Three Crowns is the second ECM album by the Maciej Obara Quartet, the Polish-Norwegian group led by alto saxophonist Maciej Obara. The title refers to the Trzy Korony, a mountain massif in southern Poland. Six new Obara pieces sit beside free arrangements of two compositions by Henryk Górecki (1933-2010). Reviewers noted that this was the first time the composer's family had sanctioned improvisers to interpret his music.
The line-up is the one heard on Unloved, the quartet's ECM debut of 2017, which won the Fryderyk Prize in Poland in 2018. Obara is joined by his compatriot Dominik Wania on piano and by two Norwegians, double bassist Ole Morten Vågan and drummer Gard Nilssen. Early in 2019 the band took first place at the BMW Jazz Awards in Munich. Three Crowns was recorded in March 2019 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, with Gérard de Haro as engineer and Steve Lake producing. According to Fred Grand in Jazz Journal, Obara came to know the Górecki family while living in Katowice, the composer's home city.
The album opens with the first of Górecki's Three Pieces in Old Style, a folk-like melody that Wania introduces with restraint. The alto then takes it into the open as a free ballad in the Scandinavian manner. The second Górecki piece, the Tranquillo from Little Requiem for a Polish Girl, is sparer, with a sombre piano introduction and measured solos. Among the originals, the nine-minute Blue Skies for Andy is a homage to Obara's late father, who played for many years in the Roma community. It finds the saxophonist at his most mercurial. The closing Mr. S is an elegy for the trumpeter Tomasz Stańko, built on a long, carefully graded crescendo and decrescendo.
Critics heard the record as a step forward from Unloved, with more space for solos and a hotter alto sound, while the two Górecki pieces keep the quiet lyricism of the debut. In DownBeat, Tyran Grillo wrote that the opening Górecki piece is "so beautifully re-imagined that it sounds as if it's emanating from another world". Fred Grand, in Jazz Journal, called it "already looking like one of the year's essential releases" and placed the quartet among the most exciting prospects in contemporary jazz.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2662, first released on 25 October 2019.
