Komeda – Hłasko is an attempt to combine musical and literary output of Krzysztof Komeda-Trzciński and Marek Hłasko into one emotionally coherent composition.
On the one hand, a formally structured, partly improvised suite on themes taken from the music of Krzysztof Trzciński. Putting together free improvisation with fragments which are determined strictly or jazz-wise, it is meant to reintroduce Komeda as a questing artist whose doings were equal to those of the then-trending ‘third stream’ (which blended jazz music with contemporary classical). On the other, recitation of excerpts from the prose of Marek Hłasko. That is, display of fear, anxiety, doubt, and threat. Setting these two voices against each other is going to produce a new quality: sort of a synthesis of the arts, breathing into so composed a piece specific coherence.
Our choice of the two figures was not a coincidence at all. In 2019 falls the 50th anniversary of Komeda’s and Hłasko’s deaths, as well as the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, an event which had left a painful mark on the lives and works of them both. At the turn of the fifties and sixties Komeda formed modern jazz circles whose influence on Poland’s jazz music would be tremendous. Marek Hłasko— biographically mythologised yet extraordinarily insightful author and screenwriter—established a close relationship with Komeda upon emigration, while living in Los Angeles. Musical and literary pieces of the one and the other shared a unique emotionalism, symbolism, atmosphere of unrest and suspense. Both, however, have been perceived, in popular culture, in a rather trivialised way, through the prism of only the best-known works of theirs. Convinced of such judgements being profoundly unjust, we intend to change that stereotypical reception of their legacy.
