Urbaniak

With British weather still persisting in Alberta, though having a few things to do, I started to watch Michał Urbaniak's clips on YouTube, with the afternoon tea, and ... forgot about everything. I brought myself Urbaniak's last CD - Miles of Blue (Special Edition!) - from my recent trip to Poland. I listen to it in my car whenever I drive. But it seems I can't get enough of his music. It plays on my mind almost all the time, and I often hear it, in my mind, first thing in the morning!

Though I knew some of Urbaniak's music when I still lived in Poland, I got more "intimate" with it in 1992 when I took a job in High Level in Northern Alberta. To put things in perspective, High Level is an eight-hour drive North from Edmonton, the capital city of Alberta. The town had about 3.5 thousand of inhabitants at that time. I was the only psychologist in the radius of 300 km. In one of the cheap stores in High Level (only those seemed to prosper there), on a bottom shelf, I found, deeply discounted, Urbaniak's CD entitled "Milky Way."

This gave me a lot of pleasure in a few ways. I have always enjoyed Urbaniak's "modern sound" and "Milky Way" was something special in the lands dominated by Country Music. And then it was also something "Polish." There was only one other Polish family in High Level. In some ways we must have felt like "Sybiraki" - Polish freedom fighters sent to Siberia by czar or Stalin. With the exception that in High Level it was possible to buy a bucket (and other necessities of life). :-)

So, with my wife, we listened a lot to "Milky Way." Then, I rather lost contact with Urbaniak's music until last year, when I overheard it being played in a music store in Poland. This drew my attention right away. It seems that Urbaniak's music, ever evolving, reached fantastic heights. The sound of his violin is unparalleled - no one sounds like him. While being a technical virtuoso, Urbaniak also finds a way to strike a string, somewhere deeply in my soul, where love and joy reside.

I feel close to Urbaniak also because, like me, he is an emigrant. I understand that, though maintaining contact with Polish music scene, he lives in New York. This allowed him to cooperate, and perhaps grow, with the most prominent American musicians. It appears that his work with Marcus Miller was especially fruitful, and kept giving Urbaniak his signature "fusion sound."

Urbaniak's latest album is a tribute to his hero - Miles Davis. Marcus Miller also played with Davis and wrote for him "Tutu" - the title track of the album that set the standard for the contemporary jazz when it was released in 1986. Miller also contributed to Urbaniak's latest album, as did Herbie Hancock, Larry Coryell, Toots Thielmans, and a few others, making the Miles of Blue a particular treat.

Don't miss it!

(PR)

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