Alice Zawadzki interview: “You often hear musicians talking about these long-term collaborators, and you can’t shortcut that. It’s a real privilege to grow with these guys”

Looking into his crystal ball, the sagacious jazz writer (and contributor to this august journal) John Fordham said of Alice Zawadzki in a Guardian review of her promising debut China Lane back in 2014 that she “sounds as if she might find her way to ECM one day.”

A decade later and the singer-violinist-composer has duly arrived at said destination. Her co-led chamber trio make their debut Za Górami on the Munich-based label this month with a seamless, very personal collection of poetic folk-song interpretations from Europe and Latin America. Although half may be firmly rooted in those lands, the other half, being Jewish Ladino traditionals, speak of uprooted people. All of them though, express universal truths that say something about the different sides to the relationship between humanity and nature. The trio are equal billing according to the album sleeve, so let’s not play down the crucial contributions of musical polymath Fred Thomas on acoustic piano, drums (minimal) and the medieval Italian string instrument vielle; and Misha Mullov-Abbado on the acoustic bass. That’s backed up by their tendency to lean more towards free-flowing collective dialogue than conventional vocal accompaniment. Zawadzki firstly reflects on the trio’s alliance with Manfred Eicher’s iconic label.

“I think it was a natural fit,” she says on a video call. “We very much made what we wanted to make. I’ve played with Fred and Misha for a long time now, coming up to 10 years. Over that time we’ve built a language between us. We do discuss a lot of mainly conceptual things, but when it comes to playing, we don’t really have to discuss a huge amount. It can just happen. We discuss it because we like to. You can’t short cut those connections so in that sense that’s a fruit of a long-term collaboration. I’m going to be 40 next year and I feel like it’s the first time in my life where I can have the real pleasure of having worked on those relationships where it can be for that long. You often hear musicians in their fifties, sixties and seventies talking about these long-term collaborators, and you can’t shortcut that. It’s a real privilege to grow with these guys.”

The trio initially formed for the 2017 Bath Festival in a commission by then artistic director David Jones, the brief being for Zawadzki to select two musicians she’d always wanted to work with. The rapport was instant and although collaborating in the meantime, this story picks up again in 2022 when the trio decided to record an album without, she says, any specific record label in mind. Fred Thomas – who has himself recently released JS Bach transcriptions for ECM as well as featuring on the label with the Albanian vocalist Elina Duni – decided to approach label head Manfred Eicher with the recording.

“Manfred said he would really like to release it,” says Zawadzki. “But he wanted to re-record it and this is where his instinct and obviously huge wealth of experience came into it. He wanted us to record it in a really beautiful concert hall, RSI in Lugano, Switzerland. It had a two-second natural reverb and the lovely thing is we worked with the engineer Stefano Amerio, and spent some time getting everything very, very carefully and meticulously all together with no separation, no headphones, very much like a classical chamber music kind of scenario.

"When you play in a hall like that it’s like you’re doing a duet with the space. It’s like having a fourth band member 'cause the character of the space influences you as much as the other musicians. With this really generous acoustic, everything was just so perfectly balanced. It meant that I could just sing! I didn’t have to worry about anything. This is a recording that doesn’t have any editing, doesn’t have any tweaks. What you hear is what happened.”

The bassist Misha Mullov-Abbado, messaging me on email, agrees, saying that it was, “as close to doing a ‘live’ concert recording as I had ever done for an album. It was an amazing experience to feel so well-rehearsed before arriving; but then to fully let go of any expectations and trust what Manfred had to say about each take.”

When asked about the recording, Fred Thomas also emphasises the build-up to the recording being crucial to its effectiveness.

“In retrospect it was interesting to go through a long process of preparation - experimentation, play, failure, live performance, endless debates, distillation, the rejection of certain things - that enabled us to record something that met the standard of the label,” he says.

Both Thomas and Mullov-Abbado – whose distinguished parents are conductor Claudio Abbado and violinist Viktoria Mullova – played on Zawadzki’s Within You is a World of Spring (2019), her second acclaimed album as leader. All have worked in situations drawing from various popular song idioms, global folk roots through early to contemporary chamber music projects as well as with a broad spectrum of jazz musicians. Diversity and eclecticism are key to their work.

