Trumpeter spices jazz roots with urban sizzle, Music blurs the lines between structure and improvisation

Now that he's known as perhaps the greatest jazz trumpeter in Europe, Tomasz Stanko is evolving beyond his Polish roots to be a true citizen of the world.

"I love cities," Stanko explained in a recent phone conversation. "I'm a very urban guy. Staying in New York has been wonderful because it is like one of the historic ancient cities at the centre of culture and civilization."

He spent several months living and working in New York last year and again this spring, inhabiting an apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, haunting the city's art museums and jazz clubs. Some of those experiences served as the inspiration for tunes like Amsterdam Avenue and Grand Central (after the famous train station), on his recent ECM release Dark Eyes, one of his best, most accessible recordings ever.

It's a gorgeous album, ringing with Stanko's deep, burnished horn sound, reflective melodies and simmering rhythms filled out by an exceptional new group of musicians who are at least a generation younger than the 67-year-old Warsaw jazz master -- "young cats from the north," as he calls them. Pianist Alexi Tuomarila and drummer Olavi Louhivuori are both Finns, while guitarist Jakob Bro and bassist Ander Christensen are from Denmark.

They've been together with Stanko for about two years, long enough to record and to inspire favourable reviews in the New York Times for their visit to New York's Birdland in April. Now they're keeping company with the horn man on his current tour of Canadian festivals.

Their youthful energy could also be rubbing off on the boss. When I suggest to Stanko that Dark Eyes has a little less of the beautiful, sombre melancholy mood that he has become known for, and a hint of something more sunny and upbeat, he takes a thoughtful pause.

"You may have something there, you know, because I've noticed the older I get, the more optimistic I become. Maybe that's coming out in the music."

Critics have compared his sound with the classic work of Miles Davis. But Stanko also packs an individual twist of European sophistication in the intimate moods of Dark Eyes and his previous efforts, blurring the lines between structure and improvisation in an elegant but relaxed style.

Stanko was born in the middle of the Second World War in a town in southern Poland, but was raised in Krakow. His father, a judge and amateur violin player, encouraged him to take piano and then violin lessons, but the young Stanko set aside his classical studies after he heard jazz on the Voice of America broadcasts, around age 14. At that time, Poland was still behind the "Iron Curtain" of Soviet influence. While jazz music had been frowned on by the authorities, attitudes began to change after the death of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1953. Pianist Dave Brubeck was even invited to make an appearance in Poland in 1958.

"Seeing Brubeck impressed me very, very much. It was a new thing, synonymous with freedom and the American style of life. I had already heard the records of Miles Davis and Clifford Brown, Fats Navarro and Booker Little, and soon I was listening to this new modern style of Don Cherry's trumpet. The freedom, the lifestyle and the image of jazz attracted me at first, but then I also recognized the beauty in this music."

As Stanko began to hear other American pioneers like Ornette Coleman, George Russell and John Coltrane, his own playing began to lean toward free jazz. By 1962, he had formed his first jazz group with several like-minded friends.

"I wanted to build my own style, not just copy someone else, and I saw a natural logic in the free jazz style that allowed me to be myself. As a young man, I was also looking to avant-garde painters and writers and moviemakers."

A year later, Stanko was invited to join Krzysztof Komeda, a central figure in Polish jazz and a composer of film music for Roman Polanski and others. He credits much of his understanding of structure to his four years with Komeda.

As Stanko travelled the world, he made musical connections with American greats like Don Cherry and Cecil Taylor, Global Unity Orchestra and European players associated with Germany's ECM Records. He released his first album on that label in 1994.

Over time, his music has stayed casually loose, but grown much more melodious into a rich synthesis of all the influences he has absorbed.

A sense of space, reflection and the night still flows out of his horn, but despite recent album titles like Dark Eyes and Suspended Night, he has grown into a "morning person." He gave up drugs and alcohol years ago, practises yoga now, and gets a thrill from playing with his new band.

"It's all cool!" says Stanko.