Tomasz Stanko Quartet
Lontano (ECM)
Tomasz Stanko knows how to set a mood. The veteran Polish trumpeter’s seventh album for ECM, Lontano, is all about using space to create a mood. He does so with a post-Miles vision and an elegance that’s earned him the highest accolades from the European jazz community. In listening to the spare, dreamy soundscapes, you wouldn’t necessarily know that Stanko’s roots lie in the roiling European avant-garde and free jazz scenes of the 1960-70s. Nevertheless, within these spacious, glacial tapestries, the quartet seems free of any structures, and, in fact, their understated restraint is the antithesis of the pyrotechnics that characterized that earlier era. The three different 12-plus minute versions of the title track provide the album’s foci and only the tune “Kattorna” approaches a medium tempo. This is the third album to feature Stanko’s considerably younger rhythm section led by pianist Marcin Wasilewski, but generations are immaterial in creating this timeless music.
This article appears in December 22 • 2006.