Plays Music of Bacewicz, Kisielewski, Komsta, Lutosławski, Penderecki

A quartet recording pairing German bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall and Romanian pianist Mircea Tiberian with the Oleś brothers — Marcin (bass) and Bartłomiej Brat Oleś (drums) — under the collective name Contemporary Quartet. Mahall moves regularly between the jazz scene (the celebrated Der Rote Bereich, recordings with avant-garde pianist Aki Takase) and contemporary music, while Tiberian is a classically trained pianist and conservatory teacher equally at home in modern repertoire; together with the Oleś brothers' rhythm section, they were assembled for just a few days of work that yielded a long-remembered result.

The program turns to twentieth-century Polish classical composers, re framing concert-hall material through the language of improvisation. The nine source pieces draw on Krzysztof Penderecki, Stefan Kisielewski, Grażyna Bacewicz, Witold Lutosławski, and Marzena Komsta, with two further original compositions — 'April' and 'Seven Hands' — by Bartłomiej Oleś, who arranged the entire program for jazz quartet, at times adding extra voices and transposing solo works for new instruments. Three central tracks rework Penderecki's early Sonata for violin and piano (1953): 'Sonata I' as a piano vehicle for Tiberian, 'Sonata II' finding Mahall negotiating the bass clarinet's extreme high register before unleashing multiphonics, and 'Sonata III' opening with an extended percussion solo. Other sources include Penderecki's Prelude for clarinet solo and the cello solo Per Slava, Kisielewski's Suite for oboe and piano, Bacewicz's Sonatina for oboe and piano (heard in 'Foggy'), Komsta's Langueur, and Lutosławski's Bucoliques.

Created under the honorary patronage of Krzysztof Penderecki, the project stands as the first reworking of his music for jazz purposes in some three decades — a continuation of the spirit of the 1971 Actions sessions that the composer once led with Don Cherry's New Eternal Rhythm Orchestra. Critics stressed that this is no tasteful, pale arrangement of contemporary classical repertoire but a dynamic, hard-swinging treatment of material jazz musicians have generally avoided since the Third Stream experiments of Gunther Schuller, with written and improvised passages blended so naturally that the seams disappear. A characteristically ambitious meeting of the jazz and contemporary-classical worlds in the Not Two catalog — and, by several accounts, one of the most beautifully packaged Polish releases of its era.