White Voice, Fiddles & Suka...in a Dub style
Warsaw Village Band @ Satalla, 9.29.04
Words & Pix by Derek Beres

Hearing the way frame drummer Maciej Szajkowski rolls his "R’s" with a unique Polish patois, calling this European village music "roots" and repeatedly insisting its hardcore-ness, you know you’re not in your mother’s (well, for me, grandmother’s) Warsaw anymore. This six-piece formed in ‘97 to pursue traditional folk repertoire in a way appealing to people of their generation. What started out as a group of friends jamming on fiddles, violins, baraban drumsa and the suka (a 16th century fiddle) turned into People’s Spring, an album that awarded them 2003’s Best Newcomer award on BBC Radio III.

While rooted in the field music of Poland, People’s Spring blared with the idiosyncrasies of Jamaica. For these musicians, modernity means dub and their recordings are laced with the same hypnotic tendencies producers like King Tubby and Scratch were fiddling with three decades back. "These beats from Studio One and Lee Perry are still relevant, so natural," violinist Wojtek Krzak tells me after the show. "We are playing just acoustic, so this is the way of wooden instruments. It is similar to Jamaican music: in the ‘70s equipment in Polish studios was bad so they had to tweak everything to get the sound." Wojtek’s last remark regards the Jamaican habit of importing cheap, nearly decimated American stereo equipment and toying with the wires, splicing tapes, doing anything to get a different sound from the speakers. Considering Perry burned down his own Black Ark studio in a fury, we can only imagine the emotional/sonic alchemy occurring within those shanty walls.

In Warsaw, however, we have a better idea. Their live show was much more tempered than on record, but that could have had to do with the completely mistrusting Satalla sound system, for their energy was in top form. In fact, the mix was brilliant (they tour with their own engineer); what was missed were the heavy bass tones so prevalent on People’s Spring. That did not take away the intensity of "To You Kasiunia," a song about wedding ritual, or "At My Mother’s," a tune rooted in the search for lost love and times past. Yet when they slowed it down – as on Sylwia Swiatkowska’s duet on suka with cello player Maja Kleszcz – or on "The Grey Horse," a musical union of Poland and Mississippi blues with Kleszcz changing the "white voice" singing style to a deep bass tone, you quickly understood why such fuss has been made.

"This is the most natural singing from a human," Krazk would later tell me about white voice. "It is like a shouting when you have to communicate with someone far away. It is especially popular in the lowlands, but you will find a lot of beautiful in the mountains. In the United States you will also find something like this. If you are listening to the blues, it is there."

Rounded out by baraban drummer Piotr Glinski and dulcimer player/vocalist Magdalena Sobczak, this band is bent on educating Polish youth on what pre-Communist life was like. In a country that has been dominated by Catholic idealism (whose missionaries have wiped out any trace of local mythology since the 12th century) they turned villager’s folk knowledge into an international dissemination of Polish culture. Their intellectual approach to performance endowed with grace and lightness is symbolic to the very way they present music, adorned in loose-fitting orange pants, Indian kortas and Pumas. What started as a mission to spread awareness within Poland has turned global; after seeing them live, you’ll know exactly why.