Raphael Roginski Plays Coltrane And Langston Hughes

Raphael Rogiński’s Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes is an expanded reissue of his 2015 album, previously unreleased on vinyl and long out of print on CD. It has only grown in stature over the years, for Rogiński’s solo guitar interpretations – or reimaginings – of John Coltrane, which draw on the guitarist's unique and immediately recognizable style, rooted in jazz, blues and global folk idioms. Part of a series called Populista, the album was originally released by Warsaw imprint Bôłt Records. Curator Michał Libera describes the series as “dedicated to mis- or over-interpretation of existing music”. Rogiński’s Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes fits perfectly into the concept, given the distance that the guitarist travels from the original form of Coltrane’s compositions, although, as Libera notes, it was “simply handed to me as a finished work”. Approaching Coltrane’s singular, spirited music with a perspective formed outside the jazz tradition, Rogiński slowed the songs down, extracting polyphonic tensions, and striving for an intimacy and mysticism that transcends genre. The way the music turned out struck the guitarist as a revelation. “Suddenly these songs became full of glowing moving pictures, with a melancholy, but also with something like promise,” he says. 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 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.”