Jazzwise
March 2005

Jan Kopinski Earth
Slam Slam CD255 I * * *

Jan Kopinski(s), Steve Iliffe(p), Stefan Kopinski(b) and Janina Kopinska(vla). Rec. 8, 10,18 September 2002 and2003

Pinski Zoo goes to the movies…Earth is an extraordinary, visionary film created in 1930 about the Stalinist collectivisation of Ukrainian farms. It toes the party line while transcending it with a take on family life deeply rooted in the soil. So not a bundle of laughs, but rare and special, not unlike Kopinski's soundtrack . As a fine artist himself, Kopinski has a sensitivity to visuals as reflected in other scores he's performed for silent movies. And by using his own family in the band Kopinski evokes the intimate, inexplicable binds/bonds of family life that are integral to Dovzhenko's silent film.

There are various paradoxes within Kopinski's music; he evokes Slav folk music, melancholic and lost to an irrecoverable past, but Iliffe's broken chords also reflect the equally lost world of discordant modernism that this brave new era of revolutionary cinema was going to usher in. There are moments of lyricism but essentially there is a hushed chamber music feel throughout, with Kopinski close-miked and intense; even moments of release, like the joyous funeral, are underlined with a sense of tears that pervades the whole composition.

Review by Andy Robson