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Photos: Pogues at House of Blues

Live Reviews

Fascinating Rhythms

Sixty-four-year-old jazz trumpeter Tomasz Stanko’s music has many virtues: dynamic variety, elastic rhythmic freedom, responsive ensemble interplay, beautiful sound. But one doesn’t listen to his half dozen or so ECM recordings of the past decade (the latest is Lontano) for ripping up-tempo solos and hard swing. So his second set at the Regattabar last Thursday began as you might expect: an upward solo phrase from Stanko, a response from bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz, an answering variation from Stanko, soft brushwork from drummer Michal Miskiewicz, gossamer piano runs from Marcin Wasilewski, all rubato and tonally ambiguous. But then Kurkiewicz began striking a repeated note, Miskiewicz switched to sticks, and they were off, Stanko swooping from his comfortable middle register to high trills and shrieks, Wasilewski vamping with his left hand.

The set had it languors, for sure. Stanko himself plays in a spare, uninflected style with little vibrato, saving the fireworks for exclamatory trills and smears and swoops rather than pyrotechnic 16th-note runs. Or even eighth notes, come to think of it. But the band did move into fast tempos, and there were even hints at Latin rhythms. To these ears it was manna when, 40 minutes into the set, the quartet finally shifted into a fast-walking 4/4, Wasilewski playing eighth-note runs, Miskiewicz leaning his head toward his ride cymbal as he drove dotted rhythms and goosed the time with dancing triplets on tom and snare and off-kilter bass-drum bombs. The drummer was responsive to Wasilewski’s every move, and he drove the pianist to his own ecstatic two-handed climaxes. Stanko’s melodies are beautiful, but it was Wasilewski’s solos that drew the biggest cheers from the small late-night crowd. (The band played mostly without pause and without speaking to the audience until Stanko gave introductions at the end of the set.) Two encores returned to ballad tempos. But they were pretty.