Jazz EN

“Music draws on other existing music” is still true. Jarek Kostka repeatedly chose the “starting material” from classic and folk patterns, creating a jazz idiom from it. This time he faced the work of Stanisław Moniuszko, a composer who, like Wagner or Rossini, created music mostly in coexistence with the text. He arranged the songs and arias of our romantic in a modern, jazz convention for choir, soloists, orchestra, rhythm section, and saxophone.
Although the musical form and style change a lot, Jarek Kostka is aware of the literary layer of Moniuszko songs. Works of poets such as Mickiewicz, W. Syrokomla, J. I. Kraszewski, V. Hugo, W. Goethe, and their nineteenth-century overtones, obliged to keep the limits of interference in the original and good taste. From many of Moniuszko’s works, he chose those lyrical, ballad and contemplative, which incline to “swinging nostalgia”. Regarding the musical form, he changes it, brings out a jazz idiom, creates a structure of jazz themes on the basis of which the musicians improvise or strictly implement.
The idea of ​​a jazz concert based on Moniuszko’s “themes” is a tribute to the composer on the 200th anniversary of his birth. All this is a truly personal and contemporary convention, in which the separateness of the two periods of the 19th and 21st centuries is blurred. The restraint and lyricism of Moniuszko’s music, its romantic background with mythical and real characters deeply touches the sensitivity of the artists – the performers of the project. The stigma of Moniuszko’s work does not affect the musical expression of the artists. The “Swinging Chimes” project is proof that music intended for home music-making in the nineteenth century, it doesn’t lose its value currently – it can be popular and recognisable.