Norman Nawrocki
Letters from Poland

LA RECENSIONE

I listened to the album and loved it. It reminded me of the Auschwitz trains that Steve Reich imagined when, in 1988, he composed one of his most painful works, Different Trains: in Germany, the slow and inexorable wagons destined for the extermination camps.

The bewitching beauty, with an Oriental flavor, of the new solo CD by Norman Nawrocki. The album contains 45 minutes of 12 historical letters (6 in English and 6 in French) from 1937 to 1995, extracted from his latest book (The Anarchist and The Devil Do Cabaret, Black Rose Books 2003, now translated as L'Anarchico e il Diavolo fanno cabaret, Editrice il Sirente 2007).

The letters to which Norman gives voice, between an eccentric Polish uncle and his father, are set to an original music. Norman plays looped violin and viola, piano, and a Polish/Ukrainian hammered dulcimer with 142 strings known as a cimbalom. There is also an instrumental accordion and a traditional Polish song sung by Norman's elderly father.

Alternately poignant, humorous, bitter, and declamatory, the collection of letters tells of a brother's love and nostalgic longing for the other, and documents this man's resistance to the rise of Nazism before and during World War II.

Norman's last solo release was the 'beat-rich', 'anti-war' and 'anti-Empire' Duck Work (2004). Letters from Poland is a more minimalist production, where Norman's acoustic strings predominate.