Night Talks

It was 29 August 2014, the Warsaw Cloud Club. An evening in which the great Portuguese trumpeter, Susana Santos Silva, recording for the renowned Clean Feed label, together with the Swedish double bass player Torbjörn Zetterberg tried to bring the idea of free improvisation music closer to the local audience. For me, however, this evening belonged primarily to the line-up that preceded Susana’s performance. It was an unprecedented meeting beyond the divisions between Bydgoszcz and Warsaw, which theoretically had no right to happen.

Wojtek Jachna and Ksawery Wójciński – balanced trumpet and crazy double bass. Seemingly two radically different personalities, from two completely different musical poles, created a coherent, homogenous and extremely interesting picture of subtle improvisation, full of subdued and perfectly balanced proportions.
And then there was an improvised session in Bydgoszcz and that’s how „Night Talks” was recorded.

It is a trance-like, discreet, almost meditative journey to areas that have not been frequented by both musicians so far. There is something of a mood in it for albums created by sensational duos like Joëlle Léandre and Jean-Luc Cappozzo, Pascal Niggenkemper and Thomas Heberer or Alan Silva and Jacques Coursil. Formally, the narrative of Jachny and Wójciński is a kind of contradiction of the idea of free as a sound extremum, full of hustle and bustle and cacophony. It is all about openness and freedom, understood in a somewhat perverse way. The filter is the sensitivity of both artists who, without any unnecessary technical extinctions, while maintaining a specific atmosphere of controversy and asceticism, give this story a searching, creative character, at the same time creating a special kind of Bydgoszcz-Warsaw improvised bridge.

Tomasz Łuczak