Chopin, They Are Profaning You! Fryderyk’s Adventures with Jazz

pomnik-chopina-fot-lazienki-krolewskie-548748196c8d9.jpg, small, Preparing Fryderyk Chopin's head for casting, 1957, photo: National Digital Archives, Chopin, They Are Profaning You! Fryderyk’s Adventures with Jazz

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From romantic improvisation to second-rate jazz interpretations of Chopin: how have Fryderyk Chopin’s adventures with jazz turned out?

Fryderyk Chopin was a perfect improviser – at least that’s how it appears from the sources available to us. As a young man, he improvised on the organ and, as a mature pianist, he happily created compositions on the fly in concert halls and salons. The basis of his spontaneous variations were operatic themes, popular melodies, folk tunes or patriotic songs. He was no exception: During the 19^th century, any pianist worth his salt had to have highly developed improvisational skills (a true master of this art form was Franz Liszt). In the final analysis, the Romantics most appreciated the creative act in its purest form.

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George Sand recalled that Chopin would precede his work on any new composition with improvisation, carving out his musical ideas and experimenting with varying solutions. In the end, he often returned to his initial concept which had grown out of an inspiration that was not fully thought through. Julian Fontana said that his most beautiful compositions are barely a reflection, an echo of his improvisation. Juliusz Seligmann noted that Chopin, when playing an encore, would often play the same pieces that he had played earlier, but with new nuances. Together with Eliza Peruzzi, his student, the composer enjoyed improvising duets on two instruments in a kind of 'dialogue'.

It should be remembered, however, that Chopin was none too fond of performing before large audiences – he was rather a creature of the salons. He was said to have observed that 'Concerts never showcase true music: They feature music that you have to move away from if you want to hear what is most beautiful in art'. He was very restrained in his playing, entirely unlike the aforementioned Liszt. This doesn’t mean, however, that his performances were completely devoid of showmanship; the fact is that he was well known for his theatrical skills.

But what did his Romantic improvisations sound like? Irena Poniatowiska, an outstanding expert on the work of the pianist of Żelazowa Wola, claims that he took his idea for spontaneous play from the tradition of bel canto – portamento della voce (‘the carrying-over of the voice’), improvised ornamentation, a smooth gliding from one note to the next. He heard this in Rossini’s operas which were performed in Warsaw’s Teatr Wielki and later in Bellini’s works which he saw in Paris.

The next element of this improvisation was tempo rubato, i.e. an attempt at doing away with the passage of time in music – rubare meaning ‘to steal’. ‘Rubato consisted of extending one note at the cost of others. This was done by opera singers in their greatest operas’, explains Krzysztof Bilica. ‘In Chopin’s rubato sections, he would introduce ornamentation – sometimes more elaborate, other times more modest, like a vocal coloratura (…)’.

André Gide found an interesting way to interpret the nature of Chopin's improvisations:

It is impossible to assume that Chopin improvised in the true sense of the word. No. But it is important that [Chopin's works] are played in a way that gives such an impression, that is, with which – I dare not say heaviness – but uncertainty, at least without the certainty that comes with the fast pace. [...] Chopin proposes, supposes, insinuates, persuades; he hardly ever claims.

Chopin, they’re profaning you!

Thumbnail — Fire of the Teatr Rozmaitości (Variety Theatre) in Warsaw, drawing by Czesław Jankowski, photo: Public Domain

The great composer’s work was profaned already within his lifetime, many decades before jazz came into existence. Ludwika Jędrzejewiczowa wrote to her brother:

Your Mazurek – the one with the third part which goes 'Bam bum bum' (n.b., it seems to me that it’s caused great excitement here, especially when it was performed in the Variety theatre by a full orchestra) – they played it at the Zamoyskis’ ball all evening long and Bar., who heard it with his own ears, says they were exceptionally pleased to dance to it. What do you think of that, that they’re profaning you like that, because your mazurka is really intended more for listening.

