Inventive Polish trumpeter makes rare L.A. visit

Poland has produced a number of significant jazz players in the last few decades: pianist-composer Krzysztof Komeda Trzcinski, saxophonist-violinist Michal Urbaniak, saxophonists Zbigniew Namyslowski and Jan Wroblewski, pianist Adam Makowicz, vocalist Urszula Dudziak and the late Zbigniew Seifert, a superb violinist.

Trumpeter Tomasz Stanko is among the finest -- as well as one of the first Polish musicians to venture into the area of free jazz improvisation. His quartet made a rare Los Angeles appearance Monday at the Jazz Bakery performing a pair of sets before two full-house crowds. Much of the material traced to “Suspended Night,” the recently released ECM anthology of his music.

Stanko’s broad-textured sound, perhaps his most immediately identifiable characteristic, ranged across a rich emotional palette, from an ice-white wintry chill to a warm intimacy reminiscent of Miles Davis’ early playing. His well-crafted, always inventive solo lines were similarly far-reaching, occasionally tiptoeing through bop phrases, more often arching across disjunct intervals and fiery note flurries.

The other members of the quartet, pianist Marcin Wasilewski, bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz and drummer Michal Miskiewicz, are decades younger than Stanko, who is 61, and have worked with him since they were teenagers. Their years together have resulted in an ensemble with an utterly symbiotic creative flow, solos darting through collective passages as the music streamed fluidly from one selection into another.

Kurkiewicz and Miskiewicz were solid rhythmic accompanists, playing with a fertile combination of swing and subtlety. Wasilewski was even better. His piano soloing, tinged with influences from sources as varied as McCoy Tyner, Cecil Taylor and Tommy Flanagan, displayed a coalescing talent, a potentially emerging jazz star in his own right.

Perhaps most important of all, Stanko’s music was jazz that -- despite its American origins -- could have been made only by Polish players. Reflective in sound, manner, melody and harmony of a culture that produced both Chopin and Penderecki, it provided another convincing affirmation of jazz as a global art.