Remember, It Was Autumn: A Wistful Polish Playlist

podkowinski marsz zalobny chopina mnk_5945265.jpg, default, 'Chopin's Funeral March' by Władysław Podkowiński, 1894, oil on canvas, 83.5 x 119.5 cm, National Museum in Kraków, photo: courtesy of National Museum, Remember, It Was Autumn: A Wistful Polish Playlist

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A sonata, rap beats, mournful ballads and kitschy melodies. Melancholy, dissatisfaction, and existential angst. Here we offer a playlist that captures the many moods of autumn.

Frederic Chopin – 'Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35.'

Let’s start with what’s most important in Polish music, namely Chopin. How did Poland’s greatest composer write his works? His friend and companion, George Sand, wrote in July 1839:

Sometimes Chopin feels better, sometimes worse. Never does he feel completely well or completely ill. Whenever he has a bit of strength, he’s cheerful, and when he’s overwhelmed by melancholy, he throws himself at the piano and composes pages of beautiful music.

This was written around the time Chopin was finishing his Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35 – a work almost everyone has heard. Even if one isn’t familiar with the entire sonata, most people know the final movement, the ‘Funeral March’, which is featured in countless films and played at funerals. In 1848, Chopin wrote in a letter to Solange, George Sand’s daughter:

When I played my Sonata in B-flat minor for my English friends, something peculiar happened to me. I performed, more or less precisely, the Allegro and Scherzo, and was about to begin the March, when suddenly I saw those accursed apparitions who had appeared to me one evening in the Chartreuse [a monastery in Valldemossa, on Majorca] emerge from beneath the half-open piano lid. I had to leave the room for a moment to cool off, then I resumed playing without a word.

When describing the Piano Sonata in B-flat minor, musicologists use such words as: horror, tragedy, anxiety and ‘a momentum evoking the rhythm of a gallop or canter’ (Mieczysław Tomaszewski). Witold Lutosławski said that the Piano Sonata in B-flat minor ‘is like a solid shape – carved into the side of a mountain’. The ‘Funeral March’ itself was written a short time earlier; Chopin composed it on 28th November 1837, on the eve of the anniversary of the outbreak of the November Uprising. Polish émigrés often celebrated the anniversaries of important events in Polish history, and the ‘Funeral March’ is one of the great works of that tradition. Today, Chopin’s march is one of the most renowned works of funereal music. Franz Liszt heard in it ‘the march of a nation deep in mourning, lamenting its own defeat’.

Grammatik – 'Jest Już Późno, Piszę' (It’s Late, I’m Writing) / Zbigniew Wodecki – 'Pieśń Ciszy' (Song of Silence)

Światła Miasta (City Lights), an album released in 2000 by Grammatik – a band comprised of the rappers Asha, Eldo and Jotuze, and the music producer Noon (Mikołaj Bugajak) – is perhaps the most nostalgic album in the history of Polish rap.

Everything takes place in gritty urban neighbourhoods. These rappers vividly recall the hooliganism and wild parties of their youth, but nowadays more mature reflections and problems concern them. For example: how to write?

Thoughts written at night, filled with melancholy, I know that right at this moment somebody, somewhere,
Is leaving behind an eternal thought,
Erecting a monument in words more permanent than bronze,
As Horace writes, in order to combat the passage of time.

^{Trans. SG}

In the song’s last bars, Noon cites lines from Polish musician Zbigniew Wodecki’s Pieśń Ciszy (Song of Silence).

Lenny Valentino – 'Zniszczyłaś To, Czy Zniszczyłem To Ja' (Did You Destroy It or Did I Destroy It)

In 2001, the album Uwaga, jedzie trawaj (Watch Out, Here Comes the Tram) was released by the band Lenny Valentino – the core of which was formed by Artur Rojek (famous in the past as the founder and leader of the band Myslovitz, now a solo artist and organiser of the OFF Festival in Katowice) and Mietall Waluś from Negatyw. Where did this album’s title come from? Rojek explains:

When I was little, I lived near tram tracks. When tram number 14 passed, everything in our kitchen cupboard shook. Once a man was run over by a tram under my window, but I don’t dream about it at night, it wasn’t such a traumatic experience.

This is another record on which every song is full of melancholy. After almost two decades, it’s interesting to read interviews with the album’s creators. ‘These aren’t classic songs’, says Rojek. ‘The songs are arranged in an unusual way. […] A lot of thought was put into every instrument’. Today we would simply say that these are interestingly composed songs.

Sława Przybylska – 'Pamiętasz, Była Jesień' (Do You Remember, It Was Autumn)

This was Wojciech Jerzy Has’s favourite song. It was written specifically for his 1958 film Pożegnania (Farewells) and he featured it in many others. The music of this autumnal tango was composed by Lucjan Kaszycki, and the lyrics were written by Andrzej Czekalski and Ryszard Pluciński. The melody appears in the film many times; and in one of the final scenes, it’s performed by Sława Przybylska (although we see Anna Łubieńska on the screen).

