Post by nancy on May 28, 2006 8:58:50 GMT -7
Warsaw Village Band gets 'em dancing ... with old-school polka
By Howard Reich
Chicago Tribune arts critic
Published May 22, 2006
It takes a brave musician indeed to stand before a local audience and utter these words:
"Do you know polka, Chicago?"
Do we know polka? Didn't we invent it?
Well, not exactly, as the Warsaw Village Band demonstrated late
Saturday night to a standing-room-only crowd, which predictably
erupted when the founder of the band posed the aforementioned
question.
"Well, we don't play commercial polka," drummer Maciej Szajkowski quickly informed the throng at HotHouse, perhaps disappointing those who were expecting a hearty rendition of the "Beer Barrel Polka" or the "Too Fat Polka."
"We play old-school polka," declared Szajkowski. "We play polka hard core!"
And with those fighting words, Szajkowski and his sublimely inspired colleagues offered something rarely heard even in the glorious old beer halls and tin-roofed banquet rooms of Milwaukee Avenue, where the modern-day polka hits of Frankie Yankovic and Eddie Blazonczyk still thunder.
Nothing wrong with that, but the Warsaw Village Band approaches the polka -- as well as incantatory musical forms from the rural Mazovia region of Poland -- from an entirely different perspective. Using reproductions of ancient instruments and drawing upon age-old musical techniques, the band takes Polish music back to its roots.
The idea is to conjure up what this Eastern European folkloric music might have sounded like before anyone could record it. At the same time, though, the young and inventive players of the Warsaw Village Band catapult the music into present, dispatching it with a cheeky attitude born of the waning days of the 20th Century, when the band was formed in post-Communist Poland (in 1997).
No sooner had Szajkowski issued his declaration on hard-core polka (a form that actually originated in Bohemia) than the band launched into a pristine example, taking the music faster but also more sleekly than listeners might have expected. This certainly was not the stomping, rhythmically exaggerated, 32-bar polka formula that most Americans know. To the contrary, it proved extraordinarily subtle, the sound of two vibrato-less violins and a cello set against the shimmering chords of a dulcimer and the primal beat of a pair of back-to-basics drums.
Even so, the rhythmic rush of this music, combined with its tonal
luster, inspired younger members of the crowd to race to the lip of the stage and begin to dance. High-energy Chicagoans sporting tattoos, nose rings and whatnot writhed to a music conceived epochs ago, creating something of a polka mosh pit.
Not everything that this ensemble performed, however, was geared toward propulsive energy. Some of its most effective and important work, in fact, steered away from up-tempo exuberance and leaned toward austere, primal expression. In "When Johnny Went to Fight in the War" (from the band's CD of last year, "Uprooting"), three female voices cried out in unison, to a searing instrumental accompaniment. In "Chassidic Dance" (from the "People's Spring" CD of 2004), historic Jewish music was re-examined through the Warsaw Village Band's stripped-down aesthetic. Klezmer purists would not have been
impressed, but there was something undeniably alluring about this radical transformation of long-familiar music.
Because cellist Maja Kleszcz, violinist Sylwia Swiatkowska and
dulcimer player Magadlena Sobczak double as vocalists -- singing
fervently in the declamatory, "white voice" style of Polish
antiquity -- the Warsaw Village Band sounds like a far larger
ensemble than it is.
Better still, these musicians are reinventing their culture through a profound investigation of its past, something that jazz musicians in the United States always have done.
One hardly can imagine what these players might yet produce -- or how it may alter our understanding of Poland's apparently inexhaustible musical culture.
By Howard Reich
Chicago Tribune arts critic
Published May 22, 2006
It takes a brave musician indeed to stand before a local audience and utter these words:
"Do you know polka, Chicago?"
Do we know polka? Didn't we invent it?
Well, not exactly, as the Warsaw Village Band demonstrated late
Saturday night to a standing-room-only crowd, which predictably
erupted when the founder of the band posed the aforementioned
question.
"Well, we don't play commercial polka," drummer Maciej Szajkowski quickly informed the throng at HotHouse, perhaps disappointing those who were expecting a hearty rendition of the "Beer Barrel Polka" or the "Too Fat Polka."
"We play old-school polka," declared Szajkowski. "We play polka hard core!"
And with those fighting words, Szajkowski and his sublimely inspired colleagues offered something rarely heard even in the glorious old beer halls and tin-roofed banquet rooms of Milwaukee Avenue, where the modern-day polka hits of Frankie Yankovic and Eddie Blazonczyk still thunder.
Nothing wrong with that, but the Warsaw Village Band approaches the polka -- as well as incantatory musical forms from the rural Mazovia region of Poland -- from an entirely different perspective. Using reproductions of ancient instruments and drawing upon age-old musical techniques, the band takes Polish music back to its roots.
The idea is to conjure up what this Eastern European folkloric music might have sounded like before anyone could record it. At the same time, though, the young and inventive players of the Warsaw Village Band catapult the music into present, dispatching it with a cheeky attitude born of the waning days of the 20th Century, when the band was formed in post-Communist Poland (in 1997).
No sooner had Szajkowski issued his declaration on hard-core polka (a form that actually originated in Bohemia) than the band launched into a pristine example, taking the music faster but also more sleekly than listeners might have expected. This certainly was not the stomping, rhythmically exaggerated, 32-bar polka formula that most Americans know. To the contrary, it proved extraordinarily subtle, the sound of two vibrato-less violins and a cello set against the shimmering chords of a dulcimer and the primal beat of a pair of back-to-basics drums.
Even so, the rhythmic rush of this music, combined with its tonal
luster, inspired younger members of the crowd to race to the lip of the stage and begin to dance. High-energy Chicagoans sporting tattoos, nose rings and whatnot writhed to a music conceived epochs ago, creating something of a polka mosh pit.
Not everything that this ensemble performed, however, was geared toward propulsive energy. Some of its most effective and important work, in fact, steered away from up-tempo exuberance and leaned toward austere, primal expression. In "When Johnny Went to Fight in the War" (from the band's CD of last year, "Uprooting"), three female voices cried out in unison, to a searing instrumental accompaniment. In "Chassidic Dance" (from the "People's Spring" CD of 2004), historic Jewish music was re-examined through the Warsaw Village Band's stripped-down aesthetic. Klezmer purists would not have been
impressed, but there was something undeniably alluring about this radical transformation of long-familiar music.
Because cellist Maja Kleszcz, violinist Sylwia Swiatkowska and
dulcimer player Magadlena Sobczak double as vocalists -- singing
fervently in the declamatory, "white voice" style of Polish
antiquity -- the Warsaw Village Band sounds like a far larger
ensemble than it is.
Better still, these musicians are reinventing their culture through a profound investigation of its past, something that jazz musicians in the United States always have done.
One hardly can imagine what these players might yet produce -- or how it may alter our understanding of Poland's apparently inexhaustible musical culture.