Darek Oles – Like A Dream – liner notes

By Michael Stephans

When asked the universally banal question of where jazz is going, Thelonius Monk, in his typically oblique manner, was reputed to have said, “You can't make anything go anywhere. It just happens.” Indeed, the making of great jazz has always been elusive that way. Improvising musicians know that the harder you try to make the magic happen, the less likely it is to do so. But on those beauteous occasions when the planets are in alignment, the music becomes like a dream – enchanting, ephemeral, but finally, evanescent, resonating only in memory, like a lost love. As Eric Dolphy put it, “When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone in the air.
You can never capture it again.” Yet, with the advent of recording technology, those deeply personal moments of give and take that can exist between musicians and their art are sometimes fortuitously committed to more permanent realms, and happily, we listeners are able to reap the rewards. The disc you now hold in your hands is one such gratifying bounty.

Darek “Oles” Oleszkiewicz is quite simply, a musician's musician. He is a virtuoso bassist, a wonderfully evocative composer, and a mature and lyrical improviser of the first order. Darek's bass sound is full and warm, and unlike many of his contemporaries, he – in Bob Brookmeyer's words – “plays the bass, not the amplifier.”

His solos are marvels of construction, understatement, and irony, each telling a story in a different way, much like the celebrated writer Vladimir Nabokov, whose own stories often shimmer with dark originality and character. In an interview in The San Diego Union Tribune, pianist Brad Mehldau, who appears on this disc, said of Darek: “He's got everything, great technique, great ears, he plays in tune and has a real sound…he's very open musically, very adaptable to whatever you put in front of him.” Mehldau might well agree that there are few bassists who bring as much expansive lyricism and humanity to any musical setting as Darek does.

Darek was born in 1963 in Wroclaw , Poland , and began his musical studies at age five at the state music school there. He studied piano first, and eventually added guitar and electric bass. Finally, at age eighteen,
he switched to the acoustic bass. It was shortly thereafter that Darek began performing at various Polish jazz festivals and national competitions. It was at these latter events that he received national acclaim, winning numerous prestigious awards for both his bass playing and his compositions. Such recognition also afforded Darek the opportunity to play and record with many of the best jazz musicians in Poland , until his departure for America in the late eighties. In 1988, Darek settled in Los Angeles , intent upon expanding his musical horizons and honing his art. He received a full scholarship from the California Institute of the Arts, and began studies with the seminal bassist Charlie Haden. Upon graduating, Darek was invited to become a member of Cal Arts' esteemed faculty and at this writing, he teaches both bass and a variety of ensembles.
He has also performed and recorded with many of the greatest jazz musicians extant, including Pat Metheny, Bennie Maupin, Lee Konitz, John Abercrombie, Alice Coltrane, Charles Lloyd, Horace Silver, Bob Brookmeyer, and Brad Mehldau, with whom he shares a liberal portion of this disc. Fortunately for us here in Los Angeles , he has been a very active and integral member of the jazz community, and has garnered rave reviews wherever he plays.

Darek's compositional gifts are well-rooted in European classical music, most notably in the music of his countryman Frédérick Chopin, whose masterworks have been accurately described by critic Jan Swafford as “so many miniature worlds.” Much of Darek's music here, like many of Chopin's nocturnes and etudes for piano, favors the intimate, and in a deeper sense, the infinite in music. His compositions, notably the exquisitely wistful November and the stately title track, are particularly Chopinesque, in that both seem rhapsodic and a bit melancholy at the same time. Much like the famed composer's lesser-known Nocturne # 6 in G Minor, or the more well-known Prelude # 4 in E Minor, Darek's music radiates with a sense of both inner strength and longing – a combination not easily achieved by any composer in either the classical or jazz realm.

That Darek should decide to record a disc of his compositions in a variety of intimate settings is much to our benefit, particularly in this era of cookie-cutter, corporately funded jazz that is as vapid as it is soulless.
Here, his duets with the great pianist Brad Mehldau, remind one very much of two old friends deeply engaged in conversation. There is so much empathy, so much trust, and so much music here. The aura of their collaboration is infused with such quiet power that it is quite impossible upon hearing these duets to do anything but sit and listen. In a sense, we are guests in Darek's and Mehldau's living room on a wintry night where, sitting next to a cozy fire with a glass of port in hand, we take in every nuance – the delicate, crystalline sounds and silences of two masters at work. In addition to these amazing duo performances, there is a pair of tracks offering the gentle introspective music of Darek's consistently inventive ensemble, The Los Angeles Jazz Quartet, as well as a mesmerizing track featuring the brilliant woodwind wizard, Bennie Maupin, contributing his unique visions on the tenor saxophone. And finally, there are two sterling trio performances,
in which Darek is wonderfully supported by two of his former students from the California Institute of the Arts. Throughout the program, all of the compositions you are hearing were penned by Darek, with the exception of the standard, You Don't Know What Love Is, re-created here as a samba in 7/4 time by the duo.

The music on this disc, like great painting or great poetry, is something that can be revisited countless times; and each time you make the return trip, there is always something new to hear – some turn of a phrase, or some newly heard empathy – that rewards the listener each and every time. Darek Oles' music resonates and shimmers quite like a recurring dream, one you can come back to again and again.

Michael Stephans is a musician, poet, and college professor living and working in Los Angeles .