Maanam – 'Parada Słoni i Róża' (A Parade of Elephants and Roses)

Kora and Maanam gave Polish pop culture not only new, inimitable musical solutions, but also a kind of lyricism that previously had been found only in poetry. It’s often bizarre and surrealistic, but nevertheless a commentary on reality. Without Kora’s charismatic singing, her poetic lyrics lose much of their power. But when you listen to her songs, it’s amazing that she can trigger so much emotion in the listener with just a few seemingly nonsensical words.

Molesta – 'Klima' (feat. Chada)

There isn’t much autumnal melancholy in the lyrical layer of Klima, produced by DJ 600V, but can you imagine a more melancholic beat? To create a unique atmosphere, two notes played on a piano are enough. The song features Chada, a rapper who died in March 2018.

Stanisław Grzesiuk – 'Bal na Gnojnej' (Ball on Gnojna Street) / Sokół i Marysia Starosta – 'Mirek'

Bal na Gnojnej, as know by the title Bal u Starego Joska (Ball at Old Josek’s), was composed in the 1930s by Fanny Gordon (Fajga Jofe) – the most famous (and only) female composer of popular music in interwar Poland. Gordon was born in Russia in 1914; her parents immigrated to Poland just after the October Revolution. She composed music for the theatre and cabarets, and her songs were performed by such stars as Mieczysław Fogg. In the 1930s, she studied in Chicago and also lived in New York. In 1938, she returned to Warsaw and lived there until the German invasion, when she escaped the city and returned to Russia. She survived the Siege of Leningrad and lived in the city (whose name was changed to Saint Petersburg in September 1991) until her death in July 1991. Many think that this song is a Warsaw ballad written down and arranged by Stanisław Grzesiuk. In any case, it’s one of the saddest Polish songs.

Contemporary Warsaw-based musicians continue to write similar ballads. The song Mirek by Sokół and Marysia Starosta, for example. Sokół, known as a member of the hip-hop group WWO, is one of the most talented storytellers in Polish rap. In the song, Sokół and Starosta tell the story of Mirek:

Mirek didn’t have a chance to finish primary school
Because he’s been running to the liquor den since he was little,
And he doesn’t show much affection to his two-year-old daughter,
He says: ‘Stop hollering or I’ll lock you up in the fridge’.

Republika – 'Moja Krew' (My Blood)

Punks weren’t too keen on the music of Grzegorz Ciechowski and his New Wave band Republika; many concerts ended with scuffles between Republika fans and punk rock fans. Throwing tomatoes and bottles was the norm, and sometimes fistfights broke out. But from time to time, the music was capable of stopping the feud between the fans, particularly when Repbulika started playing the song Moja Krew. The lyrics are sung like an angry protest song over a simple keyboard riff, or perhaps like a song during an initiation ritual for some esoteric group. This is joined by falsetto vocalisations, saxophone, and noisy guitars. Finally, the song disintegrates into complete chaos, eventually giving way to bells ringing in a rhythm that builds gradually until it transforms into a march-like beat.

Reni Jusis – 'Ostatni Raz (Zanim Zniknę)' (One Last Time [Before I Disappear])

Poland didn’t produce very much electronic music at the beginning of the 21^st century. When the world was increasingly dominated by the electronic pop music of Kylie Minogue, Britney Spears and Madonna, Polish popular music was unable to free itself from the uniform pop-rock expectations imposed on it by Radiowa Trójka (Polish National Radio 3). One of the few female singers who introduced ‘new sounds’ (the younger generation of today probably doesn’t remember this, but a decade ago this is how electronic music was described) was Reni Jusis. The dynamic, almost trance-like beat blends with a nostalgic song about transience and farewells.

Zdzisława Sośnicka – 'Realia' (Realities)

This is a song about a relationship falling apart: ‘What’s wrong with us, what’s wrong with me / Your eyes are empty, cool as mirrors / I stand in front of you, like a glass balcony door’. But while listening to it, it’s hard to forget when it was written – in 1984, less than a year after the end of martial law. At that time, Jacek Cygan’s lyrics could take on new meanings: ‘The realities hurt so much / […] / I’m constantly disappearing when I’m with you’. Krzesimir Dębski composed the music for this sombre disco anthem. It’s one of the darkest works in Polish popular music of the communist era. Actually, it would make a great cover song for a dark wave goth band.

Akcent – 'Psotny Wiatr' (A Mischievous Wind)

Disco polo absorbed and transformed electronic music and various kinds of disco, but it also adopted Polish traditions of poetic song and certain themes from folk music – not traditional music, of course, but the version of folk music presented by the communist cultural industry. Disco polo also often makes reference to gypsy music. We can hear this, for example, in the nostalgic song Psotny Wiatr by Akcent. Zenek Martyniuk, Akcent’s leader, is a great enthusiast of Polish Roma culture.

