One can say the best of things about ‘Product Placement’ as of a jazz album. However, it is worth looking at it in a broader context, as a kind of creative concept. The concept realized thanks to the strength of talent and charisma of Kamil Piotrowicz, who in 2017 was hailed as a new hope of Polish jazz music, It is worth looking at it as a concept based on the maturity of all six musicians who put the idea of co-creation above a particular need of marking one’s presence.
To characterize the album ‘Product Placement’, you can reach for such terms as avant-garde and improvisation, experimentation and progressiveness, freedom and liberty, creation and message. In a word: free jazz. As Kamil Piotrowicz says in an interview with Mery Zimny for JazzPRESS: "Many people associate free jazz with atonality, chaos, and this is a mistake. Free means a situation of freedom, acceptance, a process in which there can be a place for everything, also a beautiful melody." As if in a form of a reply, words of Adam Baruch from the website
polish-jazz.blogspot.com come: "Despite hellish complexity, multi-layered and multidirectional structure, unusual approach, and sometimes even incredibly strange sound, this music is amazingly clear and understandable, and as a result approachable. Unlike most avant-garde statements about such a range, this album is a real pleasure to listen to."
Certainly, Kamil Piotrowicz is crucial in this project: he is a composer, producer, bandleader, "(...) and his piano lines and parts of the synthesizer serve both as the glue and the core of the entire musical structure", writes Adam Baruch (
polish-jazz.blogspot.com). However, nothing happens alone on the ‘Product Placement’ album. It is impossible to mention Piotrowicz without the five other extremely conscious and free musicians, the equal-minded creators of this musical space. The collective shows that youth and courage go hand in hand with artistic wisdom and self-awareness, while teamwork, joint goal-setting, jointly asking questions and searching for answers together are more than the sum of individual statements. The words of Marta Jundziłł from
Jazzarium.pl may serve here as a summary: "We have here the integration of excellent musicians, the integration of musical genres and forms, the integration of many extra-musical impressions, moods and reflections. Everything is legibly structured, and above all very convincing."
Kamil Piotrowicz's third album is filled with content that revolves around issues such as collectivity and, at the same time, independence and freedom in undertaking actions in harmony with each other. Piotrowicz, as a composer, is strongly inspired by Tim Berne's way of working on a compositional language that is both team and individual, where each solo is not only an autonomous statement but at the same time constitutes a part of something collective. Piotrowicz, as an artist, seems to be impressed by the character of Howard Roark from the novel ‘The Source’ by Ayn Rand (Howard Records – this is the name of the publishing house founded by Kamil Piotrowicz, which released the album ‘Product Placement’). Howard Roark is a talented, steadfast architect who, regardless of the price, remains independent and faithful to his convictions, does not succumb to trends and creates only what he believes is right.
Piotrowicz follows trends and consciously, though perversely, reaches for some tools. He admits that he is researching what marketing is in the context of building the artist's image. He pays attention to the surrounding reality, hence the choice of the slogan ‘product placement’ for the title of the album and the cover of the inspired Facebook social network. Piotrowicz wonders how these individual elements affect the reception of music and how artists remain under the "dictate" of visual beauty.
Kamil Piotrowicz was born in 1992 in Koszalin and currently lives in Copenhagen. He is associated with the Academy of Music in Gdańsk and the Copenhagen university – Rhythmic Music Conservatory. Two of his last albums (‘Product Placement’ and ‘Popular Music’) were nominated for the Fryderyk Award, and the ensembles run by Piotrowicz were repeatedly awarded at prestigious reviews and festivals in Poland. Kamil Piotrowicz Sextet arrives in Szczecin with material from the album ‘Product Placement’, which contains eight compositions by Piotrowicz, which were created in various circumstances and cities: in New York, Copenhagen, Warsaw and Gdansk. The album was released at the end of October 2018. This is the second album recorded jointly by this ensemble.
