Pawel Kaczmarczyk Trio, Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival review: 'inventive and lyrical'

This impressive concert by the Pawel Kaczmarczyk Trio was part of the Festival’s Polish Jazz Focus, which included the explosive electronica of Gdansk trio Immortal Onion, reviewed earlier in these pages. This outfit, however, also progressive, couldn’t have been more different, presenting the classic jazz piano trio format at its most inventive and lyrical.

Regarded as a prodigy and scooping awards when he first emerged on the Polish jazz scene over a decade ago, Kaczmarczyk has settled into a superbly melded trio with double-bassist Alan Wykpisz and drummer Grzegorz Pałka. Without preamble, he sat at the piano, sounded out a spare, belling chord that became a winsome melody over quiet bass and cymbal hiss and they were off. No tune titles – Kaczmarczyk spoke only to introduce his bandmates – but the music flowed elegantly throughout.

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A susurrus on plucked piano wires or a minimalist keyboard theme might develop, via a free-form percussive excursion on bass and drums, to emerge, chiming as if in some crystal cavern, with Wykpisz and Pałka working up a dramatic storm before the piano theme returned, unhurriedly, to a close.

There were wistful, almost elegiac deliberations but also the kind of instantly catchy hook and full-on development that have prompted comparisons with the late Esbjörn Svensson in terms of Kaczmarczyk’s flowing melodic invention.

Elsewhere, an insistently repetitive minimalist phrase might run through an energetic drum break from Pałka, but they could swing too, all three stepping out together with bluesy pzazz, or with snappy interplay between Kaczmarczyk and Wykpisz. An occasional explanation as to tune titles might have been nice, but as an hour-and-a-half of inventive music-making goes, this was a fine one.​​​​​​​

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