E-Mail This Article to a Friend Miles of Poland We know who is Tomasz Stanko BY JON GARELICK
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During the past decade, trumpeter Tomasz Stanko, 62, the most famous living Polish jazz musician, has become renowned for the quiet grandeur of his albums for the ECM label. With his lyrical command of ballad tempos, his soaring legato lines, and his dramatic use of silence, it’s as though the last decade of Stanko albums had emerged from the shadows of deepest modal Miles Davis balladry. So it comes as a shock, when ECM hooks me up on a conference call to Warsaw, to hear Stanko speak not in languid Charles Lloyd Zen riddles, or even in a Milesian rasp, but in rapid, enthusiastic, heavily accented staccato cadences.

"Each of us has instinct as an improviser, a kind of knowledge of how to react," he says of playing "free" improvisations with his young band, who come to the Regattabar on Sunday. "This is a kind of intuition, you know, especially with this band, because in the beginning, they don’t really play free music. But slowly, it’s coming. I think instinct dictated this kind of way. And of course, a kind of knowledge also. Knowledge for example that Miles had always — that he doesn’t care about mistakes, you know. If you don’t care about mistakes, if you are relaxed and have plenty of time, you always create something, because next step you can always reparate this — what’s mean ‘wrong,’ you know? Nothing is exactly wrong. This is kind of also philosophy. If you play sure and relaxed, you always find way together."

Stanko began his career exploring the avant-garde agitations of Ornette Coleman. He was a member of the highly influential small band of Krzysztof Komeda, a pianist and composer who scored Roman Polanski’s movies right through Rosemary’s Baby.

Stanko’s ECM albums swing with a disembodied sense of meter — I recall only one walking bass from a half-dozen albums, and one waltz. The swing is all in the phrasing, and the subtle sense of pulse from his rhythm section. In interviews, Stanko talks about his desire to make his music simpler and "more and more quiet, more and more clear." Not that there aren’t passages of rhythmic agitation on Suspended Night, his latest album, or squeals and wails from his trumpet. But the overall effect of Suspended Night, and of the previous album, Soul of Things (2002), is of lyrical balladry, of stillness and quiet.

The trio with Stanko on those two — pianist Marcin Wasilewski, bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz, and drummer Michal Miskiewicz — have been playing with the trumpeter for 11 years, since they were teenagers. They had their first gigs with Stanko when he was unable to assemble his usual group of veteran European players (his cohort includes the A-list of ECM — Bob Stenson, Jon Christensen, John Surman, Palle Danielsson) for a club gig.

"It was the 8th of March 1994," says Wasilewski in a separate phone call. "I was very excited, but I was a little afraid, because we knew who is Tomasz Stanko. We saw him on television, he played so interesting and advanced music, and we were so young." But, he says, the feeling was good, and "from that time, he wanted to play with us more and more." They eventually became his band at European festivals as well as in tiny Polish jazz clubs.

On Trio, which was recorded several months after Suspended Night, the band favor tighter song forms of generally shorter duration than Stanko’s — more typical chord-based ballad cadences rather than Stanko’s abstract Milesian/Shorter structures. They show a young jazz man’s enthusiasm for Bjšrk, covering her "Hyperballad," and for later Wayne Shorter with his "Plaza Real." There’s even a bit of Ornette-like swing with Wasilewski’s "Free-Bop." But most telling are the five bracing free collective improvisations. "It was Manfred’s idea [ECM honcho Manfred Eicher], because we did it before on Stanko’s record."

Stanko and his young players hover in that tantalizingly ambiguous zone between mainstream and total freedom. You can hear the great piano trios in the rhythm section — Bill Evans and Paul Bley. (Wasilewski wrote his university dissertation about the latter.) Stanko recalls studying the recordings of George Russell as a young man, and Russell’s mode-based Lydian Chromatic Concept, which he found helpful. "If you play ‘dirty,’ it is easy to play only dirty. If you play clean technique, traditional technique, you have to play traditional technique. It’s very difficult to play both techniques together. For example, to connect that Albert Ayler style of playing with Charlie Parker style of playing, it’s almost impossible." Adapting Russell’s system, he says, helped him find that third path. The result, which owes as much to Stanko and his players as to a concept, is a kind of fluid, spontaneous interaction.

I point out that, with regard to rhythm, I can always feel a meter in Stanko’s pieces, but I can’t count it.

"Yah, yah, yah," he chirps, "thank you very much, this is compliment for me."

The Tomasz Stanko Quartet plays this Sunday, March 13, at 7:30 p.m. at the Regattabar, in the Charles Hotel, 1 Bennett Street in Harvard Square; call (617) 395-7757.