Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes

At Kraków’s Unsound festival last year, Raphael Rogiński was slated to perform material from Žaltys, an upcoming album he had recorded for the festival’s in-house label. Yet as the Polish guitarist played, Unsound director Mat Schulz became perplexed; he didn’t recognize any of the riffs spilling like unpolished gemstones from Rogiński’s guitar. Backstage after the show, Schulz asked why he’d skipped the scheduled repertoire. “But I played all those songs,” Rogiński protested. “I just changed them.”

Anyone approaching Rogiński’s newly reissued 2015 album Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes for the first time may feel a similar sense of confusion: The tracklist is dedicated almost exclusively to Coltrane compositions, yet it would take an Olympic leap of imagination to locate the jaunty strut of “Blue Train” in the patient contemplation of Rogiński’s version, which tumbles like fallen leaves, or the bold, doleful bellow of “Seraphic Light” in the halting cadences of the guitarist’s rendition. Some songs seem to share only a common key signature with their inspirations; in some cases, even that tonal connection is as tenuous as spider’s silk. To those familiar with the cryptic, mutable melodies of Rogiński’s later albums, like Talàn and Žaltys, these pieces sound mostly like dispatches from the guitarist’s own secretive imagination.

Over the past decade and a half, Rogiński has developed a singular and unmistakable style of solo electric guitar. His playing is spare, yet his fingerpicking can make it sound like there are four hands working in tandem; it can be hard to believe that there are no overdubs. His harmonic sensibility reminds me of a garden in early fall, when everything has gone to seed and once-verdant vines slouch toward decay. His melodies are ruminative and searching—doubling back on understated themes, applying minor ornaments or spontaneous variations to two-and three-note patterns—as though he were looking for something he’d lost, or trying to tease out an idea stuck on the tip of his tongue.

Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes, originally released on CD on Warsaw’s Bolt Records and never before available on vinyl or streaming, was Rogiński’s first major solo statement. Over the past nine years, this hushed, hypnotic suite of koan-like pieces has gathered a cult fan base. Reissued now in the shadow of last year’s Talàn and this year’s Žaltys, Plays John Coltrane feels of a piece with them, almost like the first installment of a trilogy. Yet it also stands alone, a perfect encapsulation of his music’s mystical, spiritual energies. Each track springs from the same well of nameless sadness, channeling an ancient, ancestral current of longing.

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.