Jazz musician

Born: July 11, 1942;

Died: July 29, 2018

TOMASZ Stanko, who has died aged 76, was the first Polish jazz musician to achieve global acclaim. With its tone of soulful melancholy, his trumpet playing connected with the national psyche and made him a hero at home with the general music audience, as was evidenced by the large turn-out from the local Polish community when he appeared at Glasgow Jazz Festival a few years ago.

Stanko was born in Rzeszow in southern Poland and like many Europeans of his generation he discovered jazz through listening to the Voice of America broadcasts that were aimed at Russia and other members of the Warsaw Pact. His interest was further enhanced by seeing pianist Dave Brubeck’s quartet on a U.S. state department sponsored tour in 1958.

Having been drawn to the trumpet initially by Buck Clayton, the former Count Basie trumpeter and leader of a series of jam session recordings in the 1950s, Stanko formed his first band while still at secondary school and went on to study violin and piano as well as trumpet at the State Higher Music School in Krakow. There, while completing his classical training, he took part in jam sessions at the Pod Jaszczurami club and after graduating, he formed the Jazz Darlings in 1962, going on to win first prize both for the band and as an individual musician at the Amateur Jazz Band Competition of Southern Poland.

American jazz records were hard to come by in Poland at the time but Stanko and his friends found ways to have them brought into the country and between Willis Conover’s nightly Voice of America broadcasts and these smuggled supplies, they were able to keep up with all the new jazz developments. Having begun by listening to mainstream jazz, Stanko soon moved through influences including Miles Davis and Chet Baker to the ground-breaking experiments of Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry.

In 1963, Stanko was invited to join the jazz pianist and film composer Krzysztof Komeda’s quintet. Three years later the group recorded Astigmatic, a landmark album in Polish and European jazz and one that helped to spread Stanko’s reputation among his fellow European musicians. Although by the time he became a professional musician the communist regime had relaxed its views on jazz to a degree, life as a jazz musician could still be tough. Stanko became addicted to alcohol and drugs and later remarked that, as a jazz musician, you needed to combine the sensitivity of being made of feathers with having the hide of an elephant.

From Krzysztof Komeda he moved on to another pianist (and coincidentally also a film music composer), Andrzej Trzaskowski’s group and having made several recordings with Trzaskowski, he began to work towards leading his own band. By this time he was becoming more and more interested in free jazz and he prepared much of his quintet’s music by playing long improvised duets with his drummer, Janusz Stefanski. His approach worked and by the early 1970s his quintet was appearing at many of the major European jazz festivals. He was also working with the free jazz ensemble the Globe Unity Orchestra and collaborating with Don Cherry.

The break that eventually led to Stanko’s worldwide recognition, however, came in 1975 when Manfred Eicher, the founder of Europe’s leading jazz label, ECM Records, heard the group he was co-leading at the time with the similarly free-spirited Finnish drummer, Edvard Vesala. Eicher put Stanko, Vesala and Polish saxophonist Tomasz Szukalski together with the British double bass player and former Miles Davis sideman, Dave Holland, and the resulting album, Balladyna, caused a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic with its soaring energy.

Stanko did not follow up the ECM connection as a leader for some 20 years. In the interim he recorded solo in the Taj Mahal and worked extensively with pianist-iconoclast Cecil Taylor, among other projects that included a quartet with Vesala, saxophonist Chico Freeman and tuba player Howard Johnston and a trio with Norway’s leading rhythm team, bassist Arild Andersen and drummer Jon Christensen.

In 1997, ECM released the album Leosia, featuring Stanko with Swedish pianist and bassist Bobo Stenson and Anders Jormin and English drummer Tony Oxley. The group and the album were hailed as top drawer and Stanko’s next ECM album, Litania, celebrating Krzysztof Komeda’s music, became a global best seller.

Stanko, having by now given up drugs and alcohol and taken up yoga, became a father figure to young musicians. His quartet with then teenage pianist Marcin Wasilewski’s trio not only enhanced his own reputation but also launched the trio onto the international stage, and his New York quartet, featuring Virgin Isles-born bassist Reuben Rogers, Cuban pianist David Virelles and Michigan-born drummer Gerald Cleaver gave Stanko, who latterly kept a flat in Manhattan, a superb platform for his poetic but always swinging playing.

Widely read and an appreciator of the arts across the spectrum, Stanko applied everything he saw and much of what he heard to his music. He was as at ease playing Latin American grooves as he was European folk-inspired melodies and as natural in composing for film and the theatre as working with electronic fusion or in creating Polin, his music for the history of the Polish jews, which featured Ravi Coltrane, the saxophone playing son of saxophone colossus, John Coltrane.

He died having been diagnosed with terminal cancer in April and having suffered from pneumonia since June. Tomasz Stanko is survived by his daughter, Anna, his former wife, Joanna, and his sister, Jaga.

ROB ADAMS