KINGA GłYK - Real Life

Kinga Głyk was born in 1997 in Rydułtowy, a small town in southern Poland. Hers is a family of musicians: her brother Patryk is a drummer and sound engineer, while her father Irek is a renowned vibraphonist and percussionist, one of the most sought-after session musicians on the Polish scene (he has worked with Tomasz Stańko, Paweł Kukiz, SBB and Natalia Niemen, to name just a few of the best known).

Having learned to play electric bass as a child, at the age of twelve she founded the Głyk P.I.K Trio with her father and brother, an instrumental jazz project. In 2015 she made her solo debut with the album "Rejestracja", released by Gad, a small local label, immediately drawing the attention of Radio Trójka (the state channel known for its support of the local jazz scene, as well as rock and alternative singer-songwriter music).

The big breakthrough came with her next record, "Dream", released in 2017 by Polskie Nagrania Muza (the former state label, sold to the Warner group just two years earlier), and in particular thanks to the exposure gained on social media by the video in which the young bassist performs Eric Clapton's "Tears In Heaven", embellishing it with refined virtuoso flourishes.

The music is nonetheless fairly innocuous: Głyk is a jazz bassist of outstanding technique, but one who has yet to find the perfect formula, and the fact that she became known through a reworking of a rather banal and mawkish song does little to convey the idea of her true potential.

After her third album ("Feelings", 2019), her career was forced into a long hiatus by the pandemic.

Straddling 2022 and 2023, the artist traveled to Barcelona to record her new album at Vint studios, supported by Michael League, leader of the American jazz fusion band Snarky Puppy. A bassist himself, League set aside his primary instrument here to focus on keyboards and guitars, specifically to help Głyk find her own sonic identity. The result is "Real Life", composed and produced almost entirely by the two of them together.

Released in early 2024, the album all but resets Głyk's career, developing a technological, atmospheric sound that is at once dense and dynamic, free of the preciousness that had weighed down her work until now. Searching through League's discography, though, you won't find anything comparable, in case anyone had doubts about the album's actual merits belonging to its credited artist.

Besides the two of them, the record features Robert Searight (drums, also from Snarky Puppy), Casey Benjamin (a session musician much in demand among American hip-hop artists, a wind player and electronic instrument expert, here working with Roland's Aerophone) and no fewer than four keyboardists: Brett Williams, Julian Pollack, Nicholas Semrad and Caleb McCampbell, all well established in the jazz scene.

"Fast Life" opens the tracklist with a jazz fusion ride where anything seems to happen: frenetic bass ostinatos, long Aerophone solos (its sound sitting somewhere between a 1970s analog synthesizer and some indefinable wind instrument), digital piano with acid jazz tones, abstract vocalizing from Głyk herself, and a finale heavily influenced by Middle Eastern melodies.

Next come "Unfollower", marked by the saturated tone of bass and baritone guitar, "Who Cares", a syncopated jazz-funk track reminiscent of Herbie Hancock, and "Island", which best illustrates the record's recurring motifs: dominated by layers of hazy keyboards and distant echoes of exotic sounds, it flaunts a sound at the crossroads of nu jazz, ambient music, new age, prog and video-game background music.

"Not Real" picks up the same celestial, vaguely mystical tones, but charges them with a funk groove complete with slapped bass, while "Swimming In The Sky" moves into broken beat territory, with fractured rhythms and a dense Aerophone solo whose notes seem to splinter against the rhythm section underneath.

"The Friend You Call" is the clearest tribute to 1970s jazz fusion and specifically to Weather Report, while on "That Right Here" the synth sounds are so saturated, high-pitched and tremulous that they come close to 1980s chiptunes.

Closing out the record are "Sadness Does Not Last Forever", built on a sampled drum beat and hand clapping, and "Opinions", the album's most ambient track, a stretch of angelic sounds that on one hand recalls the classic "Deep Distance" by Manuel Göttsching, and on the other isn't hard to imagine as the backdrop to some future installment of the "Ecco The Dolphin" video game saga. Głyk's bass-driven ostinato blends so seamlessly into the electronic backdrop that it ends up sounding like a synthesizer arpeggio.

On this album Głyk proves she can step back as a virtuoso instrumentalist (the solos are almost always left to the other musicians), focusing now more than ever on the overall harmony of each track and the solidity of its structures.

This is, in all likelihood, the most important jazz fusion and nu jazz record of the year, marred by one tragically discordant note: Benjamin passed away two months after its release, this past March, from a pulmonary embolism.

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12/07/2024