Harmonising the Human Interior: An Interview with Leszek Możdżer

leszek_mozdzer_portret_2_en.jpg, default, Leszek Możdżer at the Strzeszyńskie Lake, Poznań, photo: Jakub Walasek / Reporter / East News, Harmonising the Human Interior: An Interview with Leszek Możdżer

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Leszek Możdżier, pianist, composer, and arranger, has been a fixture on the world jazz scene for years. In an interview with Denys Shpigov, he talks about defining jazz, the good and bad influence of the artistic ego, and what to do to get inspiration.

Denys Shpigov: The boundaries of jazz are becoming increasingly blurred. Jazz often incorporates other musical genres – early music, classical, rock – while still remaining jazz. Sometimes it’s hard to grasp the essence of jazz. What is jazz to you? How would you explain this type of music?

Leszek Możdżer: For me personally, jazz is improvised music that’s accentuated in a specific way. As for analysing this music, let journalists do that. I’m a performer of jazz; I’m not interested in creating new definitions or referring to previous ones. All the more so because dividing music into styles reminds me of building fences in water, for music is a set of frequencies. The division into styles is in fact an artificial phenomenon that was forced upon producers by the music market. Music had to be technically segregated somehow so that listeners could know what to expect from a particular record displayed in a shop. For me, attempting to define jazz is like trying to rubber stamp the air. It doesn’t work.

DS: But in any case, jazz music has something in it that allows it to be called jazz. Not necessarily in a musical sense. Certain qualities, a certain character.

LM: I think we need to shift the emphasis from jazz music to jazz musicians. Jazz, in short, is music played by musicians. So you have to ask who these musicians are, not what jazz is. In essence, music is vibrating air. No style exists in isolation from people. Specific people have specific traits and skills. Jazz musicians can read functional jazz notation; they can swing and improvise. And they can use these tools to create music spontaneously, on the spot

DS: It’s like what Charlie Parker used to say. There are three things you need to do to play jazz: one, know your music theory perfectly, two, know your instrument perfectly, and three, forget the first and the second and just play jazz.

LM: It’s true. Until you forget what you’ve learned, you won’t be able to perform it. There’s something in that.

DS: Do you have a particular formula of your own?

LM: To reach a high level in anything, you need to employ your own imagination. Practicing doesn’t have to be done on an instrument. Of course, practicing on an instrument is necessary – but more crucial, in my opinion, is to imagine your own music. You can do it while sitting in a chair, swimming, walking or driving. Imagination is necessary to achieve mastery.

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Leszek Możdzer, photo: Piotr Kamionka / Reporter / East News

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DS: You’re always experimenting with the piano, inventing things, trying to find new sounds. How does your musical imagination operate?

LM: When I write a piece, I first try to feel its luminescence, its colour, its general aura, without imagining the details. Then I begin to gather information about how to fill in the framework that I’ve imagined, and by what means to achieve the tonal goal that I have in mind. Of course, you can imagine some minor specific details in the form of a melodic line, or what individual instruments are going to do. You can sneak in a lot of ideas you hear, whether taken from the sounds of everyday life or heard on the radio – the juxtaposition of instruments, melodic phrases and chord progressions. And this can be so inspiring that on this basis you can later build your own, more complex compositions. Although, in fact, the most valuable thing is to imagine music that no one has ever written before. However, this is very difficult and requires intensive inner work, which is something the composer Witold Lutosławski wrote about. It took him many years to imagine his own unique music that he had never heard before, and then it took him a few more years to work out how to write it down. So, it’s a path through inner torment. And nobody will ever understand this torment.

DS: It also depends a lot on inspiration.

LM: Lutosławski said that inspiration is something that appears in the mind of a composer, and which wasn’t there a split second before. But in order for it to appear, you have to stop thinking, at least for a moment, because if we’re constantly thinking and analysing available data, we create a kind of distillate that will be nothing other than a juggling of elements from the past. However, if we wish to look into the future, we need a flash of inspiration. For inspiration to occur, you have to stop thinking, at least for a little while. This is the technology behind creating music.

DS: Where do you seek musical inspiration?

LM: A very important tool is the ego. It’s the inner child that wants to be the best in the world and win all competitions. It’s a powerful motivator. I like my ego, I enjoy using it. Often it’s my ego that pushes me to work hard just so I can be the best, because my ego wants to be the best. So I respect my ego, I like it, I take care of it, and I think that it’s one of my tools, like a workhorse that helps me move forward

DS: It’s the ego that reveals the character of an artist. An ego has to be there. However, it can also be harmful.

LM: Of course, I don’t consist solely of an ego. The moment my ego starts to rule too much of my life, it causes me a lot of problems. On the other hand, if I begin to distinguish the ego as part of my personality, essential to my existence, then my whole life begins to feel more harmonious.

DS: If we were to speak about your music, about its character, how would you describe it?

