Unsound releases expanded edition of Raphael Rogiński’s Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes. Listen now. Unsound Kraków Starts in 2 Days

Unsound has reissued Polish guitarist Raphael Rogiński’s landmark album Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes, including 4 new tracks. Out on vinyl and in digital form, you can buy it on Bandcamp or at your local record store. We’ll also have some copies available at the festival.

Rogiński will officially launch the album with a concert at Unsound on Sunday 6 October at the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre, featuring special guest Amirtha Kidambi of the band Elder Ones. In mid-November he will perform the music at the Alice Tully Hall at the Lincoln Center in New York, with Kidambi and Jim White.

Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes contains reimagined compositions by John Coltrane, as well two songs based on poems by Langston Hughes. It was originally released in 2015 by Bôłt Records as part of their Populista series. Curator Michał Libera describes the series as “dedicated to mis- or over-interpretation of existing music”. Rogiński’s Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes fits perfectly into the concept, given the distance that the guitarist travels from the original form of Coltrane’s compositions, although, as Libera notes, it was “simply handed to me as a finished work”.

Approaching Coltrane’s singular, spirited music with a perspective formed outside the jazz tradition, Rogiński slowed the songs down, extracting polyphonic tensions, and striving for an intimacy and mysticism that transcends genre. The way the music turned out struck the guitarist as a revelation. “Suddenly these songs became full of glowing moving pictures, with a melancholy, but also with something like promise,” he says. 

The expanded Unsound reissue includes four new tracks recorded in Warsaw in the summer of 2024, almost a decade after the original recordings, yet reaching back to the concept of radically reinterpreting the work of Coltrane. Rogiński’s playing has subtly shifted over the years, imbued now with an even deeper gentleness and intimacy that echoes Talàn. As always, the playing is dazzling, recorded solo without overdubs. The idea for the new tracks came from Rogiński himself; one suspects that he could play and reinterpret this music endlessly, and he recorded them after a marathon stretch of 52 concerts in three months. “Playing live strengthens what we do in the studio,” Rogiński says. “There is even more light now in these songs.”

Earlier this year, Raphael Rogiński also released the album Zaltys on Unsound, inspired by the music and landscapes of the Polish-Lithuanian borderlands. Zaltys was The Guardian’s Folk Album of the Month and The Quietus’ Album of the Month. Rogiński will perform music from Zaltys at the Barbican in London on January 17, at an Unsound-curated event. 

As for the Unsound festival schedule, download our app, grab the booklet PDF, or check it out on our website.