PAWEŁ KACZMARCZYK AUDIOFEELING BAND COMPLEXITY IN SIMPLICITY

The picture of European jazz as we know it would be incomplete without the contribution of Poles. It was Krzysztof Komeda and Tomasz Stanko, among others, who spearheaded the musicians who succeeded in translating the message of freedom emanating from the sounds of Davis and Coltrane into the language of European music. The art of both artists enchanted not only the jazz community in their country, but also became a source of inspiration for musicians around the world. Today, Polish jazzmen of the younger generation (e.g., Leszek Możdżer and Marcin Wasilewski) are revered like pop stars and well recognized abroad; twenty-five-year-old pianist Pawel Kaczmarczyk is well on his way to joining them.

25 year old pianist Paweł Kaczmarczyk is on the right path to follow them – ever since his Live album with the KBD trio was chosen as the “Album of the Year” in the 2005 Polish Public Television Channel2 Awards, he has been considered a major force in polish jazz music. In the same year he won the MELOMANI jazz society’s major prize, Poland’s so-called “Jazz Oscar”. Since then the readers of Poland’s prestigious Jazz Forum magazine have regularly voted him “most promising” musician in the publication’s yearly poll, and in 2007, the magazine named Audiofeeling, Kaczmarczyk’s first album as leader “Album of the Year”.

With his debut release as an ACT recording artist, Complexity In Simplicity, Paweł Kaczmarczyk jumps onto the international stage. The Audiofeeling band personnel is a collective of friends whose individual contributions are simply indispensable; the groupings vary from the classic trio format to septet. The pianist also calls the broad spectrum of sounds that compose his musical personality “Audiofeeling” — and these are feelings he can ideally act out among this rich of cast of characters.

“Diversity” is the word that best describes Poland’s contemporary jazz scene, and the same goes for Complexity In Simplicity: the rugged hands-on quintet on “Logan” opens the album with multi-layered polyrhythmic post-bop structures, while in a trio format Kaczmarczyk delicately sounds out the simple beauty of Elton John’s ballad “Blue Eyes”. The title piece “Complexity In Simplicity” is a collective improvisation; as carefully as a spider weaves its web, Kaczmarczyk’s lines are threaded into the emerging denser grooves. “Catch More Chicks” is funky Groove Jazz, the hard bop-directed “Homage To Freddie” is a tribute to trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, who died at the end of 2008. With the lyrical “Elegy For E.S.” Kaczmarczyk remembers the Swedish pianist and musical mastermind of e.s.t., Esbjörn Svensson, whom he met at a festival in 2004. There, Svensson praised the Polish pianist for his concert, then he himself got up on stage and played an “unbelievable concert,” relates Kacmarczyk; “I immediately bought several of his CDs. And I dreamt about what an honour it would be for me to be able to record for ACT sometime.” With Complexity and Simplicity this dream has come true.

To make the complex sound easy and still maintain a sense of excitement, one needs to have either a lot of experience or — like Kaczmarczyk has — an exceptional talent. With his band he narrates a set of terrific multi-level modern jazz episodes filled with the youthful spirit of adventure. Playful sound textures and power playing, extroverted up-tempo jazz, and introverted ballads, deep-rooted swing, hard bop and avant-garde fantasies, horn passages, and above all piano playing in an experimental field that ranges between Bill Evans, Esbjörn Svensson and Brad Mehldau — Paweł Kaczmarczyk’s eclectic and kaleidoscopic music is so multi-dimensional that, paradoxically, you can simply reduce it to a single sentence: it’s well worth a listen!