JAZZ REVIEW June 2003
K and K go back two decades. They re-cemented their musical partnership with a tour during the saxophonist’s sabbatical from his venerable band, Pinski Zoo. This album draws on three of those gigs. The brooding, riveting "Pool Fool" is the earliest performance, in Nottingham on the last day of February. I’m not familiar with the Bonington Theatre, but the acoustics on this cut suggest an intimate space, with Kopinski supplying some extended perspectives by the occasional use of added echo and other electronic effects. A gig in Gainsborough six days later is represented by "Impresja XV" and "Trinity Meet", the former a gorgeous, startlingly pastoral solo for grand piano, the second a passionate but controlled trio composition opening out from some eloquent drumming. Kopinski is in spellbindingly authoritative form here. The remaining tracks were cut in Newcastle the following day.
Even on the crowded harmolodic agenda of Pinski Zoo, Kopinski finds room for same ballad business, but the keenest PZ fans (amongst which I’d number myself) sometimes wish he’d allow himself a little more elbow-room, the chance to spread that magnificent thick tone and epic vibrato more generously over broader expanses, to develop his ideas in a more linear fashion than he does within the intense but closed systems of the regular band. He was last heard on disc in 1998 with Ghost Music, where his lyrical side was given full rein. Zone K paces the territory between that and Pinski Zoo. The PZ ethos derives largely from the world of Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time, though Kopinski’s own sound is closer to Albert Aylor. With this trio he navigates the other principal stream of the New Thing, sometimes using a light tenor tone sounding unusually like Coltrane. (He even quotes "Cousin Mary" on "Corner Jam".) "Troika" carries us close to PZ territory, but the other pieces let us hear how adept Harris is with a less structured but no less dynamic pulse. Konikiewicz creates consistently engaging and fluent music on the piano, whilst his electronics stand in for the great Karl Wesley Bingham… or, perhaps, more like Stefan Kopinski who, in the current double-bassed edition of Pinski Zoo sets solidly funky diatonic figures against KWB’s pantonal harmolodic fantasies.
Impreja? It most certainly did.
Barry Witherden
THE WIRE, April 2003
Also and tenor saxophonist Jan Kopinski has been leading Nottingham’s free-funk jazz quintet Pinski Zoo for 23 years. The group have just reconvened for an album and tour after two years set aside for the various solo projects. Kopinski’s collaboration with Polish keyboardist Wojtek Konikiewicz stretches back almost as far to the early 1980s, when they began a regular programme of touring and recording. This live set was recorded in February and March 2002 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Gainsborough and Nottingham. Kopinski has captured a big, open sound, even if it hasn’t enough reverb to fill between the instruments. Pinski Zoo’s drummer Steve Harris seals this trio with his perpetually suspended percussion smears. He keeps up a cascade of ringing snare and flashing cymbals, anticipating and facilitating the shifting momentum of their lengthy workouts. The trio share a vocabulary of jazz fusion, albeit with a gritty edge tht discourages any backsliding. Though some of Konikiewicz’s sounds shimmy straight out of his keyboard’s standard settings booklet, his attack gives them a slightly distorted edge, and a crackling immediacy. Kopinski, meanwhile, sometimes smears his lines with electronic effects, wah-wah pedalling or harmonizing them into chortling abstraction. The opening "Corner Jam" is a tense 13 minute prowl that sprawls over into "Night To Dream", with Kopinski ruffling his sore-flesh tone with a rough vibrato. When he switches to alto for "Troika", he’s more evidently in thrall on Ornette Coleman, as Harris underlines the track’s folksy bounce with a curtly snapping tattoo. The restful solo piano interlude of "Impresja XV" is soon erased in the closing standoff between Kopinski’s electronically distended saxophone and Konikiewicz’s quicksilver piano rushes.Martin Longley
THE GUARDIAN, 2 May 2003 Jan Kopinski, the half-Polish Leeds-based saxophonist and teacher, is best known for sporadically leading one of the British jazz scene's rare cult bands, the avant-funk trio Pinski Zoo. A unique collision of American free-jazz, Ornette Coleman's Prime Time and east-European music, Pinski Zoo was an underground sensation of the last 1980s. This group, Zone K, includes Zoo drummer Steve Harris but is mainly based on the duo of Kopinski and Polish pianist and film composer Wojteck Konikiewicz. It features just as much of Kopinski's raw, spookily hollow and haunting saxophone sound, with plenty of off-the-wall grooving too. The music covers many of the Zoo bases, but in a more impressionistic manner. Corner Jam is a piece of urgent, battering funk over dolorous organ chords - and the excellent Konikiewicz deploys phrases not unfamiliar from an electric corea or Hancock album in his electric keys solo. The pianist's linear melody-making is in sharp contrast to Kopinski's, who improvises in texture more than line, and often achieves effects more suggestive of trumpets and trombones than saxophones. Harris is constantly active, sometimes taxingly so; he clatters his sticks, inserting restless, rattly snare patterns and cymbal sounds like nails scattered on to glass. The closing Pool Fool coyly camouflages a funk-saxist's phrasing - like a pop song trying to break out of a jazz club. A little monochromatic at times perhaps, and Kopinski can run out of solo steam once he has laid out all his broad palette-knife effects, but this is music of character and bite. JOHN FORDHAM
