Schmidt / Święs / Frankiewicz – Ether. Premiere September 26, 2025 (SJRecords 087)

Don't play what's there, play what's not there". 

 - Miles Davis

Only in this store the album “Ether” is available with Piotr Schmidt’s autograph!

The album available on CD, in streaming services, and as Hi-Res WAV files (24 bit / 96 kHz) with full artwork to download!

Vinyl, a 180 g numbered LP in audiophile quality, limited to 300 copies (CLEAR version), is now in pre-order!
LP premiere: October 16.

The record is an improvisation of three outstanding instrumentalists, in which the artists paint sonic and emotional spaces in real time, spontaneously developing emerging motifs and exploring energetic and expressive planes, often touching on subtleties and tonal details. The key to this album is the constant interaction and an almost metaphysical sense of the moment.

– Adam Dobrzyński (Polish Radio One, Ale Muzyka portal)

Line-up:
Piotr Schmidt – trumpet
Andrzej Święs – double bass
Sebastian Frankiewicz – drums

Ether is a display of creativity and shared musical sensitivity by three artists blessed with extraordinary imagination. There is a vast space within it, filled by the musicians with their parts. It is a mysterious world, inviting the listener into improvisation and artistic intuition.

– Marek Romański, Jazz Forum

At the heart of jazz lie emotion and improvisation. This is how three remarkable instrumentalists approached the joint task of reading emotions and building sounds and moods, dictated by fleeting melodic and harmonic ideas, creating a new kind of creative expression. The music unfolds as if at its own natural pace, yet within a discipline that explores the ideas of the trumpeter, bassist, and drummer. It is a brilliant lesson in humility toward the awakened improvisation and the sounds created in the fascinating, beautiful dialogue between musicians.

© Dionizy Piątkowski / Era Jazzu

The music on Ether is OUTSTANDING! I put it on, sat down in an armchair, and didn’t move – not only until the last note of “Ether 8” – but for quite a while afterwards… My sincere congratulations!

– Mirosław Dziewa (Radio Nowa Nadzieja, Novum Jazz Festival, Łomża)

If Piotr Schmidt had been born 30 years earlier, today his albums would be part of the canon of Polish jazz music, and we would mention his name in the same breath as Komeda, Stańko, Ptaszyn (...). I won’t beat around the bush: this is one of the best albums I have ever heard in my life – the material resonates one hundred percent both with my musical expectations and with my sense of sonic aesthetics.

– Robert Kazubal (Jazzda.net BLOG)

The album “Ether” emerges as an open project, free from rigid frames and predictable structures. Instead of orderly forms, we receive compositions built on spontaneity and intuition, boldly heading toward experiment. You won’t find here the classical approach to form; instead, there are seemingly minor nuances that create a coherent concept, based mainly on contemplation and subtlety. (…) The album “Ether” is already one of the most intriguing musical events of 2025.

– Łukasz Dębowski (polskaplyta-polskamuzyka.pl)

(...) On Ether, music is not performed — it becomes, it happens.
The musicians create an environment (an ether!), a cradle in which intentions crystallize into sounds.
They attentively watch for music to appear within them, and when it emerges on the horizon, they lure and tame it like a wild mustang — to mount it and ride, like a surfer on a wave, wherever the wave leads. Daringly, yet attentively — so as not to go against it, for that would mean a wipeout. And when the wave’s power naturally fades, they look out for the next one, in the turbulent ocean of possible sounds, motifs, and rhythms...

It’s a pleasure to listen to, because this is music deeply listener-friendly and… beautiful. Even though — by design — everything here can be improvised, once it is improvised and flows on its wave, it does not betray it or get lost in free-jazz chaos. Instead, it respects its logic, its dynamics, its modal structure. One listens with both pleasure and emotion — as if watching the motion on a square in Mumbai, where order emerges from chaos: music in statu nascendi, a play of gestures and sounds in the spirit of freedom, adventure, and surprise — but also of consistency, responsibility, and discipline. I like Ether even more than Tristano’s free improvisations — and no less than Stańko’s.

— Tomasz Tłuczkiewicz
(full text at: https://newtalentsgeneration.com/recenzja-ether-tomasza-tluczkiewicza/)

Ether fills, binds, and carries sound through space. In ancient cosmology it was the “fifth element” – filling the heavens and giving celestial bodies their eternal motion. In the history of science, it was seen as the medium carrying light waves. Today, in common speech, music is carried on the waves of ether… They hold fluctuations and energies that shape the way the waves move. The geometry of space decides what will accelerate, what will slow down, and what will crystallize into an unbreakable pattern, but never a rigid scheme. In music, the same fragility is heard in the inter-sonic space – animated by the spiritual experience of each artist, both together and individually.

The album “Ether” was created spontaneously. Without scores, without arrangements, without prior agreements. Its fabric is formed by stages of our creative search, sensitivity, and ever-deepening musicality. By sensing the space and energy in which we found ourselves.

In this process, every detail matters: a short trumpet breath, the grainy edge of a bass string, the cymbal accent that drives or slows the pulse – tiny vectors that together determine the trajectory of the piece. By listening to each other, we attuned ourselves to what was not yet there – to the potential of the next step. Phrases curved by the gravity of silence. Something slightly “before” or “after” creates the dynamics of musical tension. In joint creation, there are moments when several possible instants exist at once.

Artists working by interference, creating something that just a moment ago did not exist – co-composing. Every moment has its own frequencies that “want” to sound – you only need to play more quietly to hear more. Time and space swap roles. Silence is not just a background. In it we measure the distance between intention and result, without the safety net of arranged certainties. In this situation, building harmonic pillars or adhering to stylistic conventions ceases to matter. What remains is a natural, sincere narration…

“Ether” does not attempt to describe space in a given moment – rather, it explores its transience, along with its emotional contexts. It teaches us to listen to what exists between the sounds. If, after a track ends, we feel that something still lingers – that is ether: not a substance, but a possibility, from which music arises when it seems it is no longer there.

We leave you with this album – as an invitation to further listening, to what takes place in its undefinable space.

– Piotr Schmidt

The concept of recording an entirely improvised, intuitively created album with a certain verbal or subconscious program for the performers – in this case the trio of composers and instrumentalists: Schmidt, Święs, Frankiewicz – remains both a challenge and a real endeavor. For such a project to capture the listener’s attention, to designate a field of deeper experience, it must – as a necessary condition – transcend the circle of purely technical explorations, regardless of how skillfully or coherently these may have been sketched out before recording.

This process becomes even more complex when we consider that the chosen sound convention departs from familiar stylistic patterns or principles of building a musical language.

Here we encounter a space – a purely sonoristic spectrum – where unsprung collisions at any moment may flare up, unleash surprising energies, and draw us entirely into the musical narrative, which at times thickens intensely, at others vanishes into a peculiar nothingness. Yet it never allows our attention to weaken. The experience remains taut, and judging from the expanded structural matter of sound employed here, it even evokes astonishment at the unusual circle of sensations into which we, as listeners, have been introduced. This experience does not fade as the sequences of this sonic fresco close. On the contrary, it becomes something coherent and integral in its intense duration.

We may therefore return to the impulses that led the performers to crystallize that delicate first intuition, that spiritual need, that the right moment had come – perhaps after many years of individual searching and varied life experiences – to finally trust intuition and materialize in music something that for years was merely an impulse, a distant feeling.

That moment has happily arrived, finding its intense, emotional, musical dimension – truly authentic, unforced, and speaking directly, as is undoubtedly the case with the album “Ether.”

– Henryk Cierpioł (Radio Katowice, AM in Katowice)

See also: www.piotrschmidt.eu