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self… quite loudly! I hadn’t forgotten the accordeon, though; sometimes my parents asked me to play this or that.”
“Then I met an acoustic group, not playing electric instruments, playing South American music. What was exciting was that their energy was not from volume, it was something else; I couldn’t name what it was. And I thought ‘Well, perhaps these amplifiers are not necessary. Let’s try to do something clearer’. And after experiments, experiments, I met people – I was a stu- dent in Warsaw – people who travelled to Polish villages and participated in tradi- tional ceremonies, and who organised dance nights, just preparing some tunes and asking people to come, that were great experiences.”
These people were involved in the Pol- ish theatre and performance-art move- ment. “The matter wasn’t music itself, it was these events as a sort of musical the- atre, energetic theatre, meeting life as a theatre. How amazing things could hap- pen through music, through dance, through going to culture as it is in a vil- lage. In Poland we still have many places where tradition is something people use every day.”
“This music appeared to be the least known in Poland – Polish traditional music. Everything else was better known than the tunes and dances played by people living just 100 kilometres from Warsaw. So we started to play as they played; not chang- ing, not trying to do a folk show, not mix- ing it with a groove and trying to sell it for good money. No, we were playing as it was, as we were able to, and also so that it could be used for the dance. Playing for the dance is much more pleasant than
playing just for listening. You’ve seen the pleasure when people answer, when the energy comes back. It builds something… something normal!”
“We weren’t invited to any folk festi- val because folk music in Poland means everything else but Polish music; that’s why we don’t use the name folk.”
By now playing fiddle, but still dou- bling on harmonia, with fellow-musicians Piotr Piszczatowski, Piotr Zgorzelski and others, he organised ‘houses of dance’ in Warsaw at any venue that would have them, bringing in village bands to play.
“We invited many bands, about 100, over two years. Now you’ll not find about 80 percent of them. That was really the last time to listen to them, to dance to them. They came to play for and teach the dance. It built connections; people could visit and learn from them, to continue. Many people who come to the festival started at that time, in the mid-1990s.”
whole family he decided “We have the gift of our lives – let’s use it”. He gave up the teaching job, and he and his wife, who is a singer, finding no good music on CD for kids, made an album of tradi- tional lullabies and songs for children, and to play on it brought in the two Piotrs. He heard Michal Zak playing flute on the radio.
A
“I could hear he thinks what he plays, he understands. So I just called him. He said ‘OK, I’ll come’. And that was how we started the trio.”
long came marriage and chil- dren, and the need to earn, so Janusz took a job as an English teacher. But after a near-miss in the car with his
I observe that that makes a quartet,
not a trio. “Yes; we’ve always invited Piotr Zgorzelski to join us on basy. It’s a grouping that works, and that makes us happy when we’re together. And I’ve played with so many drummers, and very few of them have the something, the musicality that Piotr P has. The same with Piotr Z on basy; it seems to be about as simple as it gets, just playing open strings, but it’s very subtle, with lots happening inside the rhythm.”
Mazurek and oberek are interchange- able for dancing; both are in the same tempo of 3/4, sometimes with polska-like expansion or contraction of one of those three beats, but Janusz tells me that essen- tially the tunes of mazurek come from songs, and so can be sung along with, while those of oberek are purely instru- mental. And what, apart from that they’re faster, distinguishes them from a waltz?
“In mazurek and oberek the pleasure comes from turning. In waltz the move- ment is basically a left-right swing.”
The turning can become almost like a Sufi whirling ecstasy. And dancers don’t just dance one or two numbers then sit down for a break – they keep going.
“It’s just experiencing the pleasure of the music expressing through your own body. And it doesn’t matter what you look like; you can see at first look if a person dances for pleasure or to show off. Our civilisation just stopped using this way of communicating, direct communication without words. These dances are like old writing by feet. People were able to dance all night, not out of determination but because the tunes were so beautiful, and the girls were so beautiful. What more?“
www.festivalmazurki.pl/festiwal-2011 F
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