Chopin’s sister would most likely have agreed with the journalist who wrote in the magazine Rytm (Rhythm) an article entitled ‘Profanation of Art: Reimagining Chopin By a Jazz Band’:

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A few days ago, it was indignantly confirmed to me that a jazz band in Wielka Ziemiańska café played a foxtrot made up of three parts which were recast versions of Chopin’s ‘Fantasia-Impromptu in C-Sharp Minor’, his ‘Waltz in D Major’ and his ‘Funeral March’. What that must have sounded like with the shriek of trumpets, the screech of whistles, the barking of various drums, castanets, xylophones and other indispensable attributes of Black music, one can only imagine. And all of that accompanied by the frenzied applause and expressions of admiration from an unrefined audience’.

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'The Profanation of Art: Reimagining Chopin by a Jazz Band’, Rytm 1922, No. 1

These two sources are separated by nearly a hundred years, yet profanation affected the sacrum and defied any linear sense of time. The geographical proximity of these events is disturbing however. The Variety Theatre (Teater Rozmaitości) mentioned by Jędrzejewiczowa has nothing in common with the venue today bearing the same name and directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna; it rather refers to the smaller stage of the Teatr Wielki which once was located at the rear of the building’s west wing (this is where the National Theatre is now located).

The Wielka Ziemiańska, one of the most popular meeting places of pre-war Warsaw, was located at 9 Kredytowa Street. The Variety and Ziemiańska were not even a kilometre apart. The iconoclasts of Polish music could exit one of their frequented locales and, walking for a mere two minutes in the direction of the Saxon Gardens, could wave at one another, congratulating themselves on their violation of the generally honoured values of Polish music connoisseurs.

Some listeners also spoken of 'profanation of the hall' upon hearing the piano duet performed by Jean Wiéner and Clément Doucet, ‘Parisian wiseguys performing second-rate music’. They played one of Chopin’s waltzes as a jazz humoresque, provoking rage among their audience. But some liked it, e.g.. Karol Stromenger, the reviewer for Tygodnik Ilustrowany:

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But such is the fate of jazz that it must forge a path between the Pharisees and the elegant chattering classes which have not matured sufficiently to comprehend other kinds of music […] The fact that this is music which befits the atmosphere of a bar or cocktail lounge does not mean that it doesn’t have its artistic place […] And, in fact, jazz has its good examples in which it shows its charm and rhythmic, instrumental and harmonic ingenuity.

Author

Tygodnik Ilustrowany, 1930, No. 15

‘Profanation’ is a word which appears repeatedly in pre-war texts about jazz’s approach to classical music. Stromenger, whom we cited earlier, trained in the Lviv conservatory and in musiciology in Vienna, and is a populariser of Chopin’s music. In another article, he wrote with irony about the critics’ extreme reactions to the new music form that was developing in the United States:

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The critics react either with an indulgent smile or with the rending of their garments. A profanation of music! Do serious ambitions always guarantee the seriousness of music? Chopin made a bit nasty with a touch of the pedal or Mozart played at racetrack speeds and the like – Aren’t they – unfortunately – just a bit too common a profanation? Can’t music have a sense of humour?

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Leo Wiener before World War II, photo: szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl

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Not only Poles were offended by jazz interpretations of Chopin. In the 4 November 1922 edition of The New York Times, we can read a short item reporting the indignation of the members of SACEM – the French authors’ and composers’ association – over the popularity of a syncopated version of the funeral march from Chopin’s Second Sonata. The defenders of authors’ rights announced that they would call for criminal charges against the performers of this offensive foxtrot (whom they called 'jazz plagiarisers'). Ten years later, the pianist Solomon Pimsleur published in The New York Times a letter entitled 'Jazzing the Classics' in which he cites the words of Rachmaninoff, who liked the jazz performance of some of his own works and those of Rimsky-Korsakov:

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Perhaps Rachmaninoff has the right to allow his own music to be jazzified, but he has no such right when it comes to the work of Rimsky-Korsakov who, to the best of my musical history knowledge, would never have subscribed to such a view.

The horrifying vision of the music of Chopin, Beethoven and Schubert being mistreated by jazz performers continues to hold sway. Why have so few voices been raised in opposition to this phenomenon?, asked Pimsleur. Could anyone imagine the works of Dostoyevsky, Flaubert or Hardy being reworked as pulp fiction?

Or perhaps jazz isn’t profane after all?

