Marek Grechuta

Marek Grechuta is the most famous singer of "poezja śpiewana" (sung poetry), a Polish musical movement that began in the Sixties and continues to this day, although it no longer enjoys the crossover success it had in the twentieth century.

To understand sung poetry and the complex figure of Grechuta, we point readers to the monograph that OndaRock has already dedicated to the artist. This article specifically deals with his second album, "Korowód" (procession), shared with the band Anawa.

After the first album ("Marek Grechuta & Anawa", 1970) the lineup was reshuffled. The flamboyant Marek Jackowski replaced Tadeusz Dziedzic on guitar, Zbigniew Paleta was made an official member on viola (previously he had only been a guest), and for the first time a drummer found a place in the band, Eugeniusz Makówka (a few scattered drum parts could already be heard on the debut album, but they were played by session musicians).

In April '71 the new lineup went into the studio to record what still stands today as one of the highest peaks of Polish music. Solemn from the title onward ("Procession"), epic from the cover art, which shows the eight members of the band marching in a horizontal line while a lightning storm rages above them, "Korowód" combines stylistic variety, feeling and formal perfection. Despite the weight of the lyrics, the music is so intriguing, layered and surprising that its legend has begun to spread beyond Poland's borders and, thanks to the web, is slowly winning over the most receptive and curious prog fans, as well as folk and European singer-songwriter nerds. After all, there's no reason this music shouldn't appeal to fans of Brel and Serrat on one side, or the more acoustic-leaning Italian prog bands on the other.

"Korowód" is in fact an almost entirely acoustic album, but there's so much going on and so much energy released by the arrangements that one almost wonders what the point of plugging in the instruments would even be.

The album opens with "Widzieć więcej", a solo by Jackowski, who, unlike the previous guitarist, makes a point of asserting his own presence. He shows his skill on the bراč - a Balkan string instrument with Eastern-tinged sonorities - layering multiple lines and creating a serpentine weave of strums, drones and note-streams reflected by echo. One can hear both the primitivism of American fingerpicking guitarists and the mysticism of traditional Anatolian music, while its arcane, suffocating atmosphere seems to somehow anticipate certain strands of experimental post-punk (from Virgin Prunes to Durutti Column). It's no coincidence that about ten years later Jackowski would find himself leading Maanam, one of the four historic bands of Polish new wave.

"Kantata" is a poem by Jan Zych, a merciless portrait of the harsh living conditions under the Soviet regime: "I dreamed of birds without a sky, I dreamed of horses without land. Here there is no season but winter. Here there is room for a labyrinth and for a boulder on one's head. A foreign wall borders another foreign wall. On a stem in the garden, a flax flower from the sky withers...".

Jan Kanty Pawluśkiewicz, Anawa's pianist and bandleader, adapts it by dismantling the stereotypes of song form: an introduction built on dissonance, verses carried by aggressive string ostinatos, and in place of choruses two different piano passages, united only by an air of resigned serenity.

After giving his bandmates plenty of room to take the lead, Grechuta steps up with "Chodźmy", a hundred seconds of pianistic march with the double bass grumbling away in imitation of a tuba. The contrast between the music's burlesque air and the seriousness of the lyrics, a hymn to hope, is overwhelming, almost disorienting: "Gather all your ideas, gather your scrap of luck. There, where everything is still yours, wait for the day, it will come again. Let's go there to seek our day, the night flees, the light calls us".

A choral ballad building to an epic crescendo, "Świecie nasz" is a kind of agnostic prayer. "Our world, give us many bright days. Give us the wait for a bright day. Give us a way to put out the fire of evil. Give us the joy we seek. Give us flame, steel and sound. Let us open every heaviest gate. Let us overcome every hardship. Give us the joy of splendor and change. Give us the shade of tall grass. Let us lose ourselves in the rustling among the trees". It's remarkable how a song that pointed to the misery of the present and called for a change of course managed, at the time, to slip through the net of censorship. The power of poetry sometimes achieves even that.

The first side closes with “Nowy radosny dzień” (“A New Joyful Day”), an instrumental that sounds like a dark, martial version of Ravel's “Bolero”.

The other side of the record kicks off with a bang: “Dni, których nie znamy” is today Grechuta's anthem and the most celebrated Polish song of the Seventies. A gentle, baroque-tinged folk piece dominated by violin, it's really an exhortation to live and an encouragement not to fear the future: “Only the days we don't yet know matter, only those few moments we're waiting for matter. […] Search for the answers, there isn't much time left”. The final minute and a half is a whirl of overlapping “na na na”s generating sweet harmonies, but also slight dissonances, like a choir of drunken angels. The voices belong once again to the Alibabki, this time joined by siblings Aleksander and Ewa Bem, future stars of Polish jazz.

A large part of the space is taken up, however, by the title track, an oppressive ten-minute monolith with which Anawa set off on a journey into the unknown. If a mostly acoustic space-rock jam has ever existed, this is it: “Korowód”. The song kicks off as a whirling folk-funk number, with a wild Marian Pawlik, member of prog outfit Dżamble, guesting on bass (the album's only electric presence). As the backdrop seethes, punctuated among other things by majestic, ceremonial-sounding choirs, Grechuta passionately delivers the verses of poet Leszek Aleksander Moczulski, a series of questions probing human nature while also denouncing the abuses of power: “Who was the first to become a hero? Who lived and died in poverty? Who was the first to become a lord? And who was the first to become a servant? Who had to rise early? And who could sleep in late? Eyes fixed on the dance, eyes fixed on us. Eyes fixed on the sun, eyes fixed on us, utterly unsure of ourselves, utterly unaware, we will ask for a long time, we will ask in secret […] Who was the first to become a fakir? An astrologer? A king? A god? Someone from the constellation of Vega will guess who was the first man, and who will be the last?”.

Half a minute after this last question, a splendid depiction of human solitude within the immensity of the universe, the song flows into a long improvised passage, with the rhythm section pulsing hypnotically (while continuously shifting and throwing in odd flourishes) and Jackowski tirelessly grinding away on acoustic guitar. The real protagonist, though, is Ostaszewski, who, not playing double bass on this track, is free to unleash a superhuman recorder solo. No one before them had ever imagined that instrument as a guide for a journey into the depths of space, but Anawa never seemed too interested in canons and rules.

There are unsettling passages, like the wild vocalizations that come in shortly after 5'25'', or the echo effects starting at 6'25'', which turn every puff of the flute into a drone, generating a deformed, hallucinated coda. Pure science fiction for popular music in 1971. Had the album become famous beyond Poland's borders, those moments would today be regarded as one of the founding acts of world music, and would have influenced generations of world-music enthusiasts and electronic experimenters alike.

A true artistic and technical triumph, with veteran producer Zofia Gajewska steering the ship with a firm hand from the control room, “Korowód” effectively marks the end of the collaboration between Grechuta and Anawa. The reason for the split was never known; one can only guess it was a search for new creative stimuli.

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12/07/2020