, but draws it together to produce a distinctively Polish gutsy,
edgy sound in a wide range of music learned from village traditions across
Poland and its borders including Lemko, Boyko, Hutsul, Ukrainian and Carpathian
Romanian, that’s as hefty and grainy as that of the WVB.
The St Nicks’ most recent releases are Lem-agination,
which hasn’t been sent for review, and New Music, which has, partnered by
the simultaneous release of a compilation from seven of their albums from 1994
to 2004, Old Music. The pair come attached to an issue of Ferment,
an LP-sized periodical of which each issue is devoted to a particular band or
musician (earlier issues have covered Polish bands Osjan and Transkapela and
Cuba’s Septeto Nacional). It tells the SNO story in photos and words – mostly
Polish, but with a useful bio section in English. The entire package is
available from their website and from Ferment for less than the price of any of
their single albums, and I recommend it highly as an introduction.
www.mikolaje.lublin.pl,
www.ferment.pl,
www.myspace.com/mikolaje
Mazurki brings us the wonderfully wiggly
cross-rhythms – a triple beat but with stresses that can cross it in fours,
fives or sevens - of the village mazureks (mazurkas) from Mazovia, Poland’s flat
central region, played, with great skill and tremendous lift, by fiddler and
occasional cymbalist Janusz Prusinowski, with baraban drum, tambourine and
droning 3-string bass from Piotr Piszcatowski, joined by Michal Zak’s wild shawm
and flute. Suddenly the similarly wiggly, asymmetric three-beat polskas of
Sweden, which are indeed descended from the mazurka, have a direct connection.
It’s a magnificent album. These guys play with high
skill and all the fire and rhythmic energy of the village musicians they’ve
learned from. Prusinowski describes his damascene moment. “In an Andrzej
Bienkowski film I heard the Józef Kedzierski band. It was a revelation: the
authenticity, intensity and ease that I had been looking for throughout the
world existed right here, beside me, in my own language”.
What’s probably that same film, of Kedzierski in 1986,
can be seen on YouTube via ethnographer, photographer and painter Bienkowski’s
website,
www.andrzejbienkowski.blox.pl.
In his note to the Prusinowski album, Bienkowski
writes, “No other dance aroused such euphoria in dancers and got musicians into
such a trance”. Like Swedish polska there too, then. And, like polskas, mazureks
are played differently in each village. But mazureks have short songs that go
with them, and Bienkowski reckons that the variation of these songs because of
local dialect and personal expression is reflected in the variations in mazurek
melodies. The rhythm, though, is all-important, and in sung mazureks it’s
connected with rhythmic rural work as much as with dance. On the CD too there’s
singing, from Prusinowski and two female traditional singers, Maria Pezik and
Maria Siwiec.
Far, as Bienkowski points out, from the elegant,
waltz-like mazurkas known to the world through Chopin and others, this is music
to ignite a new mazurka craze, as polska in Sweden became an obsessive heart to
the traditional music revival. It could certainly send a thrill through the
ranks of Swedish fiddlers, and lead to Mazovia mazureks creeping into the
spelmansstämma buskspel sessions.
(And, food for the body as well as the mind, there’s
unusual added value in the CD pack: multilingual recipe cards for the
cream-toffee-topped Easter cake also known as mazurek).
www.myspace.com/januszprusinowskitrio
For Zywiolak Swedish connections work the other way.
It’s a new band heavily and declaredly influenced by the polska-driven wild
heftiness of Hedningarna, Garmarna, Hoven Droven and others to make something of
that ilk for Polish music. The four tracks, plus a shortened radio mix of one of
them, on its 23-minute debut CD show some success in that direction: sassy
duetting female vocals spit, shriek and whisper in Hedningarna style, male ones
growl with rather forced menace perilously close to comic-book heavy-metal
fantasy, over churning hurdy-gurdy and other edgy string-abrasions over big
drum-pulses and pumping bass, in material that’s partly traditional, partly
written by leaders Robert Jaworski and Robert Wasilewski.
While alongside it has grown the much less
tradition-rooted, symbolism-toying and occasionally Aryanist-flirting
Viking/Gothic metal scene in the Nordic countries and neighbours, there’s plenty
of intelligent life still to be created in the genre that Hedningarna pretty
much began. This hasn’t been done with Polish music before and is likely to
excite audiences in places where folk music doesn’t normally go. The essence of
the Swedish drone-rock phenomenon, though, wasn’t just the great noises but that
the musicians are deeply versed and skilled in traditional music; I hope
Zywiolak bears this in mind, and doesn’t drift off into the computer-game avatar
world of Viking-Gothicism.
www.zywiolak.pl,
www.myspace.com/zywiolak,
www.karrot.pl
Back at the beginning of the 1990s Polish Radio
producer Wlodzimierz Kleszcz, who later produced the first Warsaw Village Band
recordings, put together Tatra Mountain Górale (highlander) traditional fiddling
and singing family group Trebunie-Tutki with Jamaican reggae band the Twinkle
Brothers, who had first played in Poland in the late 80s, and the result was the
album Higher Heights – Twinkle Inna Polish Stylee. It propelled them to
national fame in Poland, created a brief bemused and amused stir on the western
world-music scene, and was followed in 1996 by further reggae-Goralska fusions
in Trebunie-Tutki’s collaborations with dub-mixer Adrian Sherwood. Now, a dozen
years later, Norman Grant and his fellow Twinkles get together again with the
Trebunia-Tutka family for Songs Of Glory / Piesni Chwaly.
Despite one’s doubts about the potential for a revival
of what appeared such a novelty project, again it’s a fun, ramshackle collision
that somehow manages to overlay the two disparate traditions; in fact this time
they’re more equally combined than last. Not just musically - the reggae
backbeat and harmonic feel of suspension joining with the characteristic 2/4
rhythms and natural-scale derived sharpened fourth of the Goralska music of
Podhale (‘the foot of the mountains’), the southern pocket of Poland around
Zakopane on the border with Slovakia - but in the content of the songs, which
alternate between, or sometimes fuse, Jamaican and Rastafarian images and the
snow and bandit-hero tales of the Polish highlander culture. They’re written and
sung in English by Grant, and written in Polish by Krzysztof Trebunia-Tutka and
sung in the traditional straining-high voice of their part of the jagged
Carpathians by himself, his father Wladyslaw, brother Jan and the more rounded
tones of sister Anna.
The English lyrics, particularly in the opening track The Day I Build My
House, which gets a dub-version reprise later, are hardly great poetry,
Grant’s production isn’t slick, and musically it’s far from a seamless blend,
but therein, and in its good-natured spirit, lies much of the appeal which makes
it through to this second coming.
© 2009 Andrew Cronshaw
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