Not everyone saw jazz as profane. Twentieth-century composers gladly added syncopation and other common jazz elements to their work. George Gershwin, Igor Stravinsky, Dmitry Shostakovich - what would their music be like without jazz inspirations? And without knowledge of Chopin? ‘Listen to Chopin’s “Prelude in E Minor, Opus 28, No. 4” and then listen to “Someone to Watch Over Me, the song popularised by Ella Fitzgerald’, suggests David Schiff: the song is a clear paraphrase of Chopin. In Stravinsky’s ‘L’histoire du soldat’, other than bits of ragtime (the composer liked to frequent the jazz clubs in Harlem), we also find parodies of the ‘Waltz in F Major, Opus 34, No. 3’. Twenty-year-old Shostakovich performed at the First International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition: he didn’t have great success there, but he did receive honourable mention.

Amongst composers, there were some who listened to jazz and, among popular music performers, there were admirers and performers of Chopin as well. Students of Aleksander Michałowski – a leading authority when it comes to performing Chopin’s music – included, among others, Jerzy Petersburski and Henryk Gold, without whom it would be hard to imagine the history of Polish songwriting. Another student of Michałowski was Michał Ferszko, a pianist affiliated with the Henryk Wars orchestra, and a composer inspired by Varsovian and Jewish folklore. He was an admired performer of Chopin’s works; he perished during the Holocaust, probably in Treblinka.

Władysław Daniłowski, along with his Dana choir, sailed to New York in 1936 aboard the transatlantic liner ‘Île-de-France’ where he encountered the famous musicians The Mills Brothers. Together, they sang jazz and popular standards, but their repertoire also included compositions by Tschaikovsky, Schubert and Chopin.

Władysław Szpilman learned improvisation from Franz Schrekert who tried to stimulate the young pianist’s musical imagination by calling on the works of Chopin. Szpilman recalled:

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‘Make it a fugue’, he’d say, handing me a paper on which he’d drawn a few notes onto a staff. ‘What would Chopin have said about this?’ he’d say, suggesting an improvisation on one of the nocturnes. That skill proved quite useful to me when I ended up in the ghetto. Improvisations on themes from Chopin to Gershwin became roughly half of my solo repertoire.

Jamming on Chopin behind the Iron Curtain

In May 1947, Warsaw was just beginning to come back to life. The first post-war jazz concert took place amidst the ruins and alongside enormous construction sites. The musicians played at the Warsaw Jazz Club, a venue sponsored by the YMCA at 6 Konopnickiej Street. The organiser and initiator of the event was Leopold Tyrmand, who called the evening ‘JAM SESSION Hot Jazz, Swing, Boogie Woogie’.

Миниатюра — '30th May 30, 6:00pm, A great concert of improvised jazz music organised by the Jazz-Club of the Polish YMCA, "Jam Session"', 1947, photo: Polona.pl

One of the performers that night was Waldemar 'Valdi' Maciszewski, bronze medal winner at the 1949 Chopin Competition. He pursued a two-track musical career as both a jazz and classic pianist. Even today, such people are a rarity; at his time, he must have been a real curiosity. It’s interesting to wonder whether – in the course of some jam session – he might have introduced a phrase or two from Chopin. Or whether his rubato, as compared to other contestants, contained an element of swing. He was killed in a car crash in 1956, a few months before his thirtieth birthday and a few months before start of the Gomułka ‘thaw’.

Waldemar ‘Valdi’ didn’t live to see the first jazz festival in Poland. Surely not even in his wildest dreams could he have foreseen that, in 1958, he would have been able to take part in concerts with the legendary Dave Brubeck Quartet – one of the most popular jazz acts of its generation. (Brubeck even made the cover of Time.) That cool jazz band from the West Coast played a dozen concerts in seven Polish cities. One of the key stops on that tour was a visit to Żelazowa Wola, Chopin’s home. Brubeck was moved by anything related to Chopin. He had listened to his music from the cradle, played by his mother, a pianist. Riding by train to his final concert in Poland – in Poznań – he composed a piece entitled - in Polish! -Dziękuję (Thank You) – a piece inspired by Poland and by Chopin (you can hear the allusions to Chopin’s ‘Nocturne in B Flat Minor, No. 1’.).

