Live is the first concert recording of the Polish trio led by the pianist Marcin Wasilewski, with the bassist Sławomir Kurkiewicz and the drummer Michał Miśkiewicz. It was taped at the Jazz Middelheim festival in Antwerp in August 2016, after four studio albums for ECM. The trio is heard in extroverted form, stretching pieces it knows well over long, building performances. Five of the six tracks pass the nine-minute mark, and the energy of a large festival crowd runs through them.
Wasilewski and Kurkiewicz began playing together around 1990 at a high school in Koszalin, and Miśkiewicz joined in 1993. The line-up has not changed since. From 2001 to 2006 the three were the rhythm section of the trumpeter Tomasz Stańko. On their own they made Trio, January and Faithful for ECM, then Spark of Life, partly with the Swedish saxophonist Joakim Milder. The concert, on 12 August 2016 in Park Den Brandt, was recorded by the Flemish broadcaster VRT, and the musicians only learned of it afterwards. Manfred Eicher produced the album.
The set opens with Spark of Life running into Sudovian Dance, which starts in quiet, reflective space and builds to a dramatic climax. The Police's Message in a Bottle, a song the trio has played since its Koszalin days, becomes a ten-minute workout. Kurkiewicz's bass drives it, restating the melody whenever the piano drifts away. The ballad Austin and the gentle Three Reflections, with its brushwork and bass solo, give the set its quieter centre. It ends with Herbie Hancock's Actual Proof, from his 1974 album Thrust, a tribute to one of the trio's formative influences.
Wasilewski has said that a crowd of around 4,000 asks for more projected energy, and "you can hear that in this recording". In All About Jazz, Karl Ackermann wrote that in this setting "the trio surpasses even their best studio material". Garry Booth wrote in BBC Music Magazine that among today's many piano trios "few shine as bright as Marcin Wasilewski's". He heard Austin as Polish melancholy joined to the blue poetry of American jazz.
This is the CD edition of ECM 2592, released in September 2018.
