ECM-ACA 2nd Event

ECM-ACA 2nd Event 30 May 2011

On Monday 30 May 2011 we had the second and equally successful event-listening, to Katakouzinos foundation, in cooperation with ECM and Jazz & Tzaz magazine...

The event was about the acquaintance with the ECM pianist Marcin Wasilewski, his great Trio and his wonderful new album Faithful...

Star of the evening was the fantastic system built by Akis Michalopoulos, with Focal speakers and Luxman electronics (amplification and source) ...

There were many people watching with interest the discussions and the music...

There were also discussions and comments on the premium hi-end system, that also performed perfectly with the dark music of ECM...

The people from ECM and Katakouzenos institution, talked to us about the artist, and after discuss us talked live with him...
Marcin Vasilewski was for many years the pianist of the leading Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko... Nowadays continues his career with his own trio...

By Manos Bitsakakis

Project...

Continuing directions sketched on 2007’s January, and the earlier album called just Trio (2004), Faithful is the third ECM album by Poland’s Wasilewski Trio. Nonetheless, it is to the trio that the listener must turn for the most comprehensive account of the players’ capabilities and inspirations. And Faithful may be the most comprehensive album yet from this group, capturing the trio’s admixture of energy, lyricism and ideas.

The album opens strikingly with Hanns Eisler’s An den kleinen Radioapparat, a song written (in 1942) from the perspective of a German exile still pursued and haunted by the voices of his persecutors through the medium of the radio. The tune had a latter-day revival under the title The Secret Marriage, but the Wasilewski Trio reach for a feeling closer to the piece’s original intention.

Night Train To You is the first of five new Wasilewski tunes here, described by the composer as “a motoric piece, a process.” At the outset three chords set up a pattern, "like a loop". Time signatures progress from 6/8 to 11/8. A “very simple melody” takes us to a solo sequence for piano and drums, before the piece slows like a locomotive approaching a station, leading to a final section with improvisations around the chords heard in the open moments.

Faithful takes its name from its title track, a tune originally from Ornette Coleman’s 1966 album The Empty Foxhole, long a reference at ECM for the clarity of its melodic line and the purity, the innocence, of its improvisation. In an indirect way, it can be related to the history of Wasilewski, Kurkiewicz and Miskiewicz, players who found their shared musical identity when just schoolchildren.

Source Marcin Wasilewski Trio