music
In 2023, Pitchfork wrote that Raphael Rogiński’s music ‘is concerned with channelling the spirits of the past’, a perfect description of the work that the Polish guitarist has been developing over the last decade. In an interview with Polityka newspaper, he recounts that when he started learning guitar as a teenager, he played so furiously that blood dripped from his fingers. Anyone listening to him today would find it hard to imagine such a violent beginning. His music has a meditative touch, a strumming so complete that it seems to come from four hands, and where improvisation, jazz and traditional music meet. The son of a Holocaust survivor, he maintains a strong connection to Jewish culture and the traditions of Central and Eastern Europe, which he honours and draws inspiration from in his compositions: Žaltys (2024) ruminates on the border river between Lithuania and Poland; Talàn (2022) is dedicated to the Black Sea, which he considers the heart of Central Europe; and Bura (2025) is a collaboration with Serbian musicians, in which he reinterprets traditional songs and Sufi texts.
But what brings him to gnration is another work, one of his first. In 2015, he released Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes – recently reissued on vinyl – an album in which he interpreted, in his own unique way, Coltrane classics and poems by Hughes, one of the most important names in the Harlem Renaissance movement. With a perspective outside the jazz tradition, Rogiński slowed down and stripped down Coltrane’s songs in search of an intimacy and mysticism that transcend form and genre. The result is almost unrecognisable compositions that reveal the polyphonic complexity of the historic American musician, while being guided by the vocabulary of one of the most unique guitarists in European music.
support portuguese republic – culture / general direction of the arts. rtcp – network of portuguese theaters and cinemas.
