Piotr Schmidt International Sextet - Hearsay

Hearsay - is the title of jazz trumpeter Piotr Schmidt’s 16th album. After Komeda Unknown 1967, which showed Schmidt as a brilliant arranger, the time has come to invite listeners once again into the world of Piotr's original music. This time it's an emotional journey full of secrets and things left unsaid…

Piotr Schmidt International Sextet

Piotr Schmidt – trumpet, composer (1, 2, 4, 5, 6)
Kęstutis Vaiginis – tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone
David Dorużka – electric guitar
Paweł Tomaszewski – piano
Michał Barański – double bass (3, 4, 6)
Sebastian Kuchczyński – drums (3, 4, 6)

Guest appearances:

Harish Raghavan – double bass (1, 2, 5)
Jonathan Barber – drums (1, 2, 5)
Bartosz Pieszka – composer (3)

Hearsay is an album without an expiration date, one that we return to like the most durable fragments of memory. Secret deposits of the best memories, from which we can recreate a backup copy of the place and time when we felt... in the right place and at the right time. The wonderful power of sound played with the thought of human fragility and sensitivity. Beautiful.

Jacek Sołkiewicz

(...)"Piotr Schmidt - including being the winner of the Nowa Nadzieja Jazzu competition in Łomża in 2010 - is currently one of the most creative Polish musicians. He will turn 39 in June, and the latest album that I would like to present is already the sixteenth in his artistic achievements. And - like the previous ones - excellent! The recognition of this album is evidenced by great reviews, but also by its victory in many surveys for the best jazz album of the past year in Poland. (...) In my opinion, there are few albums in Polish jazz , on which the band sounds as uniform and coherent as on "Hearsay". Piotr Schmidt Music has achieved real mastery in this." (...)

Mirek Dziewa Broadcast "Closer to Jazz" (Radio Nadzieja).

Hearsay is 3rd best jazz album of 2023 in Poland according to Jazz Top Poll by Jazz Forum Magazine!

Hearsay is the best jazz album of 2023 in Poland according to the magazine Polska Płyta Polska Muzyka!

Hearsay is the best jazz album of 2023 in Poland according to the annual poll by Adam Dobrzyński (Polish Radio I)!

Schmidt's new album consists of stories that revolve around artists, their lives and achievements. The title refers to unconfirmed rumors, misunderstandings and misperceptions. The album becomes a space for the artist to clash with these subjectivities through music, to try to see the naked truth, and perhaps succeed without ever really knowing for sure.

Each composition on the album refers to a different rumor - so it is not surprising that the trumpeter conveys each in a different way. He uses various jazz styles for this purpose - from spatial melancholy to energetic, condensed improvisations.

And so, we open with Harish Raghavan's harsh double bass intro - Unwanted Truth - a musical translation of the mechanism of repression. Slow Motion, penned by Schmidt's school friend Bartosz Pieszka, decelerates life; shows us a life lived in sleep and stagnation, in our own world, for better and for worse: ignorance can be a blessing. This Is Not Real is another, after Unwanted Truth, rejection of reality. Disbelieving the obvious, denial: these emotions often accompany us when someone very close to us dies.

Good Old Roy breaks away from the main narrative and is a tribute to Schmidt's great inspiration, Roy Hargrove, who inspired the creation of the Schmidt Electric team in 2011. Through this composition, the leader highlights the merging of two lines of his musical development, the electro-groove and acoustic-spatial jazz. A new quality emerges, of which this album is a manifestation.

Full of contrasting feelings: hope and doubt; stubbornness and resignation, Never Give Up, Sometimes Let Go offers the key message of this album.

The leitmotif and title of the album are related to the idea that there is no objective truth, only subjective perception of reality. This concept is one of the fundamental philosophical and epistemological positions. It suggests that our perception and interpretation of the world depends on our experiences, beliefs, values, emotions and a social context.

Even if we are all looking at the same object or event, each person may perceive different aspects, focus on different details and draw individual conclusions. Our perception is shaped by our concepts, beliefs and emotions that influence the way we perceive and interpret the world.

In addition, the cultural and social perspective plays an important role in our perception of the world. Our values, social norms, traditions and cultural context influence how we interpret and understand the different meanings of life. What may be true in one culture or community may be completely different from what is considered true in another.

However, it is worth noting that the non-recognition of objective truth does not mean that there are no universal truths or some objective criteria for evaluation. There are features of reality that can be verified and confirmed using scientific research methods, mathematics or logic. Although even in these fields, our subjective perceptions and interpretations can influence the way we perceive and understand these objective facts.

Hearsay is an album that encourages listeners to immerse themselves in the mysterious world of jazz stories, full of unusual stories, but also the accompanying uncertainty. Piotr Schmidt believes that his music will primarily stimulate the imagination of listeners and become a new prism in accepting the truth.

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