Leszek Kułakowski - Red Ice (2020)

The playing of Leszek Kułakowski and Maciej Sikała is impressionistic. The author of the album note, Stanisław Danielewicz, jokes that this is the best ECM album of the last few years, but released by Soliton. But this is a far simplification and even a stylistic abuse. The album "Red Ice" is very European, because it is based on the foundations of our musical history (Debussy, Satie, Ravel, Skriabin), it has nothing that is so characteristic of Munich's music, what I call blurring of contours, looking somewhere beyond the horizon , at the cost of losing visual acuity.

Leszek and Maciej's music has most in common with jazz due to the improvised nature of the playing, but do we have to force it to be placed on a shelf labeled jazz? Personally, I am against it, stereotypical labeling of such gems as Raindrops or Cecilia, How Beautiful You Are will harm this music-making. This playing is so charming that it will bring joy to the most orthodox followers of classical music (sorry for the colloquialism). Bagatella could be played with equal ease at a jazz festival as well as at a concert included in series dedicated to contemporary music. While listening to Birds or the title composition, I can imagine myself sitting in a philharmonic hall or in an armchair in a jazz club. There is one condition, the light here and here would have to be dimmed. Nomen omen, am I the only one who hears the affinity between Birds and Oiseaux Exotiques by Olivier Messiaen, but in a light version?

This music is nostalgic in a way, but not sad. Reflective and restrained, but not boring. Romantic, but not cloying. When necessary, the artists intrigue us with an almost funky groove in Happy News, and then take us to the land of morning mists above the lake, as in Morning Fog. There is a recording close to the stylistic excursions of Chick Corea (What is going on here - asks Janusz's jug). And also the darkness of the early works of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, such as in Flexion. And when the Septim (the title is not accidental) sounds, we can breathe a sigh of relief. We are returning from a long journey, of course, if someone is able to unite the world of jazz idiom with a delicate hint of avant-garde à la Viktor Ullmann, Igor Stravinsky and Dmitry Shostakovich, who experimented with jazz, or Leonard Bernstein.

It's a brilliant album, something I didn't expect here on the Vistula River. A beautiful, intellectual album and – unfortunately – deserving of better sound production. This is sound worthy of an audiophile approach to matter.