Czesław Niemen – 'Jednego Serca' (One Heart)

It’s difficult to decide which of Czesław Niemen’s songs is the most autumnal and melancholic. Let’s take a look at something less obvious – for example, the song Jednego Serca from the famous album Enigmatic, which features words by Adam Asnyk. It’s 19^th-century poetry set in a musical arrangement that Janis Joplin could be proud of. Niemen plays the Hammond organ in this song, accompanied by Zbigniew Namysłowski and Michał Urbaniak on saxophone, Tomasz Jaśkiewicz on guitar, Janusz Zieliński on bass and the irreplaceable Czesław Bratkowski on drums. Backup harmonies are provided by singers from Alibabki.

Alibabki – 'Szary Kolor Twoich Oczu' (Your Grey Eyes)

When we think of girl bands from the communist era, it’s usually cheerful songs about love that come to mind, or perhaps absurd songs about trivial things. However, they also sometimes sang sadder songs. We might think, for example, of the description of a blustery November in Alibabki’s Szary Kolor Twoich Oczu:

It’s autumn, rainy weather is coming
Leaves are flying, it’s November
It spreads out in a yellow carpet
But your eyes are still grey.

Krystyna Prońko – ‘Deszcz w Cisnej / Kto Dał Nam Deszcz’ (Rain in Cisna / Who Gave Us Rain)

Autumn is sometimes gloomy with shorter days that dampen our mood, but autumn can also be beautiful. Krystyna Prońko sang about golden autumns and rain that lead us into dreamy reveries rather than depression: ‘I feel better and better here / When there’s rain / Rain in Cisna / Car wheels are sliding / The windscreen wipers weep sadly in the rain / The hollow rhythm of raindrops / Taps at my door’.

When you listen to this song by Janusz Koman, it’s hard not to hum the almost identical melody from the song Shaft by Isaac Hayes, featured in the classic Blaxploitation film of the same name, directed by Gordon Parks. Plagiarism? Perhaps it’s proof, rather, that Slavic disco and soul didn’t develop in a cultural void. Songwriters and musicians knew Western music very well and allowed themselves to be freely inspired by it. Nowadays, there would probably be a lawsuit filed for millions of dollars, but fortunately people didn’t care as much about the authorship of melodies in the old days.

Rain isn’t always so pleasant, though. ‘Who gave us this rain / This three-day-long rain?’ asks Prońko in another song.

Top One – 'Biały Miś' (The White Teddy Bear)

Who wrote Biały Miś? Nobody knows. One theory is that the song was written by Mirosław Górski, who was doing compulsory military service in the 1970s and played in a military band. He is said to have written the cult song while longing for his wife and son (and while suffering from sore feet, thanks to which he didn’t have to go outside for exercises). The music came to him then: ‘After I finished writing the song, I played it in the barracks for my cousin Rysiek, who said: “This is beautiful!”’ Kamil Bałuk described the genesis of this disco polo hit in Duży Format: ‘“Everyone clapped and wanted to hear it again. And that was good, because I was so impressed by the song that I was only able to clearly hear the melody the second time’, recalls Maria Górska, Mirosław’s wife. ‘I cried. I knew at once that the song was about how much he had missed me and our son Andrzejek. We used to call him ‘the white teddy bear’ because he had very light hair’”.

Some say they first heard Biały Miś in the 1960s and the Górskis fabricated this story. There’s even a ‘cardboard record’ (a type of cheap record made of thin, plastic-coated paperboard that was common during the communist era) released in 1966 featuring Biały Miś in a ‘big-beat’ arrangement, with Janusz Idzik credited as the composer. We know that in the 1970s it was performed by a band led by Waldemar Górski, Mirosław Górski’s brother. The exact story of the song’s further fate awaits its chronicler. In the 1990s, it was performed by almost every disco polo and wedding band. Nobody has ever managed to confirm the authorship of the song. For many it’s a symbol of kitsch, but it’s difficult not to enjoy the melody’s beauty. Top One’s mournful saxophone solos are moving, and the version by Tymon Tymański shows that they can be played in a less banal manner.

Kury – 'Jesienna Deprecha' (Autumn Depression)

‘It was supposed to be the most idiotic album in the world, but it unintentionally became the album of a generation’, Tymon Tymański, founder of the group Kury, said many years later about the album P.O.L.O.V.I.R.U.S. While touring with various Yass bands, the musicians used to listen to the disco polo and power dance tunes played in dance clubs in the 1990s. This type of music was experiencing a heyday at the time because of its financial and artistic success. In an interview with Anna Gacek, Tymański recalled:

While I was writing Jesienna Deprecha, I was thinking of Soft Cell and Joy Divison. I wanted to sing lyrics about passing away, death and war set to melancholy music. When I play this song, part of me feels ashamed, but part of me also thinks there might be something good in it.

It’s also worth noting that there isn’t – and probably never will be – any other album referencing disco polo that features such outstanding musicians. On P.O.L.O.V.I.R.U.S we can hear famous performers such as Jacek Olter, Leszek Możdżer, Jerzy Mazzoll, Tomasz Gwinciński and Olaf Deriglasoff.

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