“Finally, someone managed to talk with all three of us,” laughs Paweł Szamburski—clarinetist, founder, and informal spokesman of Warsaw-based contemporary classical trio Bastarda—over Zoom. Bastarda don’t have much time, though. The only free spot in the band’s tight schedule was just before the concert premiere of Tamoj, their latest collaborative project with folk group Sutari.
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They are indeed a busy band; they’ve released seven albums in less than five years. It’s astonishing that the trio came to life as an offshoot of an abandoned idea. “I wanted to record an album with Mike Majkowski, one of my favorite double bassists, but he was too busy to start another project at the time,” Szamburski told me in 2016. After releasing his solo record Ceratitis Capitata, a meditative work inspired by different Abrahamic religions, Szamburski wanted to explore the roots of European music further. After learning about 15th-century Central European composer Piotr of Grudziądz, Szamburski contacted a long-time friend and collaborator, Michał Górczyński. They’d played together in influential Polish avant-garde groups like Cukunft and Ircha Clarinet Quartet. “Michał [had] just bought a contrabass clarinet—I think it was one of the three such instruments in Poland back then,” says Szamburski.
Górczyński himself is a classically-trained musician. He suggested working with Tomasz Pokrzywiński, cellist and specialist in early music. In the group, Pokrzywiński acts as a middle man between Szamburski’s melodies and Górczyński’s deep, heavy riffs. This meandering technique is called viola bastarda in Renaissance music. Hence, the trio’s name.
“We hit it off on the very first rehearsal. The way the sounds of my cello and guys’ clarinets intertwine is just magical. We could play only one chord and we’d be satisfied,” says Pokrzywiński. This partially explains the droney, dark sound of the band. “We love adding air to our music; we don’t have to play much,” he adds—though Bastarda’s compositions and arrangements are pretty intense and overwhelming. “It’s because I’m still a metalhead. I love fantasy novels set in medieval worlds. This darkness is in my veins; I struggle playing uplifting music,” says Szamburski. Górczyński’s first musical love was classic rock—Led Zeppelin, King Crimson, and the like. “That’s why I play riffs on my instrument,” he says. “When I make notes on arrangements, I write these short phrases, genre names like ‘death metal’ to get an idea [of] what sound I need. I’m also a die-hard Portishead fan.”
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Each album they work on together seems to open up doors for the next. The release of Bastarda’s debut album, Promitat eterno, coincided with an international conference on early music composers, including Piotr of Grudziądz. “You have in one place all the ten musicologists who know everything about him. No wonder they came to see our show,” laughs Pokrzywiński. One of those composers, Antonio Chemotti, worked with Bastarda on Ars moriendi, a collection of Renaissance and medieval funeral songs. “It was definitely the hardest of our projects. We struggled with composing pieces. But for many people it’s our best album,” says Szamburski.
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Ars moriendi, in turn, inspired Holland Baroque, a Dutch ensemble with an unorthodox, modern approach to Baroque music. “We were supposed to play just a few concerts together with this repertoire, but they had mics in their rehearsal space, so we thought we could do some recordings. It always happens that way; we just can’t resist recording our work,” says Pokrzywiński with a smile. Their collaborative album Minne is an improvisational journey through the medieval love poetry of Hadewijch of Brabant. It’s captivating music with a sense of mysticism that is both timeless and contemporary.
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Simultaneously, Bastarda took further steps into folk music. This path had started with their third album, Nigunim. Nigun is a genre of Hasidic mystic vocal music derived from folk melodies. Both Szamburski and Górczyński are no strangers to Jewish music; they played it together in Cukunft and separately in other projects. “Arranging Nigunim was pure fun,” says Szamburski.
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Nigunim spawned Kołowrót, a concept album about seasons’s repetitiveness. “There’s a choir on the last track on “Nigunim” and after one of the shows [around that album], we were contacted by a girl from an amateur students’ choir. She said we had to work together and that she could even get some funding from the SWPS University,” says Szamburski. It was the first time they’d worked with musicians who weren’t seasoned professionals. Kołowrót is divided into four long compositions, each corresponding to one season. Bastarda based their songs on Polish folklore, taken mainly from Oskar Kolberg’s collection.
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This, in turn, led them to Sutari, who perform folk music from the Polish-Lithuanian-Belarusian borderland. “We started from [important Polish poet] Adam Mickiewicz’s ‘Ballady i romanse’ cycle, but then we decided to dig deeper, to find folk sources of his poetry, to become Mickiewicz ourselves,” says Górczyński. Meanwhile, in 2021, a refugee crisis erupted on Polish-Belarusian and Belarusian-Lithuanian borders. It couldn’t be left unanswered. Tamoj became a powerful cry against borders.
While they’re getting ready to get on stage, one last question: what is their dream project? “We’d love to write a score for a great movie, simple as that,” says Szamburski. “No, the dream would be if John Williams decided to direct a movie and asked us to score it,” laughs Górczyński. “Just give us two years,” adds Pokrzywiński. Somehow, it seems like more than a joke.
