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Written in fRoots issue 191, 1999

KROKE
Live At The Pit
Oriente RIEN CD 19 (1998)

Several years ago a good friend visiting Poland brought me back a couple of chance-bought cassettes, one entitled Klezmer Acoustic Music released in 1993 by the then quartet Kroke, and the other of the quartet Bubliczki which featured Kroke’s accordionist Jerzy Bawol and bassist Tomasz Lato with a singer and a clarinettist. Both turned out to be very fine, Kroke in particular, and now here it is as a trio touring and making a CD in the UK.
      The audience on July 3rd 1998 at the Dandelion Trust’s dinner-concert venue in Surrey was treated to a performance of uncompromisingly beautiful intensity, eye-bright with intelligence and full of a keening sadness. The patter of increasingly warm applause shows the small size of the room, and is slightly incongruous with the music which, extremely well mixed back home in Kraków, is rich sounding and spacious.
      Much of the material is traditional, but Kroke explores, expands and extemporises. Tomasz Kukurba’s violin and viola, throwing off ecstatic flurries of notes or exquisitely sobbing with veiled, yearning harmonics, and occasionally paralleled with soaring falsetto vocalising, move over and through the liquid lines and surging chords of Bawol’s accordion as Lato’s double bass pulses, chugs and grinds. Even when the prevailing slow, reflective mood quickens into up-tempo dance tunes every note counts, the rhythm pulls and pauses and the scampering is tinged with a sense of loss.
      This isn’t the amiable jollity of another wedding or barmitzvah gig but a brilliant modern Polish music pouring from, and sweeping the listener into, the emotional heart of klezmer.


© 1999 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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