Tomasz Stanko — R.I.P.

[Ron Thorne]

Tomasz Stanko, A Trumpeter Whose Music Spoke To Freedom, Has Died

July 30, 201812:03 PM ET

David R. Adler



Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko, a leading figure in mid-1960s European avant-garde jazz who enjoyed a major career resurgence over the past 20 years, died on Sunday in Warsaw. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Anna Stanko, who said that her father had been diagnosed with terminal cancer in April of this year, and had been suffering with pneumonia since June. He was 76 years old.

Stanko is best known for his soaring, elusively beautiful albums for the ECM label, most recently with a coterie of groundbreaking younger musicians he called his New York Quartet. Particularly through the New York Quartet, Stanko in his later years built strong bonds with young American players on the cutting edge of the music.




Born on July 11, 1942 in Rzeszów, Poland, Stanko grew up under communist dictatorship. Like many behind the Iron Curtain, he first encountered jazz through Willis Conover's broadcasts for the Voice of America. He saw Dave Brubeck in 1958 on a State Department-sponsored tour, and as he recalled in a 2006 profile for The New York Times, "The message was freedom." And it proved irresistible. Stanko got his professional start in Krakow soon after.

His trumpet playing, once praised by New York Times critic Ben Ratliff for its "soothing melodic shapes interrupted by flutters and harder intervallic stabs," had a sparse and often meditative quality not unlike his forebear Miles Davis. But his intensely concentrated lyricism owed as much to Don Cherry's work in the classic Ornette Coleman quartet, one of his chief early influences.

Stanko's writing, spacious and enigmatic but also possessed of a deep and abiding sense of swing, had a catalyzing effect on experimentally-minded musicians such as pianist David Virelles and others, documented on the New York Quartet albums Wisława (2013) and December Avenue (2017).