Raphael Rogiński - Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes (Unsound, 2015 / 2024)

By Martin Schray

Raphael Rogiński is not a guitarist like any other, and his playing style is particularly unusual for guitarists from the field of free jazz or improvised music. There are hardly any references to Sonny Sharrock, James “Blood” Ulmer or Derek Bailey and Masayuki Takayanagi. So it may seem all the more surprising that this album deals with the music of John Coltrane and the lyrics of the most famous representative of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes (the vocals on “Walkers With The Dawn“ and „Rivers“ are sung by Natalia Przybysz).

First of all, however, it must be said that Plays John Coltraneand Langston Hughes is not a new piece of work, but the expanded reissue of an album from 2015 that has not yet been released on vinyl and has long been out of print on CD. The fact that the Unsound label is now making the music available again cannot be appreciated enough, because Rogiński’s solo guitar approach to John Coltrane’s music is completely new and exciting. Although the album is full of Coltrane classics like “Blue Train”, “Naima” and “Lonnie's Lament”, you’d hardly recognize them, if you didn’t know that. Rogiński only leaves parts of the melody lines, if at all, the harmonic and rhythmic structures are virtually ignored and the tempo is sometimes radically throttled. It’s as if Coltrane had been deprived of jazz. This almost sounds like blasphemy, but what the Polish guitarist makes of it is simply spectacular. “Blue Train” and ‘Equinox’, for example, sound like Bill Frisell was jamming with Maleem Mahmoud Ghania, while the arpeggio-drunk “Mr. P.C.“ and “Seraphic Light“ are reminiscent of Spanish flamenco guitarists which are influenced by a harsh punk attitude. “Countdown” wouldn’t stand out on an album by Ryley Walker, so relaxed and shiny is the folk/country framework that Rogiński has put under the piece. Approaching Coltrane’s singular, spirited music with a perspective formed outside the jazz tradition, the music turned out to struck the guitarist as a revelation, the liner notes claim. “Suddenly these songs became full of glowing moving pictures, with a melancholy, but also with something like promise,” Rogiński says. Another characteristic of the atmosphere conveyed by this music is intimacy. A piece like “Spirituals”, in which something like a Coltrane melody line actually seems to be recognizable, is imbued with a great tenderness. One might actually believe to be sitting unrecognized in Rogiński’s living room while he plays this music just for himself.

The grail keepers of John Coltrane’s music may be horrified, but Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes is simply a wonderful piece of music, like fine wine it has only gotten better over the years. Anyone who has heard the guitarist’s music with Shofar or his project Yemen. Music Of The Yemenite Jews , with Perry Robinson, Wacław Zimpel and Michael Zerang, will love this music. Outstanding.

Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes is available as a double album on vinyl and as a download. You can listen to it and order it here: