I don’t envy music critics even though their job may seem like a dream come true.
But that’s because I find putting too many words into describing music can suck the mystery out of it and I want/need all the mystery I can get left in. Which is one reason I enjoy writing about the experience of listening to music through a hifi, as counterintuitive as that may seem.
Polish guitarist Raphael Rogiński Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes is like saying Piet Mondrian paints Willem de Kooning and T. S. Eliot—with such a strong personal voice/vision we get more of the interpreter than the interpreted. Here, Coltrane and Hughes are angels hovering over these works casting more light than shadow.
Rogiński says, “At that time, I lived in an apartment with the branches of a fig tree growing into it. I sat in 35-degree heat under its leaves, on the carpet, and discovered the polyphony of this music. I met a broken person on the street around this time. She moved in with me for a few days, a victim of an ultra-religious family from which she had escaped. She slept on the couch all day, recovering, and I started playing. As if for her. I had to breathe light into her life and I did what I do best, and that is how this music came into being.”