The American jazzman was grateful not only to Chopin; he also wanted to thank the Polish musicians and audiences for their hospitality. At the Kraków train station, Brubeck found a musical welcome awaiting him, performed by Andrzej Trzaskowski, Krzysztof Komeda-Trzciński and Lesław Lic. The Trzaskowskis and the Komedas travelled with him to his concerts in Wrocław, Łódź and Poznań. The American pianist felt an instinctive connection with Komeda, composer of the music to the 1960 Andrzej Wajda film Innocent Sorcerers.

Krzysztof Komeda, like every Polish child, began his musical education by learning to play works by Chopin. He never copied them literally, yet many observers have noted a similarity in the atmosphere created by that classic Polish jazz composer and the great Romantic who preceded him. A critic for the Danish newspaper Dagens Nyheter wrote about the quartet’s concert:

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Other than that, there abound in it such “serious” concepts, which prove that Chopin is still very much alive amongst Poles.

‘Krzyś, I give you my hands: teach me to play that jazz’, the pianist Barbara Hesse-Bukowska, silver medalist at the 1949 Chopin Competition, once said to the too-soon-deceased composer. They had had a vacation-time romance in 1952. It’s interesting to wonder how Polish piano’s history might have looked different had their relationship not ended during a vacation in Ustronie Morskie.

Another American pianist who owed much to the composer from Żelazowa Wola was Bill Evans, the one White musician in the Miles Davis Sextet. The distinguishing elements of Evans’ performance were interesting, far more developed than was the case for the majority of jazz pianists. That is the product of his fascination with the works of Ravel, Débussy and Chopin. This is why Evans has often been referred to as ‘the Chopin of jazz’.

In turn, Mieczysław Kosz has been called ‘the Bill Evans of Polish jazz’. In his performances, we can hear echoes of the music of Romanticism, especially in their colour, dynamics and, of course, in their mood. A regular feature of his repertoire (both solo and with his band) were swinging paraphrases of the ‘Preludes in A Minor and C Minor’. Roman Kowal, an outstanding expert on the history of jazz, called Kosz ‘a belated Romantic artist’.

An entirely different, though, from a historic point of view, equally important, jazz interpretation of Chopin’s music is the album Novi Sings Chopin. Chopin sung in jazz style hewed surprisingly close to the original. The Novi Singers introduced no changes to the text; they sang what was nearly a faithful transcription. In their interpretation, they didn’t try to overly interpret, swing, or shock – they just performed Chopin using the instrument of the human voice. As Aleksandra Masłowska observed in her article ‘Chopin de Novo’, thanks to the faithful singing of the works of the piano composer who died in Paris, some of his compositions take on a clearly jazz character. What’s interesting is that the album ‘Novi Sing Chopin’ was the choir’s bestselling album of all time, gaining greater popularity than their albums featuring a pop music repertoire.

Chopin Jazzes It Up in Free Poland

The Novi Singers released their album in 1971 and Kosz died two years later. Over the next two decades, Chopin’s music was the hottest topic in Polish jazz circles. Mazurkas, nocturnes, preludes and études brought back syncopated rhythms to radio waves along the Vistula during the 1990s. It started with Chopin, an album recorded by the Andrzej Jagodziński Trio in 1993 (the trio was comprised of Andrzej Jagodziński, piano; Adam Cegielski, bass, and Czesław Bratkowski, percussion). Jagodziński said:

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To me, Chopin is first and foremost melody and harmony […] But if we’re just talking about the improvisation, I at least try to keep it in a character and mood close to the Chopin original.

When improvising, Jagodziński doesn’t corrupt Chopin’s way of thinking; as a rule, he builds on it or gently alters it, for instance by changing the order of the chords or developing them. The sound of the trio is quiet and subdued.

Jagodziński’s trio was reviewed for Jazz Forum by Bohdan Pociej, one of Poland’s leading musicologists and musical philosophers regarding 20^th-century music. He has said that Jagodziński’s album is head and shoulders above all existing jazz (or even pseudo-jazz) ‘playing with Chopin’. ‘This is the spirit of Chopin’s form with that extremely odd dialectic between classical proportionality – symmetry – and romantic asymmetry and extension’, Pociej wrote.

