THE GUARDIAN,

May 2003

Zone K, Kopinski& Konikiewicz Slam CD252

Jan Kopinski, the half-Polish Leeds-based saxophonist and teacher, is best known for sporadically leading one of the British jazz scene's rare cult bands, the avant-funk trio Pinski Zoo. A unique collision of American free-jazz, Ornette Coleman's Prime Time and east-European music, Pinski Zoo was an underground sensation of the last 1980s.
This group, Zone K, includes Zoo drummer Steve Harris but is mainly based on the duo of Kopinski and Polish pianist and film composer Wojteck Konikiewicz. It features just as much of Kopinski's raw, spookily hollow and haunting saxophone sound, with plenty of off-the-wall grooving too.
The music covers many of the Zoo bases, but in a more impressionistic manner. Corner Jam is a piece of urgent, battering funk over dolorous organ chords - and the excellent Konikiewicz deploys phrases not unfamiliar from an electric corea or Hancock album in his electric keys solo.
The pianist's linear melody-making is in sharp contrast to Kopinski's, who improvises in texture more than line, and often achieves effects more suggestive of trumpets and trombones than saxophones. Harris is constantly active, sometimes taxingly so; he clatters his sticks, inserting restless, rattly snare patterns and cymbal sounds like nails scattered on to glass.
The closing Pool Fool coyly camouflages a funk-saxist's phrasing - like a pop song trying to break out of a jazz club. A little monochromatic at times perhaps, and Kopinski can run out of solo steam once he has laid out all his broad palette-knife effects, but this is music of character and bite.

JOHN FORDHAM