A room with a view
"Quand tu ne sais pas où tu vas, arrête-toi et regarde d'où tu viens”. That Senegalese proverb is the sentence with which she leads her career’s information. Her album Antichambre (2010) is very faithful to that principle, opening the doors of a great composing talent. Her hands give us piano tunes that create a beautiful view on our daily windows.
Classically trained in her own city, Brussels, her concern has always been to play also in the fields of jazz and contemporary music, with improvisation as an important element in her composition. In 2007 she composed live the music for a contemporary dance show in the Lefthand - Try Out Festival VCA Brussels. Later, compositional collaborations with guitarist Catherine Struys arrived within the Reine Ensemble Kameleon of which she is a founding member. Together they create music that she qualifies as a soundtrack for its literary inspiration in the novel "Music for Chameleons" by Truman Capote.
Her first record Antichambre is defined by herself as “consisted of pieces for piano solo, we find a writing of a minimalist vein and tinged with a composed improvisation, the beat there is out of a classical frame many times to make itself intimist and closer”. And it is indeed, her music embraces you and takes you on dance by views that flow on within you and without you.
Hospitalité starts the album drawing a landscape that you feel far but close at the same time. Our memories emerge as well as our defeats and losses which back to us locking for their lost home. All becomes nothing and then it starts our journey to the rest of our lives. Its beauty is staggering, even more direct. Grażyna is deeply sensitive composing tunes and that shows us a personality in full bloom and wide open to life.
Hospitalité starts the album drawing a landscape that you feel far but close at the same time. Our memories emerge as well as our defeats and losses which back to us locking for their lost home. All becomes nothing and then it starts our journey to the rest of our lives. Its beauty is staggering, even more direct. Grażyna is deeply sensitive composing tunes and that shows us a personality in full bloom and wide open to life.
Three interludes under the title Short cut increase our desire to know more of her works. She draws on influences such as Michael Nyman, Philip Glass and a classic as Kurt Weill describing her own music as a path between the visual and musical language.
Another piece, Ballade pour Harper Lee, is really touching. Its minimalist cadenza paints our landscape vital in an irremediable loneliness. We all know that’s the way it really is, the rain is always present within us, but heard in her notes becomes implacable truth. Still, the gloom can be sweet when we are able to understand it as our own, as the end of something good and a growth of our soul, as the music of Grażyna which opens for us windows with a new view where to pour our lives.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photos by Frédéric Oszczak-SOFAM
Photos by Frédéric Oszczak-SOFAM