LM: I feel most comfortable expressing myself in the format of tonal music based on a combination of so-called cadences – that is, a combination of a dominant and tonic. The dominant, which is a chord full of tension, and the tonic, which represents the resolution of that tension. The dominant symbolises tension and the tonic symbolises relief. This is the system of sequences that functions in tonal music and which is understandable to the audience. If you have an awareness of the dominant-tonic connection, and if you expand these harmonic structures a bit with the help of chromatics, you can achieve the desired effects; that is, you can skilfully make use of tension and relief – something we’re all familiar with from everyday life.

DS: That’s right. In your music, there’s a problem and a solution to that problem.

LM: Sometimes the solution to the problem is another problem, but this also symbolises things that are happening in our lives.

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Wolfgang Amadeusz Mozart - Gigue in G major K. 574 - Leszek Możdżer - arranged by Walter Norris

DS: What music has shaped you as a musician?

LM: My music is rooted in the classical sounds of the European tradition. In music school I had the opportunity to play the works of outstanding Polish and non-Polish composers: Chopin, Prokofiev (whom I like very much), Rachmaninoff and Scriabin. Actually, I could also mention many others: Mussorgsky, Lutosławski, Beethoven, Bach, Szymanowski… Lots of them. This is wonderful music, which I soaked up and which I love very much.

DS: Do you consider yourself primarily a jazz musician?

LM: We could say I’m a jazz musician, but it makes no difference to me how you define me. I’m a musician. Music’s my passion, although there are indeed some areas where I don’t feel confident. But there are also areas where I feel quite safe. When it comes to improvisation or building tension on the spot, I’m able to use the piano in such a way that I find myself in lots of different configurations.

DS: Jazz in classical or classical in jazz?

LM: Well, that’s a good question. I think I go more in the direction of classical music, which means I was trained as a classical musician, then I assimilated the language of jazz as part of my arsenal of musical means of expression

DS: Does jazz offer more freedom, or is classical music also full of the freedom and improvisation that characterises jazz?

LM: They are, to a certain extent, completely opposite genres. Classical music gives a sense of security, resulting from the fact that we get a ready-made score which we have to learn, and then we can express ourselves freely within this score. It’s something that gives shelter, but it also causes a lot of challenges. And in jazz it’s completely the opposite: there’s no fixed score, only suggestions of how to do certain things. And this also gives some security, but at the same time it causes problems of an entirely different kind. Here we have the possibility of expressing ourselves in a language of our choice. Everyone has to choose where they feel better and safer.

DS: What’s it like in your case?

LM: I like both. I think that performing a prepared score gives me the comfort of playing sophisticated music, perfectly constructed music, over which the composer sat for hours, weeks or months, building its structure, writing it down very carefully. Executing this beauty gives me great pleasure and takes the responsibility for it off my shoulders. However, in jazz music it’s difficult to improvise structures that are as complex as the ones in classical music. I suppose it can be done, just not at my stage. So, of course, jazz music has a slightly less sophisticated structure, but it’s often stronger emotionally. There are elements of uncertainty, surprise, and spontaneous reactions – the things that give us the most emotion in life. We don't know what’s going to happen and we try to follow some kind of plan as we go along, but you have to be flexible and capable of changing your intentions at any given moment. Above all, the advantage of jazz over classical music is that in jazz mistakes are part of the phenomenon; mistakes serve as building blocks. Just like in life: if you make a mistake, you can consider it a failure, or you can consider it an opportunity to take advantage of completely new possibilities that only open up when you make mistakes. When one accepts errors as part of life, they’ll end up enriching it. And that’s exactly what happens in jazz.

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Leszek Możdżer, photo: Łukasz Gawroński

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DS: Jazz improvisation – the element which allows you to move freely within the limits of a certain composition – is in fact usually prepared beforehand. Nevertheless, an element of surprise remains in it. Have you ever surprised your colleagues onstage with a completely unexpected improvisation?

LM: Such situations have happened. Of course, it all depends on the experience of one’s onstage partners, because very experienced musicians are rarely surprised, and if they are surprised, it makes them genuinely happy. With such partners, you play very well. It seems to me that surprise can be a positive or negative experience depending on the approach and spiritual development of musicians. The basic task of every performing musician is a high level of positive emotions and acceptance of everything that happens onstage. Only under such conditions – at very high levels of acceptance, enthusiasm, love and support – does telepathy work. The moment we start to negatively evaluate anything that happens onstage, we drop down to a lower level of vibration. And we get closer to material reality. At the moment of high vibrations bordering on love, we can have extra-sensory communication with our onstage partners, and this makes the music magical. We make decisions together in an unexpected way, resulting from our collective mind that has begun to fuse together into one whole.

DS: Does this happen often?

LM: Of course. It happens every day.

