Raphael Rogiński: Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes Album Review

Hints of Rogiński’s source material occasionally peek through the penumbral mood. The ghost of Coltrane’s “Equinox” moves fitfully through the guitarist’s cover, flickering in the occasional flash of a minor third; the roller-coaster blues of “Mr. P.C.” is rendered in notes that float like soap bubbles, fat and wobbly and slow, splashing rainbows wherever they land. The heartbreaking “Naima” is the album’s most faithful interpretation, its rising and falling lead mapped precisely to Coltrane’s score, as though acknowledging the purity, even perfection, of the ballad’s reverent melody. But by and large, the heads of these songs become, in Rogiński’s interpretations, stealthy hydras, twisting wildly in slow motion.

Just two songs are credited as Rogiński originals: “Walkers With the Dawn” and “Rivers,” both settings for lyrics adapted from Langston Hughes, the pioneering Harlem Renaissance poet, and featuring the plaintive voice of Polish singer Natalia Przybysz. Half whisper and half moan, her voice is weary and fraying at the edges, a dry stalk framed against Rogiński’s puddles of tone. Both songs are standouts: They break the meditative spell of the album’s instrumentals and open up a mournful new dimension, giving voice to the melancholy at the heart of Rogiński’s music.

It would be understandable to entertain some measure of skepticism about some of Rogiński’s borrowings. Who is he, a white European, to invoke Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” a poem rooted in the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow and the hope of the Great Migration? But the poem’s geological time scale—“I’ve known rivers/I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in my veins/My soul has grown deep like the rivers”—articulates a broad metaphysical sweep inherent in all of Rogiński’s music. As the child of a Holocaust survivor, he is keenly attuned to the way trauma leaves its mark, generations down the line. In his fascination with Jewish mysticism, Tatar folklore, and all the cultures that have crisscrossed Central and Eastern Europe and Western Asia over thousands of years, Rogiński is a cataloger and reviver of folk traditions, an archaeologist looking for traces of living spirit in battered instruments and half-forgotten refrains. In invoking Hughes and Coltrane, I see Rogiński as neither appropriative nor extractive, much less fetishistic, but regenerative: drawing upon the supernatural force of those artists’ work as sustenance.

Four newly recorded songs, all credited as reinterpretations of Coltrane pieces, round out the reissue. “Pursuance” is seemingly inspired by part three of A Love Supreme, and “Promise” might spring from “The Promise,” from 1964’s Live at Birdland, but it’s unclear which works “Spirituals” and “Love” are drawn from. That doesn’t really matter; what’s most notable is how faithfully Rogiński has recreated the sound and mood of his album’s original recordings, nine years later. The muted glow of his guitar and the dusky room tone are identical, and his use of empty space is just as thoughtful. If anything, his playing on these new tracks is even more spare, as if in the past nine years Rogiński had distilled the spirit of Coltrane’s music—or, at least, the spirit as it moves through him—into an even more concentrated essence. Far from mere bonus cuts, these four final songs feel like an essential coda, an enlightening new afterword to Rogiński’s masterpiece.