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Written in fRoots issue 240, 2003

WARSAW VILLAGE BAND
People’s Spring
Jaro 4247-2 (2002)

Booming drums, bowed bass, a tish of cymbal, sheets of scratchy fiddles, and bawled female vocals in the style of the traditional rural “white voice”. It’s a surging exuberant noise as this bunch of young Poles dig into the songs and dance music of their country’s villages in an approach the sleevenotes describe as “bio-techno”. It’s a mass of churning organic acousticity, emphasised with some well-integrated use of echoes and effects; none of your old-hat techno thud-tick here, except possibly for a hint in the dancier of the two remixes at the end of the album, which has a driving grainy groove slightly reminiscent of the acoustic-writ-large approach of Sweden’s Hedningarna.
      “In the beginning, they just beat the drums in any rhythm occurring to them until they met in a common sound”, say the booklet notes. And it has to be said that once having found that common sound, which is indeed an effective one, they pretty much stick to it; the onslaught of edgy scrape and thunder slows and speeds but rarely relents, and the album perhaps works best taken a few tracks at a time.
      The six band members, three male, three female, provide the voices, the pair of battering drums, a touch of jew’s-harp, and the fiddles, bass and Polish suca, whose strings are stopped, lyra-like, by the fingernails of its player, the main singer Katarzyna Szurman. Welcome tonal variety is injected by guest trumpeter Piotr Korzen Korzeniowski, whose ecstatic echoed solo improvisation over At My Mother’s is a high point, and the first track is opened by the hammered dulcimer of another guest, Marta Stanislawska.
      The band have paid their dues in terms of going to the villages and meeting surviving traditional musicians there, but this is no academic copying of details. In a country that’s rich with remarkable new music in all genres, it’s a celebration of the essence, the spirit and texture of village music, and proof that it has the energy to skip across the generations to be embraced as an adventure by at least some of cool youth.
      The melodic basis of one track, Polka Folkisdead, is credited to the praised playing of village musician and instrument-maker Kazimierz Zdrzalik, but it would have been good to see an acknowledgement of where, or from whom, the band learned the rest of the material. Perhaps that information didn’t make the transition from the the original release, on Poland’s ever-interesting Orange World label, of all but one of the tracks on this Jaro version, which is available from the online shop at www.jaro.de


© 2003 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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