Raphael Rogiński - Plays John Coltrane And Langston Hughes - 2LP

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25/10/2024
Unsound
UNS009

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    Artist: Raphael Rogiński
    Label: Unsound
    Version Description: 180g Gatefold Double LP Black vinyl re-issue
    Sound Carrier: 2LP
    Barcode: 5057998836802

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    BEST NEW RE-ISSUE IN PITCHFORK - 8.5/10 “Over the past nine years, the guitarist’s hushed, hypnotic suite of koan-like pieces has gathered a cult fan base. It’s a perfect encapsulation of his music’s mystical, spiritual energies.”

    Raphael Rogiński’s Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes is an expanded reissue of his 2015 album, previously unreleased on vinyl and long out of print on CD. It has only grown in stature over the years, for Rogiński’s solo guitar interpretations – or reimaginings – of John Coltrane, which draw on the guitarist's unique and immediately recognizable style, rooted in jazz, blues and global folk idioms. 

    Part of a series called Populista, the album was originally released by Warsaw imprint Bôłt Records. Curator Michał Libera describes the series as “dedicated to mis- or over-interpretation of existing music”. Rogiński’s Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes fits perfectly into the concept, given the distance that the guitarist travels from the original form of Coltrane’s compositions, although, as Libera notes, it was “simply handed to me as a finished work”.

    Approaching Coltrane’s singular, spirited music with a perspective formed outside the jazz tradition, Rogiński slowed the songs down, extracting polyphonic tensions, and striving for an intimacy and mysticism that transcends genre. The way the music turned out struck the guitarist as a revelation. “Suddenly these songs became full of glowing moving pictures, with a melancholy, but also with something like promise,” he says. 

    Rogiński says, “At that time, I lived in an apartment with the branches of a fig tree growing into it. I sat in 35-degree heat under its leaves, on the carpet, and discovered the polyphony of this music. I met a broken person on the street around this time. She moved in with me for a few days, a victim of an ultra-religious family from which she had escaped. She slept on the couch recovering, and I started playing. As if for her. I had to breathe light into her life and I did what I do best, and that is how this music came into being.”

    The album also includes two tracks drawing on poems by Langston Hughes, a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s, and one of the innovators of jazz poetry. Rogiński’s long-standing interest in mystical experiences across cultures brought him to the Hughes poems he pays tribute to, poems he says are “full of brilliance and goodness”. The line “I’ve known rivers: ancient, dusky rivers” makes an implicit connection with the images of flowing water and the Black Sea that run through Rogiński’s later album Talàn, as well as the lakes of the Polish-Lithuanian borderlands in Žaltys. Rogiński’s singular musical vocabulary is guided by an abiding belief in the interconnectedness of all things.

    The expanded reissue includes four new tracks recorded in Warsaw in the summer of 2024, almost a decade after the original recordings, yet reaching back to the concept of radically reinterpreting the work of Coltrane. Rogiński’s playing has subtly shifted over the years,