Rafał Księżyk: I’d like to talk about the band that made The Soul Of Things in 2002. You refer to the musicians in your quartet – Wasilewski, Miśkiewicz, Kurkiewicz – as children.

Tomasz Stańko: Because they are children; there’s a large age gap between us.

They really were children when you started playing together?

Michał [Miśkiewicz] was sixteen. Marcin [Wasilewski] and Sławek [Kurkiewicz] were eighteen. They were really young. They were still at high school, and when they were playing with me, they were students in Katowice. And they were good right from the beginning.

What was it about them that particularly appealed to you?

Artistic maturity. And the fact that they were gifted. They immediately picked up whatever I wanted.

Were you a teacher to them, or a vampire?

It’s difficult to say. But I like that word: ‘vampire’. A vampire – of course! I once read an interview with Miles, where the interviewer said that so many musicians had learned from Miles. And he replied, “No. The other way round. I was doing the learning.” That’s contrariness, saying it for effect, not entirely true.

Playing with me, they benefit from my confidence and my stage experience. That’s invaluable. I can remember my first job with Komeda, how I absorbed his charisma. You absorb it in a flash. Now, when I think back to Astigmatic, I think, “Hell, that got everything out of me; it fast-tracked and developed me”.

They’ve had the same. But I haven’t given them any advice. If I’d been about me advising them on how to play, I wouldn’t have hired them. We talked about certain things to do with tempo, about nuances to do with style, about the way to improvise or interpret. Essentially, the trick with the music that I play isn’t to do with playing the theme well, because obviously that has to be played well – that’s basic. It’s about the nuances. I give the musicians a certain chord, but they can do whatever they want with it. I’d give it to these children, and then I’d wait.

Marcin often changed things, if only accidentally. That’s how we learned. He’d accidentally play major instead of minor, but I wouldn’t interrupt him. I’d say, “Keep it like that!”, because I’d suddenly hear freshness. It’s a certain kind of wisdom. He sees the effect of something random, how I can work with that and how much I like it.

The way I compose is that sometimes a certain chord accidentally comes out randomly, and then that sound makes me wonder. That’s our speciality. Taking advantage of an accident is fundamental to improvised music, because these associations are made quickly, at lighting speed. The power of the mistake changes its value. Because what is an accident? It’s a mutation. A mistake. Well, we are, after all, alive due to mistakes and mutations.

You mentioned that in Komeda’s quintet you took the edge off the traditional sweetness of his music.

Yes. I made it avant garde.

In the quartet, we could say that Marcin Wasilewski’s piano added some traditional ‘sweetness’ to your music.

Wasilewski plays a communicative groove, but I wasn’t presenting my music like that.

Wasilewski is the most romantic musician that you’ve worked with.

A conventional musician. You could say romantic, but it would be more accurate to say conventional.

I said that because he’s from the Keith Jarrett school.

That tradition. But I also felt good with him because we rather quickly began playing free in his romantic, more harmonic style. Wasilewski’s greatest strength is that he can play both traditional and free, the way Bobo [Stenson] can. There are more and more musicians able to do that these days. I’m curious to see what it’s going to be like playing with Dominik Wania, because he’s also very traditional. He had his roots in classical music, but he plays very rhythmic music at the same time. He was guided by Danilo Pérez, who taught him in Boston and thought highly of him. Except that, in contrast to Marcin, Wania’s playing is anti-romantic. He plays cold, which I’m also starting to find exciting. I’m curious to see how our job in Vienna’s going to turn out because I’ve only played with him once before.

The quartet is a band that you’ve been playing with for practically the last 15 years. Is that as a result of your decision to focus on communicative music, which needs just this kind of line-up?

It was about the quality. I’ve never been a purist by nature. I liked the flexibility of art because it gave me freedom. I had my roots in playing free and I loved playing free. My technique and instrumental predispositions took me in that direction. I’m talking about the expression that you can get through non-technical playing, through nonmusical means. That expression was the most important thing for me, and still is. It’s flawed because you can’t always do it the way you want to, the way the brain would play it, but this free expression was closest to my heart.

And, at the same time, by using my tone, through the beauty of tone, I was able to play the ballads that I liked. In the quartet, I had more conventional musicians. They’d get me into a certain mood, which I liked and which I’d take further. I’d already played things like that with [Adam] Makowicz who, at the end of the day, was a conventional musician. That’s why, throughout the whole period of our collaboration, we played standards and ballads. I was always inclined to get together with those kinds of musicians. When I realized that I had access to a good band at home, I could hardly not take advantage of it. A stable bassist, an interesting percussionist and a charismatic, powerful pianist. What a line-up! It’s such a joy. This isn’t New York where musicians congregate from all over the world. And that’s why we spent so many years playing together.

In the middle of the 1990s, you had two bands going in parallel: that famous European quartet with Tony Oxley, Bobo Stenson and Anders Jormin, and the Polish band at the same time.

Yes. They dovetailed with each other.

In what circumstances did the Polish quartet – Wasilewski, Miśkiewicz, Kurkiewicz – become your priority band?

As usual, it was pure chance. When I had one-off jobs in Poland, where there was no question of bringing over a band with Oxley in it, I played with Polish line-ups, which I organised myself for individual concerts. The backbone was Janusz Skowron, because he’s an excellent pianist. What’s absolutely essential to me is the quality of the music and who I play with. I give the musicians a lot of space, and I can’t put myself in a position where someone might play the wrong chord. He can’t go wrong and play a major sixth instead of a minor one. I can’t have him play a wrong note, which is the mark of musicians of average talent and sensitivity. I need high-level musicians, so that I don’t have to say anything, or explain anything to them, and they’ll play the notes I want. That’s why I played with Skowron.

I had this terrible problem once. At the end of 1993, I had a job in Przemyśl, in a quartet with Skowron. We were meant to have Zbigniew Wegehaupt and Bernd Konrad playing in the rhythm section. Well, a few days before the job, Wegehaupt rings me: “I can’t come; I have an important gig over here.” “Well, you’ll have to recommend someone then,” I say. “Play with young Miśkiewicz.” “What Miśkiewicz?” “Henryk Miśkiewicz’s son: he plays drums — a lad, very young.”

That really caught my interest because I thought highly of Miśkiewicz’s father. His strongest point is his so-called ‘jazzy’ playing; he plays like a jazz musician — he can really swing it. I thought his son might have the same thing, which is important on the drums. I rang him, and he recommended Sławomir Kurkiewicz. They’d been playing together for a long time, so I obviously was going to take on both of them.

How did the first concert go? Did you have rehearsals beforehand?

We went straight to the job in Przemyśl. We drove straight to the venue, where we had half an hour to rehearse. Very little time for a first meeting. Well, it turned out that within half an hour we’d got through the whole programme. They had knowledge and learned quickly. There’s no need to rehearse; this is improvised music. I was surprised to see how brilliantly they actually played. I was touched. And they quickly persuaded me to give Marcin a try.

I remember, it was at a concert in Łódź. We had a quick rehearsal and then we played. I tried him out and I really liked him. I’d got my whole line-up. They’d played a lot together; they were tight. And we very quickly started doing concerts. More and more of them. I took them to Germany. There was this one point, I noticed to my surprise that whenever I came back off tour with Oxley, Jormin and Bobo, I loved playing with those children and the freshness of the thing. It was different, of course, but, artistically, I find that satisfying. I was very surprised by that, and that’s how our collaboration began.

Desperado: An Autobiography by Tomasz Stańko with Rafał Księżyk is published by Equinox. Read a review of the book in The Wire 465. Subscribers can also read the review online via the digital archive.