Novi Singers - Novi in Wonderland/Torpedo (1968/1969)

"There is this epidemic of labeling, everybody labels everybody - seems some people can't sleep at night without having everything neatly classified. I don't give a damn if somebody says I sing church music, and somebody says it's military marches and somebody says it's nursery rhymes, and somebody else wonders if it's jazz. (...) I don't care what it's going to get called, I just want it to be good." (Bernard Kawka of the Novi Singers in: Jazz Forum 1/1971)

We first stumbled across the Polish vocal ensemble Novi Singers (New Original Vocal Instruments) several years ago by chance and have been hooked ever since. Their second album "Novis in Wonderland" (1968) might be known to many, for it was released on the German SABA-MPS label. The vast artistic output of the group for the state-owned Polish record label Polskie Nagrania remained a well-kept secret for the Western-European countries and the rest of the world. The emergence of the CD in Poland had a detrimental effect upon the Polish Jazz scene by confining many of these excellent jazz-recordings to the vaults.

With their absolute technical perfection and their musical approach, the vocal jazz ensemble Novi Singers were at the time often compared to Lambert-Ross-Hendricks or Les Double Six. The story of the Novi Singers begins in 1964 when Bernard Kawka, a student at the Warsaw Music Conservatory, decides to found his own jazz group with other students, choosing the voice as an ideal instrument. The original members of the group are Ewa Wanat (violin), Janusz Mych (flute), Waldemar Parzynski (percussion), Aleksander Gluch and Bernard Kawka (violin), all of whom both sang and played their respective instruments.

"Above all we found the human voice to be a perfect jazz instrument" recalls Ewa "and that the possibilities in sound, expression and interpretation were unlimited. We knew that there was still much to be done in the field we had chosen and so we decided to become real improvisers: to create music while singing. We resigned from lyrics, and began to scat. Texts are self-determining and make improvisation difficult, while we want our music to be spontaneous, fresh and full of improvising expression and rhythmic dynamism that belongs to afro-rooted music". (Jazz Forum 1/1971)

PS. This post is dedicated to Bertrand

links in comments