DS: And what’s needed for this to happen? Knowing each other well and playing together for years? Are there situations when you have a telepathy-level bond right away?

LM: The amount of time spent getting to know each other isn’t important at all. It has often happened to me that I’ve felt a total 100% connection with another artist onstage, while playing with him for the very first time, improvising with him, feeling his sensitivity and support, feeling his love for music and acceptance of what I’m doing. But then when we go to the dressing room, we don’t have anything to say to each other at all. So, on the intellectual level there was no connection, whereas on the levels of energy and spirit there was a deep connection, simply arising from a spiritual relationship. The interesting thing is that sometimes these are very powerful cross-cultural phenomena. People receive the gift of spiritual connection on a stage, despite the fact that they come from completely different, culturally distinct parts of the world.

DS: And how about communication with the audience? Jean Paul Sartre said back in the 1930s that jazz, like bananas, must be consumed on the spot. I agree, because the time and place in which jazz is born are far more important than any recording. Do you get energy from a live audience? Is that important for a musician?

LM: For many years I kept in touch with the audience, trying to adapt to it. Recently, however, my non-musical activities have met with a lot of criticism and I’ve had to put some distance between myself and the audience for that reason. At the moment I’m more in touch with my inner world. And I have to say that it’s more beneficial for creativity, for stage work, when an artist is more interested in his inner self than in the reaction of the audience. The performance level starts to rise automatically. The sound realities that arise are much more precise, and therefore they reach the listener more powerfully. To be honest, I’m not really interested in what the audience emits in my direction. If I were interested in that, I would have to keep drifting towards people who flattered me and running away from people who were insulting or malicious to me. So, it’s best to observe both with a calm, carefree manner and concern myself with my own inner world.

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Leszek Możdżer, photo: Kamil Gozdan

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DS: And is there some kind of message that you’d like to convey or reveal to your listeners? What do you express with your music?

LM: I have a desire, when performing on stage or composing, to be able to communicate to the audience that there’s deep harmony and beauty in everything we do, and that despite the apparent chaos, the world around us makes a lot of sense and is, on deeper levels, perfectly organised. By choosing certain sounds, I try to create worlds that are harmonious and beautiful. My dream is to achieve the basic function of music, which is to harmonise the human interior – when people come to a concert after being saturated with various pieces of contradictory information, I want them to receive a dose of harmonised beauty that will cause everything untrue in their minds to disappear. Such a concert will enable them to be in contact with universal messages that guarantee optimism, peace and gentleness.

DS: Composing music is something personal, even intimate. Music often becomes a mirror of its creator’s soul. Can these words perhaps apply to you?

LM: This can be said about all musicians. All the values that a person presents flow into the composed music. These are issues of intellectual and spiritual development, awareness of flowing energies, proficiency in using compositional techniques and so on. It’s a complex process. Indeed, composing is a very intimate process and involves a lot of solitude. Solitude is necessary in order to compose anything.

DS: Do you ever play just for yourself?

LM: Yes, sometimes I do. I practice classical music, pieces by Chopin, Bach, and Beethoven. In my free time I look through sheet music and try to listen carefully to what I play when I’m alone, because this is the best way to develop. The best way is to sit down at the instrument and listen carefully to what you play just for yourself.

DS: You’re one of the most outstanding pianists in Poland, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say you’re one of the best in the world. Your music delights listeners all over the world. What has it cost you to reach this level?

LM: I’m a product of a certain tradition. My path in life was such that I had practically no other choice, so I don’t give myself any credit here. As far as reaching this level is concerned, I’m a product of a culture and of the specific conditions that were given to me in life. I was born into a family where my parents created positive conditions for me to develop. My soul and my ego found a way to fulfil their ambitions through music. Fate gave me the opportunity to meet valuable people from whom I could learn. I was always brought up to be polite, self-restrained, courteous, and punctual, which allowed me to enter all sorts of artistic environments. My level of playing is not solely due to me; it’s the result of a great many factors that came together at one time. A successful person is always doomed to many dangers, for success causes one to drift towards arrogance and to start harming oneself and the people around one. It’s then very often the case that God takes away a person’s talent, this mysterious charisma, when one begins to attribute it to oneself. Talent is always a gift. So I realise that at this point in my life I have certain skills and abilities at my disposal, and I try to make the most of them for the common good.

DS: You often mention Krzysztof Komeda’s famous statement that jazz is a dangerous and merciless game in which you put your own life on the line. Have you had to put your own life on the line?

LM: I’ve paid for the music I play with my whole life. But actually, music gives meaning to my life and bestows me with the ability to influence the world around me. It gives me a lot of pleasure and a lot of suffering. Music is the vehicle in which I travel through my own life. I think there’s really a complete balance here. I’ve sacrificed my life for music, but music repays me very beautifully for that.

^{Interview originally conducted in Polish; translated by SG, Nov 2021}

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