Polish Jazz
It’s hard to imagine a better start, but how did it all begin? Marcin Cichy and Igor Pudło met through the hip-hop scene. Cichy (currently active under the pseudonym Meeting by Chance) started his adventure with music at home. Later he learned to play the piano, played in a rock band, and recorded music for commercials on an Atari computer. In 1999, together with Marek ‘Pro’ Gluziński, he founded Blend Records (1999-2012), a label that released the debut albums of Grammatik, Fenomen, and Wzgórze Ya-Pa 3. Igor Pudło (currently performing solo as Igor Boxx) was a punk guitarist in the 80s. He had also been making music on a computer, and later became involved in hip-hop – he worked in a record store, was a DJ and co-created a magazine entitled Klan (1997-2005).
After a successful tour with DJ Vadim they released the demo Polish Jazz, which is a perfect example of Skalpel’s initial approach towards music. They used the cut and paste technique, once used by the biggest avant-garde bands such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and The Beatles. The two DJs from Wrocław were browsing through boxes with old records, looking for attractive (and, if possible, difficult to recognise) samples from old jazz records. Sometimes it was a single sound, a second-long fragment. At other times we can hear whole pieces taken out of someone else’s compositions. Samples from works by Urszula Dudziak, Jan Ptaszyn-Wróblewski, Zbigniew Namysłowski meet with fragments of The Cannonball Adderley Quintet. They avoided samples that were too obvious, although the critics wanted to hear, for example, Krzysztof Komeda.
The charm of the duo’s music lies in the fact that it doesn’t sound like a computer puzzle made of samples. Skalpel perfectly imitates the sound of a ‘real’ jazz band composed of ingenious virtuosos.