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Written in fRoots issue 370, April 2014


KAROLINA CICHA & SPÓLKA FEAT. BART PALYGA
9 Languages
Wydzwiek, no number (2013)

MOSAIK
Cale Szczescie
Mosaik PL-J63 (2013)

As I wrote in the piece in fR 367/368 about the Sounds Like Poland showcase in Warsaw, Karolina Cicha is a mightily impressive performer, simultaneously playing accompaniments on accordion, keyboard and percussion yet not letting the technology and required concentration get in the way of direct, relaxedly perky communication of her wide-range, uninhibited singing.
     She does it just like that on her album, joined, as live, principally and very creatively by multi-instrumentalist Bart Palyga on electric cello, overtone whistle, jew’s-harp, mandolin and duduk.
     Not only that, but the traditional songs to which she brings strong dramatic personality and quirky innovation are from nine of the linguistic groups in the cultural meeting-point of Poland’s eastern-border Podlaskie region: Polish in songs from Kurpie and Podlaskie, two songs in Yiddish, one of them from her native Bialystok written by an exile at the beginning of WW2, a song in Ukrainian about a Cossack, young girls’ songs in Lithuanian and Belorussian about unhappiness in marriage or its threat, one in Russian eulogising the Russian landscape, two in Tartar about young lovers and a snowdrop/life analogy, one in Romani about freedom, love and not getting up early, and ending with Psalm 23 in Esperanto, the language created by Podlaskie-born Ludwik Zamenhof.
     These are total performances, full of life and wildness in very original music with widely influenced, no-boundaries approaches. The word about her is likely to spread fast.
     www.karolinacicha.eu
 
The excellent Palyga also plays in the band Mosaik, which combines Polish traditional, Middle Eastern and early-music and instrumentation in spacious, grainy-textured interpretations of traditional songs that are far from the more classically-restrained end of early-music. Medieval-fiddler Jolanta Kossakowska sings in the wild, gutsy Polish traditional style, with accompaniments on oud, hammered dulcimer, duduk, mandola, recorder, reed pipes and percussion plus Palyga’s acoustic bass and jew’s-harp. A nice touch is the change in acoustic of the closing track, recorded outdoors, presumably outside the mountain hut where the rest of the album was recorded.
     www.mosaik.pl 


© 2014 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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