SBB - SBB (1974)

Last week I was driving around my city looking for a parking spot when, after 10 minutes of venturing through the urban maze, I ended up in this tiny, long forgotten street. Looking around for a spot I sort of caught this small shop sign in the corner of my eye. To my astonishment, the sign read: 'MUSIC, CDs, VINYL'. Surprised and excited, I've managed to sneak a peek through the window and I thought to myself: 'Well, whatta you know, a decent record shop in my home city. I should definitely check it out'.

Wouldn't you know it, I was already in the shop the very next day, browsing through the records. Turns out the store is owned by a true music junkie, with a real passion for his hobby. Even more, it turns out that the guy hosts a weekly radio show on Radio Afera, every Sunday from 8 PM which I promised myself to check out one day. I also managed to find out that he runs a blog with album reviews and general everyday chit-chat (Viola!). Right...enough about the context, let's get to the good stuff.

With a little guidance from the store owner I managed to dig out the debut album of this polish rock band from the 70s called: SBB (Szukaj, Burz, Buduj - Search, Break, Build). They never made it really big, but they do boast a following of some sorts from the more devoted fans. The group consists of 3 lads: Jozef Skrzek, the band leader and multiinstrumentalist (bass, piano, synthesisers, vocals, harp); Antymos Apostolis, a son of greek immigrants (guitar); and Jerzy Piotrowski (percussion).

SBB formed around 1971 by the young Jozef Skrzek, who by that time has already been working with Tadeusz Nalepa's Breakout (Nalepa on Platinum Grooves). The Silesian Blues Band, as they were then known, began touring with the famous Czeslaw Niemen and managed to perform with him on a few festivals in Western Europe. However, as it  usually is when two powerful personalities crash, the group parted Niemen around the summer of 1973, and officially became SBB: Search, Break, Build. With regular concerts in the Silesian area and frequent radio shows, the group got more and more recognition.

It's around that time when they release their debut album on Polskie Nagrania Muza. The disc is actually a live recording from a 1974 concert they gave in the Stodola student club in Warsaw. The material is really peculiar, I must say. It's this free-flowing run of progressive rock jams with some bluesy piano-suites in between and plenty of solo improvisation. If I were to pinpoint their music I'd say it's like a mixture of McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra, Cream's trio-format sound and Pink Floyd's hazy aura; but I feel that it's just a facade, and that if I were to dig in more deeply I'd find a richer dimension to their music. There's also something really catchy and nearly hypnotic in Skrzek's vocals (which, for the love of god, reminds me of Robert Plant).

Well anyways, I'm definitely glad I got this record. Not only because I have a fetish for debut albums, but also because it inspires me to explore more polish rock which, admittedly, I still have a lot to learn about.

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Tadeusz Nalepa - Bluesbreakout 1971-1972 (1991)

Somebody once famously stated that: 'If it ain't Mississippi, if it ain't raining and if you ain't sitting on the corner of the street soaking wet, hoping you weren't hungry - it ain't the blues'.
Well I always thought that was true... Until last week, when my good friend proved me wrong by showing me a fantastic album - 'Bluesbreakout' by Tadeusz Nalepa's 'Breakout' band.

Believed it or not, but Tadeusz Nalepa is white, he doesn't come from Mississippi (but from Rzeszów, Poland) and he sure can play the blues! I was really surprised that such fantastic blues music can come from behind the iron curtain.

The album was released in 1991 as a compilation of two of the groups' previous titles - 'Blues' and 'Karate' (1971 and 1972 respectively). The music therefore was recorded in times of deep communism in Poland - when artists where banned from public performances if their hair was too long and when the state treated the Beatles as a symbol of western, imperialistic society's moral decay.

Bearing that in mind, I think the authentic feeling of the music and its uncanny resemblance to American blues is mind-boggling - Western records were really hard to come by at that time. Still, you can hear many influences in Breakout's playing - there's a bit of Clapton, a bit of Robert Johnson a bit of John Mayall etc.etc.

You ask: how come? Well, Nalepa recalls touring Western Europe with his previous band - Blackout - and meeting Eric Burdon, who gave him his guitar and a bunch of tapes with 'black blues music' - Nalepa immediately fell in love with it. Actually, the couple of months of concerts they performed in Holland at that time allowed them to buy some proper equipment - before, they used to manually convert acoustic guitars into electric ones, simply because the latter weren't readily available in the *ekhm* People's Republic of Poland. The Western equipment is the reason why the album sounds a lot better than most other Polish music at that time.

The lyrics sung by Nalepa are in no way worse than the music of Breakout. The person responsible for these great texts is the poet Bogdan Loebl who also used to live in Rzeszów at that time. While the music is clearly inspired by American standards, the lyrics have a unique quality - deep, moving, yet very simple.

So, it turns out you don't have to be a black farmer working in the cotton fields of deep Mississippi to feel the blues. As Howlin' Wolf once said: "When you ain't got no money and can't pay your house rent and can't buy you no food, you damn sure got the blues".

This quote frightingly accurately describes communist Poland... 

...Nalepa just found his Mississipi in Rzeszów.

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