The media interest in you and the success of the album “Night in Calisia” has not abated for more than a year, did you expect such a reaction?
No, but I have to say that it’s a very nice feeling and it entails very positive emotions. It is nice that there’s such a reaction and that many people are pleased. I think that the Grammy Award is the fulfilment of the expectations of hundreds of thousands of people, Poles, who reacted in an extraordinary way. It was from the Poles living in the USA, Canada, and Europe that I got first the telephone calls, and after coming back to Poland it turned out that not only was there a media frenzy, but a huge number of emails, text messages and telephone calls of congratulation. And it’s something extraordinary – the apogee of good feelings
Thanks to the Grammy Award, there have been a lot of interesting possibilities, for example several interesting performances with pop stars. This is important for jazz, which, from the point of view of the average listener, is a niche genre. I hope that the award and my presence in the media resulting from this will also be beneficial to other jazzmen, that it will be possible to arouse interest in jazz in a wider audience, that maybe it is a moment of renaissance for this genre – let’s hope so!
It appears that this is so – the album “Night in Calisia” has gone triple platinum.
Yes, we have also gone platinum in an interesting “category” – DVD. We have managed to sell more than 6,000 DVDs of the concert given at Congress Hall, released in December last year. And it’s a sensation, and not only in Poland, for it is an expensive product. So it is noticeable how the Grammy Award winning streak translates into the marketing aspect.
And concerts? Is there any place in the world that you would like to play? A city, club of concert hall?
Indeed, I have played on all continents, in various halls, clubs, churches, bars and recently even at Okęcie airport [laughs]. So the places are different and they complement one another – elegant venues, concert halls or laid-back places, because, let’s face it, the jazz I play most often shouldn’t be treated so seriously. And talking about the diversity of those places, I have recently played my music with a jazz quartet from the film “Rewers”, at the Jazz Festival in Kowno, and a few days later I played “Misterium Sabat Mater” with the Georgian choir at the Jasna Góra basilica in Częstochowa, at the International Festival of Church Music. So the range of places that I perform is really vast.
Places, cities, stories of people living there, the merging of cultures – these are things that inspire you?
We cannot generalise, but if we think about “Tykocin. Jazz suite” and “Night in Calisia” we can say so. It is programme music, and its origin had some conception, some idea, connected with tradition or history, a situation or a place. Furthermore, it is intuition that reflects my inner world in musical pictures. It is from this perspective, from my personal choices that I later translate into the language of music, that an aesthetic phenomenon arises, that music, recordings and concerts are created. So in my case there is mutual interaction between music and the environment and influences that are its source. It may be poetry or, as in the case of Tykocin, a personal story connected with Michael Brecker’s fight for life, and searching for the roots of the Brecker family in Podlasie, in Suchowola and Tykocin. It is a motif that symbolically defined this music – it was its background, its script. But music can defend itself without any scripts, of course. I suspect that if someone is playing my works in a hundred years from now, they won’t be interested in what I meant when I was composing them; at least, that is what I’m secretly hoping. In the same way, I’m not interested in what Chopin or Bach had in their minds when they were composing their works. What is most important in all that, regardless of circumstances, is the essence of the beauty of the clean form. But of course we only use musical codes expressing certain emotions, for instance in giving our works titles, and if we don’t name them, there is some external pressure to do so – as was the case with the “Revolutionary Etude”. Frederic Chopin never gave title to this work, it is one of 24 études he composed. It was others who, listening to this music, felt it was about the November Uprising, and gave it such a title. And this is both the key and the fascinating adventure connected with music. An adventure with implicit statements, that music is not recognisable a priori, and falls outside any definitions of logical dependencies.
And what is film music to you?
The most appropriate term used with reference to this is illustrative music.
It is music illustrating certain experiences, emotions that are the effect of the director’s assumption – we have a freeze-frame and we can see a face in it, and music can express what is going on inside a man at a given moment. Music somehow illustrates the state of mind, it gives these emotions another, invisible, intangible dimension of non-verbal experience.
