| urbanology |

If you didn’t know beforehand, it would be hard to tell after the first listening that Skalpel weren’t actually a hot jazz combo. But Skalpel is only a duo from Poland, consisting of Marcin Cichy and Igor Pudio. Their second release from 2005 is for jazz fans and beat-heads both, “Konfusion” offers a dizzying variety of highlights for your greedy enjoyment. This Polish crate-digging duo is doing their cut and paste work so awesome, that you can practically feel the warm smoke from the interior of the jazz club waving over to your table near the bar. There are no borders between Jazz, Hip-Hop beats and Electronic for Skalpel, I guess it is not that wrong to call it fusion, but this will be definitely and irrefutibly jazz for most of the listeners, mmmmh well, I will call it Trip Jazz.

Whatever, it is more interesting that Skalpel did use a lot of old polish Jazz recordings for “Konfusion”. I really was surprised to hear that – this polish jazz scene must have been quite big and good to offer such a repertoire to produce a record like this one. But shame on me, I have to admit I never heard about if before, but after some reading and digging I found a lot about an interesting Jazz scene in Poland, which even reaches back to the 1920s and was also lively after the second world war and still is today. Under the socialist regime Poland had the most important Jazz scene from the eastern countries and the annually “Jazz Jamboree” festival in Warsaw was and is a prominent platform for the interchange of eastern and western Jazz scenes. If you want to read a short history of the festival, click here. Enjoy this laid-back record and maybe you will start to research on polish Jazz after listening to Skalpel.

Na zdrowie!