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Written in fRoots issue 259/260, 2005
 

WARSAW VILLAGE BAND
Uprooting
Jaro World Village 468063 (2004)

The establishing success of their second album, the winning of the Radio 3 World Music Award for Newcomer and a good deal of visibility on the world-music live scene could have pushed Warsaw Village Band into a more mainstream approach. But though there are slight guest appearances on a couple of tracks of Uprooting by a couple of dance-techno people, the band is undiverted from its digging ever more deeply into the tradition and emerging with music that’s modern in its very own terms without, apart from some sunspecs posing, making obeisance to cool. Its sound, while developed and diversified, is just as raw as it was on its 1998 debut, Kapela Ze Wsi Warszawa (though from that line-up only frame-drum and pole-cymbal player Maciej Szajkowski remains).
      On People’s Spring the WVB sound of battering baraban and frame drums, ragged hard-voice female vocals and abrasive fiddles was, good as it was, fairly unrelenting. This one, while keeping that energy, lays off the drums for quite a few tracks and has much more light and shade. On that album some of the landmark features such as trumpet and dulcimer came from guests, but since then with the departure of singer-fiddler Katarzyna Szurman they have been joined by dulcimer player and vocalist Magdalena Sobczak, adding her ringing hammered strings to Wojtek Krzak and Sylwia Swiatkowska’s slithering fiddles and hurdy-gurdy and the pound-and-tish of the percussion.
      Maja Kleszcz takes the majority of the lead vocals as well as playing a driven cello, providing the plucked and bowed bass end to the band’s sound. Her contributions, most clearly in her unaccompanied singing of Lament, the dying love prayer of a war-wounded young man, leave no doubt that she has matured into a strong singer in full command of the hard-edged ‘white voice’. She’s the daughter of Wlodzimierz Kleszcz, who over the past decade or so has brought Polish roots music into the world arena via his radio work and his Kamahuk label, releasing among others the first WVB CD and those buzz-creating Trebunie-Tutki/Twinkle/Adrian Sherwood collaborations in which Tatra Mountains fiddling met reggae. On Uprooting he’s credited as “godfather”.
      It’s a sign of the increasing breadth of the world-music scene that music like this is making a mark. It’s not just Warsaw Village Band; there’s more gold to be found in Poland, as there is in the other newly-accessible parts of eastern and central Europe.


© 2004 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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