Avant-garde, underground & pop culture
‘Does the beat avant-garde exist?’ This was the question asked by Ryszard Gloger in the title of his major article for Jazz magazine in May 1970. The piece was illustrated by the album covers of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, as well as of The Fugs – these were, according to Gloger, the main representatives of the titular phenomenon. Contrary to the simple compositions and banal lyrics of rhythm and blues and rock ‘n’ roll bands, Mothers of Invention, The Fugs and other bands similar to these (which of course, included The Beatles, albeit earlier) were supposed to be characterised by their inclination for experimenting, crossing boundaries and breaking moral and aesthetic norms.
Gloger devoted a lot of attention to the underground character of the bands, and to the fact that they were alternative, situating themselves on the margins of the music industry. The beat avant-garde functioned on the sidelines of the mainstream, approaching it only sporadically – it had an underground character and it was often called underground. (And it still is: part of the Polish Rock Granary in Jarocin relating to the beat avant-garde is actually entitled ‘underground’.)
At the same time, these bands were very pop – and popular. At the turn of the 1970s, artists such as Frank Zappa were able to overcome these contradictions with style and nonchalance. Bands such as Romuald i Roman (Romuald and Roman), Nurt (Current), and Grupa Stress (Stress Group) enjoyed in their best periods an immense popularity, and the legend of 74 Grupa Biednych (74 Poor Group) is still alive today (even though not much else remained of them). Of course, this popularity was still incomparable to the mass admiration enjoyed by the leading big-beat bands.
Gloger’s views were accurate in framing this phenomenon in Poland. After all, there was no big beat in the West at all, and the homegrown beat avant-garde shared the characteristics which the journalist pointed out. Its representatives broke musical and moral conventions, used atypical meters, and followed Stockhausen into the field of intuitive music by reaching for Indian, Chinese and Japanese instruments. They arranged onstage happenings and shocked the public with their hippie way of life.
A cultural mix
What’s more, the beat avant-garde combined elements of various cultures. There were strong Eastern tendencies, visible especially in the work of Warsaw’s Grupa w Składzie (Group in Composition), as well as Nirwana, created by Wojciech Waglewski and Michał Urbaniak (although Nirwana wandered far outside of beat music) – and, most important, Osjan, which was founded by Jacek Ostaszewski, Marek Jackowski and Tomasz Hołuj.
It is worth mentioning that, according to Kamil Sipowicz, the spiritus movens of Grupa w Składzie was Milo Kurtis, a son of Greek political refugees who arrived in Poland in the 1950s. For his entire life, Kurtis was considered an exotic stranger (although not necessarily a Greek stranger – he was sometimes believed to be Jewish). Eastern motifs served also as an inspiration for 74 Grupa Biednych from Ustka, who, according to what the journalist Marek Garztecki wrote in 1970, ‘were destined to be the Polish Beatles’. Their rhythm section also experimented with African sounds.