Film has two inseparable parents – picture and music. After all, sound, understood as dialogue and musical effects, came later. At the beginning there was only music – it created a film, told the stories shown on the screen, and dialogue was shown only in the form of subtitles. This symbiosis between music and picture is a highly significant thing. In short, film is art that inextricably combines these two worlds into one – picture, and motion, recorded on a roll of film in the form of thousands of frames, and music. Usually, directors do not ignore music. Of course, there are films without music, but these are rather experimental films, and music, in general, is an inseparable element of film stories. And it is music that gives film its three-dimensionality, showing this invisible context that is inside everyone of us, and which concerns all of us. Statistically, we walk the streets and it seems we all do the same thing, we all walk the same way in this or that direction, we go to a shop, to work or to school, but the purpose of music is to pick out one person from this crowd and show their inner world.
So, as Debussy said, “music begins where words end”?
Essentially, yes, but one has to remember that even the best music will fail with a poor film. There are so many productions we do not remember, which had forgotten hours of music written for them. We remember musical works from films that are good, where there is a balance between content, professionalism and all other elements creating a film, and then music complements it all. And then we say “great film, great music”. Most often it’s like that. It does not happen that music from a poor film lives independently of the picture.
Creating a film is team work, and everybody must act together, for without this there is no chance of success.
You also composed music for theatrical performances, music based on the poetry by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Józef Czechowicz, and now you are working on music for Adam Zagajewski’s works. What fascinates you in poetry?
Poetry is unfashionable, but this can be changed. In Poland it is treated as some kind of elite literature, and, beginning from primary school, an artificial barrier between poet and reader is created. Nobody says “read it, because it is by an interesting person and has a lot to say”, but, instead, “be careful – he is a genius”. This is some kind of “extreme elitism”, it creates an artificial division between elites and the rest of the world. Poetry is nothing to be frightened of. Here, I’m thinking about good poetry, because we cannot generalise; we know there are different poets, musicians, directors, that there are good and bad artists. The fact that somebody plays jazz does not mean that they are a good musician. In the same way, someone who writes poems is not necessarily a great poet. One has to be very careful here.
Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell are my examples of fantastic poets, the poetry of whom is sung by the whole United States and Canada, the whole world, practically. They did not consider themselves to be above others, they came from society and they entered this society, they tell people the truth. Standing with a guitar on the stage, they use music to express something important. Like Leonard Cohen and many others, this is the trend in poetry that I am interested in. I think in the same terms – “I am from society, I am for society”.
And this is what happened when “Night in Calisia” won a Grammy Award, and “Ida”, by Paweł Pawlikowski, won the Oscar. It turns out that people are looking for good music, good films. Among things offered by the modern market, they are looking for works that have some message, which provoke reflection.
Yes, these are two events significant for Polish culture. Paweł Pawlikowski was also an expat, our stories are similar. I do not know it for sure, but I guess that maybe the fact that we are not burdened by cultural baggage of the Polish People’s Republic and the environment that still decides on many things that happen in the country did both of us good. But we are free people and we do our job. Fortunately, in present-day Poland, what we introduce to the market in terms of culture and art no longer depends only on those people… My example, and the example of Paweł Pawlikowski, illustrate perfectly that the world is different from the one 30 years ago, when one could not produce a film, record an album, go to the West, etc., without the support of Polish People’s Republic. Fortunately, times have changed a bit, although it has not been an easy route. In comparison with the communist era, there are fewer government institutions using public money to conduct what we call the cultural policy of the Polish state. Yet, there is a “bureaucratic cancer”, typical of a post-Soviet state, which floods and assaults the Polish culture (laughs).
Well, precisely, the road to freedom. You lived in Hamburg for many years, and the Berlin Wall came down when you were playing a concert in one of the clubs… you came back to Poland… and now it is 4 January 2014. On the Castle Square, in the presence of presidents from different parts of the world, the premiere of “Freedom” by the Grammy Award winner, Włodek Pawlik, takes place. Could it be said that things came full circle, and life showed that it is worth sticking to your own rules and defending the personal freedom of choice?
Yes, it is worth it. The price is high, but it is obvious that it is more difficult to swim against the tide (laughs). But swimming with the tide is so uninteresting, so predictable – one has to meet this or that, and it is all obvious at the very beginning. One does not have to read fine books to know how to stand on one’s own two feet in a small environment in order to become known. Of course, not everybody has to be willing to think like an idealist, if someone does not have such needs and wants to live “here and now” in a local environment and does not care what is going on in the world, culture, poetry or music – they create their own, local, safe world and have to lavish so much care so as to “consolidate” it.
