Hi-Fi News
September 2004, Music Choice - Jazz
JAN KOPINSKI
Earth: Music To Dovzhenko's Film Zemlya
Slam 255 66m 56s (£££)

For tenor saxophonists, the legacy of John Coltrane is an unwieldy albatross. Those that make the best of his legacy are players on other instruments, like guitarist Sonny Sharrock or singer Phil Minton. Those who pick up on the modal bliss-outs of late Trane (Pharoah Sanders, Zusaan Kali Fasteau) betray both their own individuality and the real meaning of his universalising musical language. Kopinski is different. With his band Pinski Zoo he developed an unlikely cross between harmolodic funk and Polish folk to mesh with his Traneish sax.
Here his quartet - son and daughter Stefan and Janina on electric bass and viola, the Zoo's Steve Iliffe on grand piano - lacks the pounding groove of yore, but manages to maintain the wonderful sense of slowly-unrolling time which is Kopinski's forte: appropriate indeed for accompanying old film stock.

Kopinski looks at life through the squint of eternity - music nostalgically recalled rather than actively pursued - but his funereal solemnity is leavened with black humour and sarcasm in true East European style (on the foldout, his profile is positioned so it resembles one of Dovzhenko's mighty bulls). The band has an internal rhythmic coherence and bovine dignity which is truly rare.
PERFORMANCE MEASURED, SOMBRE
RECORDING WARM, RESONANT

Review by BEN WATSON