The new trio of Wojtek Mazolewski, Tamar Osborn, and Natcyet Wakili as Tryp Tych Tryo is yet another reminder of the greatest strength of contemporary British jazz—it is a multicultural melting pot perfectly merged with the jazz tradition. The variety of sounds emerging from this scene is astonishing, but it has lacked the Slavic element so far.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we didn’t know what to do with ourselves, how to react to the new reality, what to spend the time on, which we suddenly had in abundance. This strange kind of limbo was extremely hard for musicians, who initially moved their activities to the Internet – first in amateur videos shot at home, then in large productions carried out in closed clubs, without the audience. Wojtek Mazolewski also succumbed to this short-lived trend, but he quickly realized that playing for the camera made no sense and directed his energy towards a new, international trio.
The Polish double bassist has long been deeply interested in the British jazz scene. He has performed at many local venues with his quintet and with the Pink Freud (formed in 1998), released three albums with Whirlwind Recordings, and traveled to London to dig rare LPs unavailable in pre-internet Poland. Without a doubt, if it had not been for the administrative and logistical difficulties enforced after Brexit, he would have decided much earlier to start a band based in London.
The right opportunity unexpectedly arose a few years later when the pandemic restrictions were loosened after one of the lockdowns. Mazolewski didn’t hesitate long and rented a studio near Warsaw, to which he invited Tamar Osborn, a saxophonist, flutist, and clarinetist, and Natcyet Wakili, a drummer. One night, what would later become Warsaw Conjunction was created and released under the banner of the debuting Tryp Tych Tryo.
British jazz gained a huge following in recent years and managed to escape from small pubs on the one hand and philharmonics on the other, finding a way to go to big festivals like Primavera or Glastonbury. It has its own identity, but it’s difficult to describe what makes it different based on sonic textures or any other element of music. It’s also pointless to list the inspirations or names of the artists who had the most significant influence on this scene because its most characteristic feature is drawing from music traditions from around the world and skillfully combining them with a jazz foundation.
Shabaka Hutchings takes from the music of his ancestors from Barbados, Sultan Stevenson from the music of Saint Vincent, Cassius Cobbson from Ghana, Yazz Ahmed from Bahrain, Nubya Garcia from Guyana, Theon Cross from Jamaica, and the list goes on and on, but each added ingredient is well balanced with the skills acquired thanks to the formal education, participating in such programs as Tomorrow’s Warriors, playing standards and learning jazz from the inside without treating its roots as obligatory homework that needs to be done as soon as possible before moving to more engaging things. Jazz is an exceptionally welcoming music, in skillful hands capable of merging with almost any other sound or genre, which became a common language of expression on the London jazz scene.
Wakili – better known as Eddie Hick, co-founder of Ariya Astrobeat Arkestra and Nok Cultural Ensemble, as well as one of the two drummers of Sons of Kemet – is fluent in this language. Osborn mastered it as the leader of Collocutor, musician of the Afro-Cuban New Regency Orchestra, and the Africa Express collective (to name just a few of the many projects in which she is involved). It might seem that London already saw everything yet searching for not-so-exotic and not particularly distant Slavic influences on its colorful scene, it turns out that although nearly half a million Poles live in Great Britain, they do not actively participate in the cultural life of their new home.
Mazolewski finally added some Slavicity (in its most reckless form) to this melting pot. After all, he is one of the most prominent figures of the late Yass—a musical movement started in the 1990s in northern Poland. If it were not for the fact that it had no media support and burned out quite quickly, it could be considered a harbinger of what was to come in the last ten to fifteen years in the UK.
The clash of personalities does not diminish the individual style of any of them, which has developed over many years. While listening to their instruments separated, it’s easy to distinguish the distinctive way they like to form sounds. However, the new context and different configuration of people do not allow putting an equal sign between the Tryp Tych Trio and any of the previous projects of these three improvisers.
In the album’s opening (“Three Colors of the Sun”), Osborn plays the flute gently, in the mood that evokes “Amber’s Garden”, which she recorded two years ago as a guest with Natural Lateral, but with an exotic, Middle Eastern flavor added. In contrast, Wakili densely hits the ride cymbal and (with slightly less regularity) the snare. It leaves no room for rest or active silence but does not get to such a high gear as in the sometimes hectic music of Sons of Kemet – drum parts blend into the atmosphere, which plays a primary role here. Mazolewski unifies the extremes with a short, recurring bass motif, placed so vividly at the front that it gives the entire piece hypnotic properties. Individually, none of these three musicians did anything surprising or unexpected, but their meeting resulted in something new and intriguing. Warsaw Conjunction steals attention from the beginning because of the combination of timbres, creating a captivating esoteric mood and escaping the simplicity of meditative music (although this song could easily work that way).
The labyrinth of connotations sometimes leads through short, sonoristic moments (“Where to Begin”), other times it surprises with a twist towards dub (“Air Water Fire”), then leads back to sonorism, but in a broader, avant-garde formula full of short, abrupt sounds (“Let’s Go”). From here, it unexpectedly takes a course toward the captivating, expressive bass rhythm and a soft flute solo in the record’s catchiest moment (“Aries Journey Under the Libra Moon”). It lets a bit of a swing in (the second half of “The Uncertainty Principle”) and – with the help of listeners’ imagination – transforms the final saxophone arpeggio into a techno beat (“No Going Back”).
It’s hard to believe that a complex and diverse structure like that did not come to life with a strictly fixed plan or at least with a conceptual framework but based on the free improvisation of people who had not spent much time together before entering the studio. Undoubtedly, it’s the result of many years of feeding intuition, absorbing the jazz, Nigerian, and Slavic traditions, absorbing Afrobeat, Yass, and many others, as well as everything that is happening in music today. Tryp Tych Tryo don’t swim in the spring of their inspirations but only fill the canteen for a further journey into the unknown.
This process will continue – the 40-minute-long piece captured on Warsaw Conjunction will not be gradually ossified into a composition. As Mazolewski stated, this music will remain in a state of constant evolution, including the line-up changes – it has already been announced that at the upcoming live shows, Sarathy Korwar will fill in for Wakili, adding his outstanding style in which there is room for both traditional tabla and modern electronics. There’s still so much going on in London, on its multicultural scene, that it’s hard to keep up with all the new ideas and projects, but this Tryp Tych Tryo are worth paying attention to.
Jarosław Kowal is editor-in-chief of Soundrive, one of Poland’s most opinion-forming music websites, curator of the Jazz Jantar and New Music Days festivals, co-founder of indie cassette tapes label Iskra, and music journalist since 2006.