A year later, Leszek Możdżer recorded his album Chopin: Impressions. The barefoot pianist approached the national virtuoso far more freely. Balancing between modern and Romantic sounds, he has an exceptional talent for sudden and unexpected returns to Chopin’s sound, even at moments when we might think that he might allow Chopin to get lost under the pressure of his own musical concepts.

He would prefer to emulate Chopin than to build a whole new narrative with the aid of direct quotes from Chopin. He invited Polish jazz legend Zbigniew Namysłowski, whose saxophone turns a mazurka into something like an Oriental prayer, and Tomasz Stańko, who paraphrases the emotions of a nocturne with an abrupt, yet reflective sound, to join him in recording two pieces.

Since that time, many have looked to Chopin for inspiration. As Rafał Garszczyński, a journalist for JazzPRESS, suggests, not everyone did that out of fascination with the Romantic pianist:

It would be enough to throw a bit of Chopin into the repertoire and it would be much easier to make money. Of course, not everyone profited that way, but many tried and, once projects were approved, albums were released, at least some of which probably shouldn’t have been.

Many have reached for Chopin’s music, among them: Lora Szafran, Marek Bałata, Karol Nicze, Adam Makowicz, Anna Serafińska, Krzysztof Herdzin, Kuba Stankiewicz, Leszek Kułakowski, and Włodzimierz Nahorny. Many of them have returned to Chopin’s music time and again.

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Marcin Masecki, photo: Tomasz Dubiel

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An interesting example is the Chopin of Marcin Masecki, a pianist trained in both the jazz and classical traditions. In 2011, that is, right after the Chopin Year declared on the 200^th anniversary of our composer’s birth, at a time when almost everyone was trying to produce some Chopin project or other, Masecki along with the group Profesjonalizm recorded an album entitled ‘Chopin Chopin Chopin’ (featuring Marcin Masecki, piano, composer and director; Kamil Szuszkiewicz, trumpet; Michał Górczyński, clarinet and saxophone; Tomasz Duda, saxophone; Piotr Domagalski, bass; Jerzy Rogiewicz, percussion). Despite the thrice-invoked name, we can find no reference at all to the patron of innumerable music schools in Poland. This is a reinterpretation of the history of jazz through group improvisation and composition, speaking in a language steeped in the avant-garde.

Masecki returned to Chopin with his album Nocturnes. He played it by ear, rejecting the perfectionism and precision which are demanded by the juries of all piano competitions, the Warsaw competition above all. In the end, every pianist educated in Poland ended up playing and hearing these pieces hundreds of times to the point that he or she can feel them in their bones. I remember the anticipation attending the release of that album, the hope for a refreshment of the Chopin repertoire. ‘Chopin’s music takes on the form of oral transmission; it begins to function more like folk music’, the promotional material for the album asserted. It turned out that Masecki has a very good memory and, even working without a text, he is able to adhere quite closely to it. We don’t find any embarrassing stumbles, errors or shortcuts there. The most controversial thing about the album was the choice of instruments: untuned, six-octave, middling-quality instruments.

Post scriptum

This is only a fraction of Chopin’s jazz adventure, which rather quickly ceased to be a profanation. Other homages to the composer whose remains – other than his heart which was removed and sent to Warsaw – lie in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris were created by Art Tatum, Alice Coltrane, Ahmad Jamal, Horace Silver, Oscar Peterson, Ornette Coleman, McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Sun Ra, Jean-Luc Ponty, Errol Garner, Vagif Mustafazadeh, and Aziza Mustafazadeh, to mention only the most renowned.

Originally written in Polish, Sept 2021, translated by Yale Reisner, Oct 2021

Main sources: https://polishjazzarch.com/; New York Times; Polskie Radio; The Atlantic; M. Grzebałkowska, Komeda. Osobiste życia jazzu, Kraków 2018; R. Przybylski, Cień jaskółki. Esej o myślach Chopina, Kraków 2009; A. Gide, Notatki o Chopinie, Kraków 2007; K. Karpiński, Tylko smutek jest piękny. Opowieść o Mieczysławie Koszu, Kraków 2019; K. Karpiński, Był jazz. Krzyk jazz-bandu w międzywojennej Polsce, Kraków 2014; K. Bilica, W poszukiwaniu ukradzionego czasu, „Polski Rocznik Muzykologiczny”, 2018

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