Best of 2019 #19: Adam Baldych Quartet – “Sacrum Profanum”

Adam Baldych, as with many musicians before him, came up through the classical music traditions, and, like many musicians before him, gravitated to jazz’s untamed wildness and structural freedoms.  But you don’t forget where you’ve come from, and the act of revisiting the past is as natural as breathing.  The challenge is in how to interpret the past, now, viewed through older perspectives and in the light of today.  And so, on his latest, the violinist keeps one foot in his past traditions and the other in his current, and it’s why austere classical pieces display some of the audacious dramatics of a typical Baldych jazz work, but also, conversely, why the jazz pieces reflect a more focused, sleeker lyricism than what one might otherwise expect from the violinist.  This shadowplay between past and present results in Baldych’s best work to date.

Your album personnel:  Adam Bałdych (violin, renaissance violin), Krzysztof Dys (piano, prepared upright piano, toy piano), Michał Barański (double bass), and Dawid Fortuna (drums, crotales, gran cassa).

Released on ACT Music.

Music from Warsaw, Poland.

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