Polish Jazz, Vol. 4

The flood of avant-leaning and progressively innovative jazz that emerged in the wake of Poland’s late ’50s liberalization was both an engagement with and a deliberate counterpoint to the American influences that seeped into the region after the death of Stalin. Pianist Andrzej Trzaskowski, who had toured the States in 1962 with his band the Wreckers, was one of the more distinctive composers and musicians to run this gamut, with an initial hard bop sensibility gleaned during the late ’50s eventually shifting and mutating into something more rhythmically unpredictable and melodically stark. Polish Jazz, Volume 4 is remarkable in that it’s a record that finds as much depth in brevity as it does in elaboration, with Trzaskowski’s graceful yet somewhat deliberately unstable playing finding memorable expression in shorter pieces like stylistic-debt acknowledgement “A Ballad With Cadence in Horace Silver’s Style” and the reflective “Post Scriptum.” The longer, more mutable pieces are the real draw, though, and cross-cultural hybridizations like the playful tradition-tweaking “The Hop (Jazz Variation on a Polish Folk Melody)” and the thrilling order-from-chaos internationalisms of Latin/American/European suite “Synopsis” put Polish Jazz, Volume 4 in the same world-citizen turf as Duke Ellington in late-career ambassador mode.