Kaszuby remarks after the recording session...

As I mentioned earlier, I just recorded an album with my/our interpretations of music of Kaszuby area in Poland. The original music is not very interesting actually, and people who know something about it say that this is something what has been made up from scratch in XIX Century in order to have SOME kind of traditional music there. So the music itself is definitely not the "deep" tradition preserved for hundreds of years and continued by generations of musicians.

The interpretation is not a good word here either. It was rather something of a point of departure: the melodies taken from recordings in almost original state are the core of some formal compositional processes, as well as the themes of improvisations.

But in some cases I took some further action considering the melodic language and redesigned some intervals to have slightly different structure. I also made most of them to be played in modern, "awkward" harmonies to take away the taste of their basic lines, which were quite ugly at times. In one case though I rewrote the whole piece INCLUDING mistakes and brakes made by the player himself. From the other hand I tried to retain its raw, robust character and flow.

Another thing is the context. I tried to "crash" the Kaszuby melodies with very distant traditions and aspects. Jazz and freejazz is one of them, but I was also trying to use the "echo" of the Gamelan and the semi-modern music paradigm to make all these things not obvious.

Finally, the musicians invited to this project appeared to be as creative as virtuosic. Thank to them the music reached it's full potential. I love you guys.

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