This is a listening thread for UK avant-music publication THE WIRE's best-of lists published at the end of every year. We pick a year, listen through all the albums ranked, discuss any and all impres

Hey Fred B, if you want to take over this thread, that's 100% fine by me. I'm sorry I headed your last attempt off. I'm not sure when I'm going to be able to start listening through the Wire lists again, but there's no point in letting this sit in mothballs if there's interest from other posters.

Oh, actually I was thinking of returning to 97 and checking out the ECM albums on it now that they're on spotify. Anyone else up for spending a week more or so on this list?

i'm interested

Cool! The ECM albums I'm going to delve into are these three:

6.Tomasz Stanko Septet - Litania: Music Of Krzysztof Komeda
29. Joe Maneri Quartet - In Full Cry
45. Giya Kancheli- Caris Mere

lovely

this stanko record is sounding really nice. komeda is really worth exploring. i particularly like his "astigmatic" from '66

https://img.discogs.com/x2lhdRJZIXHTSHEdf9zi6SpLOno=/fit-in/600x574/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-2684297-1315083022.jpeg.jpg

...which, as the cover art now reminds me, tomasz stanko played on. duh

wow, i guess this komeda album is really well-known and very highly regarded! my friend, who lived in poland for about a decade, once showed it to me and he gave me the impression that he was letting me in on this secret obscure underground avant-jazz polish thing but the internet tells me otherwise.

anyway, back to "litania" and stanko. the record is so sparse and breathy and completely beautiful. there's this moment in "night time, daytime requiem" around 11m after a longish piano interlude and stanko starts playing, it sounds like he's wincing, it's this strange, fragile, hesitant, raspy sound. and then as the band comes together it has this feeling of a primordial moment, a kind of re-discovery, as if the musicians are all remembering that they play jazz, that jazz is this beautiful thing for which they are living, breathing conduits, and the realization makes them convulse in this spasm of noise around 14m40s and then the serene, post-natal textures at 15m giving way to further reflections alternating between tranquility and these slow, increasingly ecstatic crescendoes and then collapse and re-set. what a pleasure.

great post

and maybe this is hackneyed but i feel like the music definitely evokes post-war poland in a big way. i mean, this is what stanko's hometown looked like in the '60s:

http://www.podkarpackahistoria.pl/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/08.jpg

http://www.podkarpackahistoria.pl/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/13.jpg

the whole "we gotta start over" sentiment maybe

(thanks ross)

and yeah okay so this is stanko talking w/ npr in 2006:

HANSEN: The music critic Geoffrey Himes wrote that you pioneered a distinctly Polish brand of jazz. What does that mean? What's Polish jazz?

Mr. STANKO: This is question not for myself. I don't know exactly, because I play this music. I think it's kind of melancholic, what maybe it's coming from our climate, our light in our country, and this melancholy may be a little bit also in the Chopin music, this kind of romantic, melancholic atmosphere, mood.

HANSEN: So it does reflect sort of the culture. Politically, however, how difficult was it to play jazz? Because Poland has gone through so much in the last 50 years.

Mr. STANKO: Yeah. It was - in the '50s, it was quite difficult, even was illegal. But in my times, '60s, it was quite possible, even fashionable and every film director, actors, Polanski and this society, was really into the jazz music, and we were kind of kings in the arts society.

(Soundbite of laughter)

HANSEN: Do you think there's a difference between the way jazz is developing here in the United States and the direction it's going in Europe?

Mr. STANKO: Probably yes, because had war, you know, and jazz was much shorter period in Europe, because war destroyed completely everything. Like you remember, you said Django Reinhart was in France before the war, but after that, you know, everything start from the beginning.

Polish Jazz makes me think of Ida. Kinda holy, kinda modernistic chic.

lol of ALL the polish films!

or wait did you mean the band?

No, the film :)

Looking through his discography, Komeda apparantly made several scores for Danish director Henning Carlsen as well, including his international breakthrough Hunger. Never knew that. One of the tracks on Astigmatic is from a Carlsen film as well.

i like stanko's '70s stuff. particularly "purple sun" (with zbigniew seifert on violin) and "twet". they've got a sound to them i find amenable.

although the notion of "polish jazz" has me listening to this record called "winobranie" by zbigniew namyslowski that rym rates highly - any of y'all heard this one? good shit!

never heard it, just put it on. thanks for the rec!

somebody made a list on discogs of the whole "polish jazz" series, which was done by the state-run label i guess. the first one is "new orleans stompers" by the warsaw stompers lol

https://www.discogs.com/lists/Polish-Jazz-Series/17341

also this is a really nice overview of stanko's career https://jazztimes.com/features/tomasz-stanko-the-soul-of-freedom/

I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced by the Giya Kancheli album. It's very intensely religious classical music, but both a little too kitchy and a little too proper. It doesn't have the austerity of an Arvo Pärt at his best, but on the other hand isn't as straightforwardly emotionally manipulative as something like Gorecki's third. I love the final vocal passage of the first track. But there are a couple of moments, as when there's a quote of Jewish music, or some of Jan Garbarek's saxophone passages, where it's a bit of a stylistic mishmash. Holy Polystylism? Holystylism?

hi Frederik. sorry i let this lapse. i listened to the kancheli album twice (last week) and didn't have much to say, except that i wasn't very into it. i was planning to listen a couple of more times, and perhaps be more specific in my criticism. but then i listened again and decided against trying to formulate my feelings into words.

so onto joe maneri, then. (tomorrow.)

Lol, that seems like a pretty legit response to Kancheli to me. Joe Maneri, and then, anyone who has a suggestion for another year?