Czesław Niemen

Quando nella seconda metà del 1969 Czesław Niemen registra il suo quarto album, è già uno dei musicisti polacchi più amati.

On 20 December 1968, "Dziwny jest ten świat…", his debut work, became the first gold record in the history of the Polish music industry, having sold over 160,000 copies in a year and a half. "Sukces" (1968) and "Czy mnie jeszcze pamiętasz?" (1969) also met with excellent success, though stylistically they remained in the wake of the debut: a blend of beat, blues and psychedelic rock, driven by the artist's roaring soul voice and the baroque flourishes of his Hammond organ.

For his new project, titled "Enigmatic", Niemen decided however to take a different turn: no longer lyrics written by himself or by colleagues, but great classics of Polish poetry set to music. Furthermore, no longer short songs with well-defined structures, but expansive pieces with a structure somewhere between acid-rock jams and the suites of the newly born progressive rock.

It was only the first step in a continual raising of his own artistic ambitions, which soon led to a shift in how the public engaged with his music: although his increasingly experimental records would go on to sell very well throughout the Seventies, none of them would ever again produce hits capable of leaving a mark on the collective memory, and to this day all of Niemen's songs remembered by the general public came out before 1970. "Enigmatic" is therefore the key turning point of his career, the moment when the "singles artist" transformed into an "album artist".

The backing band also underwent heavy changes: the Akwarele, who had accompanied him up to that point, were disbanded. Of the sextet, Niemen kept only Tomasz Jaśkiewicz (guitar) and Zbigniew Sztyc (tenor sax), after which he recruited Janusz Zieliński (bass), Czesław Bartkowski (drums), Zbigniew Namysłowski (alto sax) and Michał Urbaniak (tenor sax and flute).

Every department was renewed: as the vocal harmony group, the Alibabki replaced the Partita [note 1], while Zofia Gajewska took over production duties from Wojciech Piętowski [note 2].

The entire first side of the vinyl is taken up by the sixteen minutes of "Bema pamięci żałobny – rapsod" ("Funeral Rhapsody in Memory of Bem"), an adaptation of a poem by Cyprian Norwid dedicated to General Józef Bem, a choice that was anything but random.

Bem was one of the greatest Polish military leaders and is regarded as a hero both at home and in Hungary: he fought for the former during the November Uprising of 1830-31 and for the latter during the revolution of 1848-49, and in both cases he was defeated by the Russian army due to its overwhelming numerical superiority, yet he showed great valor, managing to limit the damage and hold off the enemy down to the very last stretch of ground. In short, he was a man capable of handling dramatic situations with great clarity of mind.

It's no surprise that Niemen chose to transpose Bem onto the Poland of 1969, once again under the Russian yoke, a situation in which protest songs could be risked only as long as they didn't become too specific. The stratagem was foolproof: by using a eulogy written in 1851 and known by heart to any educated Pole, Niemen shielded himself from the Soviet muzzle. Censoring it would have meant censoring Norwid, and by extension Polish poetry itself, which was simply not feasible, especially given how widely known it was [note 3].

The track opens like a sort of deconstructed mass, with a backdrop of Hammond organ set to a cathedral-like tone, constantly cut through by dissonance, chaotic percussion and tolling bells. A church choir, conducted by academic professor Romuald Miazga, occasionally comes in, repeating a Latin motto of Hannibal that Norwid had originally paired with the poem: “Iusiurandum, patri datum, usque ad hanc diem ita servavi” (“The oath I swore to my father I have kept to this day”).

Niemen's voice enters at 7'44", finally intoning Norwid's verses [note 4], and the song takes on a more regular structure, with the entrance of the rhythm section (whose hypnotic, jazzy groove sounds like a forerunner of trip hop), the Hammond's tone gradually growing more saturated, a tireless blues guitar embroidering solos in the background, and Miazga's choir pouring itself into monotone chanting, until everything is swept up in the grand finale. The result ranks among the great suites of early progressive rock.

The second side of the vinyl contains three tracks and opens with “Jednego serca” (“One Heart”) by Adam Asnyk, a less demanding text than the previous one, being a rather straightforward love poem. The author, however, is another local hero, among the leading figures of the January Uprising of 1863-64, once again against the Tsarist forces.