So maybe emigration is an important experience, allowing us to see our own country from a different perspective?
I think we have lived to see the times that all Poles have gone somewhere – some people return, others stay abroad. I think that, from the perspective of the last 25 years, our generations and younger ones are better educated and more receptive, more cosmopolitan, yet this does not mean that they run away from their Polish roots, from what shaped them.
I don’t think that we even fully realise how integrated we are with the places where we were brought up and tradition that taught us what it is to be a man, gave us language, a way of communicating, and the ability to create reality by means of certain codes 5hq5 are connected with this, and no other, history. We are Poles and this is the way one should look at it and talk about it. But this is not all – Nicolaus Copernicus won’t overcome our various inhibitions for us – let’s do something! The world is waiting for people who are creative. We cannot rely on the gregarious thinking proposed by the Polish post-communist elite. If we do so, we will win few Grammy Awards, Oscars, or Olympic medals. Poland lacks innovative scientific projects, Polish universities are at the tail end in the rankings of the best schools in the world. Unfortunately, such gregarious corporatism often dominates political thinking in Polish society, which does not make life easy for people who are creative. Usually, creativity does not go hand in hand with correctness or predictability, which has other objectives. And that’s not to mention art… artists are rather not well-behaved people. I am thinking here of Baczyński, Lucas Cranach, Van Gogh, Jimi Hendrix. We are not members of “Team Komsomol”, many of us are extremely unruly rebels. In such structures as existed under communism, there was no air to breathe… and then you had to pack.
You are a versatile musician, you compose very diverse songs. Is there some form of music to which would you like to turn your hand?
I tried to think of everything – I have written an opera, ballet music, poetry, film music, theatre music, vocal music, piano concertos, the Mystery Sabat Mater, jazz music, symphonic music… I am probably hooked on all areas of music. What other forms am I missing? I guess it’s not about the form, this is a secondary thing; it is important that there is no superiority of form over content. I think just in terms of the content, to have an idea, to be able to tell something interesting, whether through a great orchestra, a small band, or a vocal project. The point is that those at the top “should be pleased”, that they should never run short of invention. It is important that this flow of creativity, which gives inspiration, should continue, that there should be ideas all the time..
Is this conducive to teaching?
Yes, I have good contact with the students. I am always aware that the young generation comes with open minds and hearts, ready to change the world. These are precisely the 19 year olds with whom I have contact at the university. They have faith in the fact that it is a valuable privilege to be a certain age, in the power of youth. They have what is most important. You have to take care of this so as not to grow old, not to become indolent and put your faith in systems. Because then it is all over.
What would you say should never be forgotten in the artistic life?
Be hard working, and confident in your talent. Do not give up your dreams, because they drive you… although not enough. Paderewski attributed 90 per cent of the success of work to this. I say 60 per cent, but it depends on what a person has in himself, what kind of predisposition, and this cannot be generalized. Some need more work than others, but I think that dreams are the most important, they are the volcano of energy, ideas and imagination.
All in all, the scope of imagination and self-improvement are very important. You have to create a world that gives satisfaction, even practicing an instrument systematically. This is a great escape from life’s everyday prose.
But the life of the composer-artist is not only about the music. How do you relax?
Well yes, of course, I am only human (laughs). I like to swim, that is certainly my springboard to relaxation. And I cycle almost every day. Sometimes I go to a concert.
And what kind of music you listen to, for example, when driving?
Lately only my own (laughs), because I have just recorded a new album – The Włodek Pawlik Trio “America”. There was a concert at the National Philharmonic in Warsaw, on May 24, connected with the album’s premiere.. A week ago, you could see us play and hear us on TVP 2.
What will we find on this album?
For the first time, I am diverging from the rule, and on this album are not only my compositions, but also the works of two great composers, Chopin and Paderewski. This album is a cross-section of my work over the last 30 years, including film and theatre music. You’ll find works from the movies “Rewers” and “Wrony”. We can say that this compilation is the history of the time from my forced exile in 1984, to 2014 and a Grammy Award in Los Angeles. The oldest song on this album is the song “America”, which I wrote during my first trip by plane to the United States, in 1988. And what else? You can hear for yourself soon.
Photo © Mirosław Janus
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