MUSIC REVIEW
Setting Leadership Aside For Collective Control
By NATE CHINEN
Published: January 14, 2011
A bolt of bracing indeterminacy shot through the trumpeter Tomasz Stanko’s late set at the Jazz Standard on Thursday night. Tempos lurched and buckled, or mysteriously dissolved. Melodic lines snaked quickly through oblique intervals, defying resolution. Mr. Stanko framed his solos in long, searching arcs, each note sharply articulated but unpredictable in its aim. His engagement with the other musicians in the band suggested a kind of collective bargaining rather than the resolute charge of a leader and his men.
Angela Jimenez for The New York Times
Tomasz Stanko Quartet Plus Chris Potter: Thomas Morgan, left, Mr. Stanko and Mr. Potter performed at the Jazz Standard on Thursday night.
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This was all for the best. Mr. Stanko, 68, is among Europe’s most celebrated jazz musicians, and one of the few to make inroads in the United States. But his public profile here is lopsided as a result of the poignant, whispery albums he has released over the last decade on ECM. During his youth in Poland in the 1960s, Mr. Stanko favored a thornier, more unsettled style, drawing on the radical new example of an American jazz avant-garde. The thrust of this set, then, suggested both a departure and a rekindling for him.
What made all the difference was the personnel. Mr. Stanko wasn’t working here with a passel of younger musicians from Poland or Scandinavia, as he usually does. Instead he had enlisted a cast of serious New Yorkers: the saxophonist Chris Potter, the pianist Craig Taborn, the bassist Thomas Morgan and the drummer Jim Black. Each musician onstage was entrusted with some crucial measure of control.
That dynamic was clear from the start of the set, as the band outlined a shadowy theme. It was “Last Song”— from Mr. Stanko’s most recent album, “Dark Eyes,” released on ECM last year — and it opened up to free-form invention by the rhythm section. Mr. Taborn etched fast, glancing scribbles at the piano, punctuated by the occasional chordal chime; Mr. Black scraped and clomped around his drum kit, extracting sighing overtones from a cymbal with a violin bow. Then Mr. Potter entered the picture, blurting strange clusters of notes, and deftly conjugating the clusters through multiple keys.
Mr. Stanko accepted these conditions as a fresh challenge, putting more torque on his phrasing and more bite in his attack. The brisk swing of “Maldoror’s War Song” and “The Dark Eyes of Martha Hirsch”had him leaning ahead of the beat, while “Balladyna,” the title track of one of his mid-1970s albums, brought out a more characteristically subtle tension.
If the rhythm section, with its impulsive heat, was the chief reason for the music’s urgency, it was just as intriguing to note the rapport between Mr. Stanko and Mr. Potter. Both are lyrical improvisers by nature, but they leaned on each other here, pushing for discovery. You hope this isn’t the end of their collaboration; clearly, they’re onto something.