Niemen turns it into a powerful jazz-rock march, with his bluesy, percussive Hammond patterns, driven along by the swirling tremolo of the Leslie speaker, leading the Alibabki's choruses (in which airy soul harmonies mix with a whistling register) and the constant back-and-forth between blues guitar and intense saxophone solos, worthy of the finest spiritual jazz of the era. It would become the album's best-known track.

“Kwiaty ojczyste” (“Flowers of My Homeland”) is the only text written specifically for the album, but it bears the signature of a giant of postwar poetry, Tadeusz Kubiak, who by then had already been knighted by the Polish People's Republic.

Niemen sings of the beauty of his country by describing its varieties of flowers, in yet another surge of patriotic love that hints at a longing for freedom from Soviet pressure:

Flowers on the Vistula river in Mazovia,

daisies, violets and marigolds,

green hilltops above Warsaw,

garlands of flowers on the houses,

flowers on the Oder river, groves, roses,

a hundred colored peacock feathers

in the parks of Szczecin and Opole,

in small gardens near Wrocław.

Viburnum, mallow from Białystok,

in Lublin, luxuriant vineyards,

golden mullein near Zamość

and white orchards in Kazimierz,

flowers on the rivers Vistula, Narew and Bug,

gathered by the sun, by the moon,

I love you, flowers of my homeland,

on the rivers Narew, Oder and Pilica.

Musically similar to the previous track, it nonetheless leaves more room for improvisation, with the Alibabki repeating "la la la" over long stretches, punctuated or backed by digressions from saxophones, guitar and flute.

Closing the album is "Mów do mnie jeszcze" ("Keep Talking to Me"), a delicate love poem by Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer, a leading figure of the Young Poland movement who lived at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Niemen turns it into the album's only ballad, a romantic blues rock number that's decidedly more straightforward than the rest of the tracklist, but no less passionate.

"Enigmatic" was unveiled at the end of 1969 in a special for Polish television, shot in colour but broadcast in black and white (see the attached videos). On 19 January 1970 the LP finally hit the shops, wrapped in an iconic cover showing the artist bent over the Hammond organ like the Phantom of the Opera.

The following year it was certified gold for surpassing 125,000 copies sold (updated sales figures are unfortunately not available, but it has been reissued at least ten times since 1973).

Its importance lies not only in the pivotal position it occupies in Niemen's career, or in the commercial impact it achieved despite complex, experimental content, but also in the influence it had on Polish culture: it is essentially the album that inaugurated local progressive rock (ahead, for instance, of the Italian school), as well as marking the first appearance on a rock record for two of the most important jazz musicians in Polish history, Namysłowski and Urbaniak (the latter in particular would go on to gain international fame after emigrating to the United States in 1973).

While in Poland he is a national icon, Niemen can today also boast a considerable cult following among progressive rock enthusiasts around the world, with "Enigmatic" serving as the bridgehead. Several other brilliant albums followed nonetheless, in a journey full of curiosity and adventure that would eventually lead him to the futuristic electronic sound of "Niemen Aerolit (N.Æ.)" (1975).

The commercial fortunes of his albums of new material would wane with the onset of the 1980s, but anthologies of his old classics would go on to rack up impressive numbers in the decades that followed, even after his death in 2004 from lymphatic system cancer: the compilation "Złota kolekcja: Czas jak rzeka" reached number 1 as recently as 16 June 2016.

Note 1: Alibabki and Partita were prolific vocal groups, the former all-female and the latter mixed, with careers split between their own records and backing the era's most important solo singers. The Alibabki in particular are a legendary name in local culture.

Note 2: Gajewska and Piętowski were two of the most important producers in the history of Polish popular music. The former, in particular, was already encountered at the production helm of another OndaRock milestone: “Korowód” by Marek Grechuta & Anawa. 

Note 3: throughout the twentieth century, poetry in Poland enjoyed a social role that is hard to grasp from the outside, with a reach that extended even to the most disadvantaged social classes. One example above all: during the Soviet era, workers' protests often took the form of gatherings where the great classics of poetry were read aloud, if not unpublished pieces written for the occasion by local intellectuals or, quite simply, by any participant.

Local singer-songwriter music itself was born as a variant of poetry, so much so that it is still referred to today as poezja śpiewana (sung poetry).

Note 4: the best Italian translation available online is the one from Paolo Statuti's blog “Un'anima e tre ali,” available at the following link.

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24/03/2022