27 July at 7.30 pm
Bosco Theatre / Assembly George Square Gardens (EH8 9LD) Tickets: £10
Box office: 0131 473 2000
Maciej Obara, photo: Addarek, www.maciejobara.com
The Quartet is a new project by the accomplished musician Maciej Obara. Pianist Dominik Wania performs with the band for an evening of ripply, paced waves of jazz
Maciej Obara is a young Polish composer and alto saxophonist.
His career started after recording Message from Ohio in 2006, with which he won the Bielska Zadymka Jazz Contest for young instrumentalists. In the year 2008, Obara set out on a tour across Poland together with Antoine Roney, the prominent American saxophone player.
In 2008 Obara was recommended by Manfred Eicher of the ECM to Tomasz Stańko, which resulted in their frutful cooperation.
The musicians Obara and Wania met while performing in one of Tomasz Stańko's bands, and the encounter triggered a great musical friendship between the two talented artists. The Maciej Obara Quartet is the result of their collaboration dating from a period in which they jointly recorded a track called Equilibrium. The piece was first performed at The Jazztopad Festival in Wrocław in November, 2011. Obara's and Wania's common desire for the creation of musical stories bears fruit, and the Quartet is a long-awaited project for all of the musicians' fans. A fresh and unique project of the European jazz scene, the ensemble has already received enthusiastic reviews.
The rhythmic section of the Quartet includes Maciej Garbowski on bass and Wojciech Romanowski on drums. Always restricting himself towards the harmonic element, Obara was encouraged to enrich the raw sound of a classical jazz trio and create the ambitious, mature project of a European character.
John Fordham thus commented on Obara's concert in his 2011 review for the guardian.co.uk:
At the festival's opening show, which took place at Hackney's Vortex club, Obara played a long set with a powerful trio that included the pianist Dominik Wania. A compact, barrel-chested young man, weaving and crouching, Obara displayed an inventiveness and stamina that reminded me of the veteran improv master Lee Konitz. Wania, too, is a real find – a superb improviser with the confidence to toy with an audience's patience. His spacey, tentative opening contributions built up to tumbling melody and muscular chordwork.
The set contained episodes of laid-back swing, free-jazz shufflings, hints of Latin groove and of Ornette Coleman-like freebop. Close to the finale, Wania launched into an unaccompanied solo of jarring contrapuntal lines that were eventually underpinned by a walking bass hook. Obara's is by inclination a free-jazz group, but it's one with discipline and a sense of narrative shape – and it set the young audience smiling. British listeners will be hearing a lot more.
See more on the artist’s official website: www.maciejobara.com