Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival review: Marcin Wasilewski Trio, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

THE Marcin Wasilewski Trio have been hailed as Poland’s most significant jazz group by no less than Tomasz Stanko, and their recordings on the ECM label have met with critical acclaim.

The pianist has been playing with bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz and drummer Michal Miskiewicz since they were teenagers, and they are now only a couple of years away from clocking up two decades as a band.

All of that long familiarity with each other’s playing was entirely evident in the course of their two sets here. Verbal communication with the audience is not their strong point – the pianist spoke briefly only once in each set – but they scored highly when it came to musical communication, both within the band and to the appreciative listeners.

While such bands as E.S.T. and the Neil Cowley Trio have established a distinctly rock-influenced model of piano trio in current jazz, Wasilewski and his collaborators took a more subtle route for much of the time, although they did unleash considerable energy on a couple of tunes, and shifted into more jagged, tumbling abstractions on their reading of Paul Bley’s Big Foot.

Their usual mode of operation, though, involved an intricate and often very complex sense of group interaction, led by the pianist’s gift for constructing long and carefully structured solos, which in turn were every bit as thoughtfully supported by his colleagues in a way which went well beyond simple solo and accompaniment.


Rating: ****