“It’s interesting that musicians often talk about adding stuff to their skillset, about wanting to diversify to be more versatile,” she says. “I tend to feel comfortable naturally doing lots of different types of things. I think it’s similar for Fred and Misha. So certainly for me the temptation has sometimes been to want to do everything in one piece of work. But then part of this process of working with Fred and Misha has actually been one of distillation and actually removing things, and that feels very much like the theme of this album. It’s been about removing songs that didn’t fit a more cohesive whole.

"We really wanted to make an album that had a really strong identity and even if the songs are in different languages or maybe coming from different eras that there would be a shared atmosphere in them.”

Pulling that off on such a kaleidoscopic range of songs from disparate cultures has been no mean feat. The track selection includes songs from Polish folk mythology, the French Renaissance, as well as an English-language song set to a verse by James Joyce titled ‘Gentle Lady’ with an original melody written by Thomas. According to the sleeve notes they were, "collected on our travels and taught to us by our friends…songs we have learned and loved together".

But is there something else that binds them together?

“I think there’s an ancient-ness about all of them,” says Zawadzki after giving pause for thought. “It felt very natural to have this particular set of songs together. They’re coming from quite deep and old traditions and they’ve all got something of a night-time quality. They’re about the moon, the mountain, the rain, the birds, and some of them are quite simple but then you find intricacy within them.

"One of my favourite writers is Stephen Nachmanovitch. His book Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art talks about chaos and if you leave it to percolate long enough it becomes self-organising. Because the three of us already had this desire to make something that had a really consistent identity, it meant that those decisions were sort of made themselves. We see that process happen in nature all the time, of order arising when something is left to its own devices for long enough and sometimes it’s just good to trust in that.”

Aside from the more modern-day Spanish-language songs by Argentinean film composer Gustavo Santaolalla and iconic Venezuelan songwriter Simon Diaz, it’s Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) traditionals that make up exactly half of the album.

“There’s something about the components of Sephardic music that draw me in,” she says. “It’s Jewish music but I think it’s also defined by the fact that it’s a music of exile. Me, Misha and Fred all have elements of that in our background. There’s also the language itself. My mum is a Spanish speaker so I grew up aware of Spanish, she has loads of poetry books of Lorca and stuff like that. I always had a romantic attachment to it. Then there’s just something about the character of the language which speaks to me.

"Also you can start to see where the technical or physical fits with the spiritual or the more esoteric. There’s something about those shapes as well within the mouth, the body, the space that Spanish puts me into that I like to be in.

“There’s also all the stuff that’s going to resonate with your own personal experiences of that cultural language or people. With Sephardic music there’s also a kind of esoteric abstraction to the lyrics and you can then use those things as a vehicle for whatever it is felt on that day. It’s like when someone asks you to explain a poem or a piece of music and some of these things we can’t explain verbally and if we could, that music or poetry wouldn’t exist. The reason those things exist is because we can’t say them. We can only tell the truth in that indirect, unspecific way. It gets very, very deep on a soul level for me.

“Then of course you have loads of other musicological elements. The music comes out of the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century and then makes its way through the Mediterranean through the Levant to North Africa and depending on where the song comes from it picks up elements from wherever it’s located. So you see these journeys of songs. Then of course there’s this influence of North-West Africa in a lot of the rhythmic elements as well, especially when we’re looking at the Sephardic repertoire that comes more from that region.”

Ah finally the J-word. And if it hasn’t come up yet in conversation with this eloquent speaker, it’s not that the trio aren’t bona fide jazz musicians, as demonstrated by their respective skills and experience. For one Zawadzki, when a teenager, went on the road with New Orleans singer Lilian Boutté, studied for a Masters in Jazz Vocal/Composition from RAM and later performed and recorded on the UK jazz scene. So what does jazz mean for her as it finds expression in the music on Za Górami?

“I think it’s in the method of freedom in which we’re trying to operate with each other,” she says. “The way that jazz musicians play with each other which is to do with helping each other to liberate ourselves and to make stuff that’s filtered through one’s own unique being or setting. Some of these songs are so old that they’re barely traceable or I don’t have a go-to recording that would be a definitive version necessarily, that would be relevant for a voice, piano and bass. So there’s quite a lot of freedom already because we have to use our imaginations a lot in bringing them to life. You listen to this music and you wouldn’t necessarily say this is jazz but when you listen to what’s actually happening between us it’s using the skills that we learned when we’ve been much deeper into the jazz idiom, and in the jazz community as well.”

This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Jazzwise. Never miss an issue – subscribe to Jazzwise today