The dark, brooding Slavic underpinnings of the mood and compositional style gave Endless a passionate melancholia
Among the top new releases, Adam Bałdych returns with Endless, a drummerless quartet studio recording full of the Pole’s originals on which he is joined by Italian bandoneon player Daniele di Bonaventura – who is with Maciek Pysz and the brilliant Yuri Goloubev on the ultra melodic Pont de Vie released this year – Swedish pianist Jacob Karlzon and French double bassist Michel Benita – the bassist also features on Andy Sheppard’s upcoming trio album Salt Catchers.
I wouldn’t say it has too much jazz language on it or as much as some of his earlier recordings but Endless certainly sits easily alongside my regular jazz listening choices and I don’t mind at all its heterodox approach stylistically. Isn’t that what originality is about, to break “the rules”. It is stupid to get hung up on generic barriers and the strength of this style is the way it roams freely across jazz and classical. But I could imagine classical stations playing this release more. The kind of jazz station that wants groove and relentless riffery or manufactured “smoothness” would balk at playlisting this, however, and would probably ignore it given their quest is for a style that approximates in some Frankenstein way to an analogue of pop music.
The Endless sessions took place at the Krzysztof Penderecki European Centre for Music in Lusławice, a village 230 miles south of the Polish capital, Warsaw.
A feature of the recording which isn’t at all a taxing listen but nor is it dumbed down wholesomeness either is Bałdych’s use of the Renaissance violin, an instrument offering a lower tuning and distinct acoustic resonances compared to its modern counterpart.
Bałdych has integrated a low-register renaissance violin into his core sound for nearly a decade and his specific instrument is custom-configured and tuned a seventh lower than a standard classical violin. He debuted this setup on the 2017 album Brothers with the Helge Lien Trio and expanded the approach on this historical crossover with Sacrum Profanum in 2019, leveraging the ancient character of the violin to reinterpret sacred classical compositions from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. By 2021, Bałdych was using the instrument’s breathy tone to contrast the jazz brass of trumpeter Paolo Fresu on Poetry. He then pushed the technical boundaries on Legend in 2022, pitching his deep-register instrument against a brilliant 1755 Gagliano violin to record stereophonic reinventions of Henryk Wieniawski‘s classical works. Most recently, on his 2024 duet album Passacaglia with piano genius Leszek Możdżer, the renaissance violin served as a primary structural voice, locking into the lower harmonics of both standard and prepared grand pianos.
Endless tunes are very strong and include ‘Michalina’ written to celebrate the birth of the violinist’s youngest daughter. More generally beyond the familial, thinking about the way he has named these, the titles form a lexicon of movement, distance and possibility. So look at what they are called. ‘Long Way Home’, ‘Wanderer’, ‘Traveler’, ‘Horizon’ and ‘Between Here and Forever’ suggest a journey without specifying its destination; while ‘Endless’, ‘Shine’, ‘Rainbow’ and ‘The Stars Are Closer Than We Think’ push that journey beyond geography into ideas of perception, aspiration and transcendence. The album’s titles act as signposts on an open-ended journey, moving between the personal and the universal, the immediate and the unreachable.
Born in Gorzów Wielkopolski to the north west near the German border a long drive distant from where this album was made, the 40-year-old leader studied at the Academy of Music in Katowice, and started to gain wider recognition through his 2012 album Imaginary Room. Poland has a rich tradition of jazz violin from Zbigniew Seifert (1946-79) to Michał Urbaniak (1943-2025). AB stands on their shoulders.
The material on Endless ranges from original compositions such as ‘Long Way Home’, ‘Horizon’, and ‘The Stars Are Closer Than We Think’ to an appealing adaptation of Erik Satie’s ‘Gnossienne’. Is it possible to ever tire of Satie?
But I don’t think with the exception of ‘Traveler’ that the bandoneon element of the sound comes through enough. And there isn’t really a strong element of jazz language to it overall. However ‘Traveler’ is interesting in that it smashes notions of easy categorisation. And so you can feel the momentum of the piece on the verge of tipping into something far more experimental but restraining itself from doing so which becomes stimulating as you follow the idea.
Actually there aren’t many albums that approximate to the same idiom with the same instrumentation as here. It’s not the same at all but listen to Argentinian pianist Pablo Murgier’s Pazdera Quintet and their recording Gare du Sud from 2022 to discover how things could be very different. If you do you will find this is far more rhythmical, certainly more South American sounding, and actually has more jazz language.
However that all said, Endless I’d prefer perhaps because the violin is more at the heart of the album even with the caveat that bandoneon isn’t well enough exposed. The tunes seem to have a greater emotional impact to them. Ultimately there is no doubt that anything Bałdych does is worth prioritising given the warmth and expressiveness of his sound and the sheer ingenuity of his interpretations and a compositional voice that burns brightly in the forests of the night. Rating: ***1/2