JAZZ VIEWS
Month Reviewed: 016 - June 2003 Artist: Kopinski & Koniliewicz Title: Zone K Label: SLAM CD 252 Jan Kopinski (ts, as); Wojtek Konikiewicz (p, kyds); Steve Harris (d) Recorded 02 &03/02 SLAM Productions have nothing short of an impressive and somewhat prolific catalogue emerging. If the selection that has been sent to Jazz Views for review over the last few months is anything to go by, label boss George Haslam, is amassing a body of recorded work that is wide and varied within will the general umbrella of improvised music, and help to dispel many of the notions that this is a difficult music and should be viewed with caution. Jan Kopinski has been familiar to gig goers in this for the energetic outfit that he formed in the early eighties, Pinski Zoo, a band that could be readily described as occupying territory somewhere between punk jazz and free improv, with a slice of funk thrown in. Drummer, Steve Harris, was also a Zoo member, and heard recently on the excellent (and heartily recommended) ‘ZAUM’ (SLAM 253), whilst Wojtek Konikiewicz is a new name to me. As a trio, they take a stance between semi-structured free jazz, improvising freely and collectively, and taking their cues on a several tracks from compositions supplied by two of the trio members; as on he extended work-out on Kopinski’s ‘Night To Dream’ and the solo piano feature for Konikiewicz on ‘Impresja XV’. A lovely interlude which helps to add relief to, and enhance the overall performance. There is nothing in this music that is overtly abstract, indeed the trio operate with frameworks that permit the emergence and development of a melodic idea, as opposed to shying away from what might in some improvising pools as trite or contrived; and will work with defined beats and pulses that allow the music to flow with its own momentum and logic. Another impressive release that deserves to be heard. Reviewed by Nick Lea
Jazz Journal, October 2003
Kopinski and Harris will be best known as members of Pinski Zoo, that extraordinary free-funk jazz outfit that blew out of Nottingham in 1980, Konikiewicz as a pianist, big band arranger and film/TV composer. Pinski Zoo has recently been on a well-earned sabbatical (although it is touring again this year), allowing its members time to develop such interesting individual projects as this live set. The trio’s sound is vast, dominated by Kopinski’s declamatory, occasionally banshee, saxophone and Harris’s cymbal-driven drumming punctuated by the sudden rimshots and bass bombs from the rest of his kit that provide the push and pull necessary for this urgent, driven music. Konikiewicz’s piano gets a little lost in the mix, while his electric keyboards are often too muddy to make much impact (and a tad predictable when they do), although his piano lines on Night To Dream and on the solo Impresja XV provide a thoughtful contrast to the tension elsewhere. A hi-energy set from a vibrant trio of innovatory musicians.
Simon Adams
All-Music Guide
Kopinski, Jan/Konikiewicz, Wojtek Zone K Slam SLAMCD 252 2002 2002 02 28-2002 03 07 5 This album has been put together from three concerts in February and March of 2003, while sax player {$Jan Kopinski} and keyboardist {$Wojtek Konikiewicz} were touring England with drummer {$Steve Harris}. Three of the six pieces are credited to all three musicians, which would indicate their improvised nature, and indeed they sound like jams, but more striking is the presence in them of Konikiewicząs electronic keyboard, which tugs the music away from the realm of jazz. And yet, Harrisą self-effaced swing and Kopinskiąs hard-bop soloing keep things rooted in the idiom. Konikiewicz himself is a man of contradictions, improvising chord changes on the piano while triggering electronic sweeps in {&łTrinity Meet.˛} {&łCorner Jam˛} is a more straightforward improv, the keyboardist sticking to an electric piano setting that evokes the worst moments in the history of jazz-rock (luckily the music doesnąt get that bad). {&łNight to Dream˛} is the only composition contributed by the sax player. An expressionist ballad, it gets a bit too soggy; Kopinski doesnąt have the roundness in sound and soul to make the piece rise above its clichés, On the other hand, his sharp tone works very well in Konikiewicząs {&łTroika,˛} a tricky modern fusion workout, and in the funky {&łPool Fool,˛} oddly left hollow between the keyboardistąs piano stabs and synth blurbs. François Couture