Though I worked as a reporter for my hometown newspaper back when I was in high school, I never really count that experience when I think about my writing career. For me, it started when I was a music critic for a local “alternative” newspaper—you know, the sort of publication that was hip before hipsters were a thing.
That’s when I discovered the music of Tomasz Stańko, the virtuoso Polish jazz trumpeter who died over the weekend at age 76. Stańko was a revelation to me, a player whose music demonstrated once and for all that jazz was as much color and texture as it was rhythm and changes.
Spare and atmospheric—almost minimalist in his approach to improvisation and composition—Stańko, it always seemed to me, didn’t just play his trumpet. He painted with it: haunting soundscapes of quiet, otherworldly beauty. And yet, somehow, he was as deeply soulful as the best of his American counterparts.
I’d never heard anything quite like it. And now I can’t imagine jazz—or music, really—without his contribution.
