I believe we've found Poland's answer to The Electric Prunes. The male foursome Czerwono-Czarni ("Red-Blacks") hereby presents Msza Beatowa, which in English would be The Beat Mass. Perhaps Psychedelic Rock Mass would have been a better title, as this thing sometimes even out-Prunes the Prunes' old classic Mass In F Minor. Set aside whatever preconceptions you might have about what a Polish rock band might sound like - these guys seem suitably psychedelicized into
the whole late-'60s scene. Garagy guitars, heavy bass, liturgical chanting, symphonic strings, tribal percussion, brass, and a long instrumental modal jam that descends into a turbulent raga maelstrom. Lots of musical variety in here: psych, pop, beat, hard rock, classical, with trippy organ, cheesy organ or cathedral organ to suit whatever the mood. Only toward the end do they whip out a whimsical tuba-tootin' fiddle-playin' number that made me think "now that sounds Polish" - and it just happens to be the most fun track on the lp. It's all sung in Polish, although the titles should look pretty familiar ('Kyrie', 'Gloria', 'Credo', 'Sanctus', 'Agnus Dei', etc) Written by female composer Katarzyna Gartner and first performed at St. Christopher Church in January 1968. Says in the English liner notes that The Beat Mass is performed each Sunday in the city of Lesna Podkowa (near Warsaw) "with full approval of the parishioners". Given the Eastem Block countries' "thumb of oppression" over both rock music and religion during the era, it's rather amazing that this thing even exists. (Ken Scott – The Archivist).
There is a polish, I think, page here where these files were located.
Tracks:
01. Introitus
02. Kyrie
03. Gloria
04. Graduale
05. Credo
06. Sanctus
07. Agnus Dei
08. Communio
09. Koleda
10. Chwalcie Imie Pana
11. Przyjaciele Moi
12. Historia O Bozym Narodzeniu
Members: Tadeusz Mróz - vocal, guitar
Henryk Zomerski - bass
Klaudiusz Maga - keyboards
Ryszard Gromek - Percussion
Biterate: 128 Download
Password to open files: dzicy
ReplyDeleteAaahh, what a pleasant surprise from Poland. Thanks ...
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ReplyDeletepassword works fine. And just by listening to the intro. THIS IS AMAZING. I mean... I've been a crate digger for a long time, with lots of christian records etc. And this is incredible! Will give it to my Polish friend. THANKS A BUNCH!
ReplyDeleteMy love affair with the Poles goes back to '73 when I was 10 and the Polish national side were playing England in a vital world cup game that England had to win to take part in the '74 tournament. I was desperate for us to win but in a thrilling game, we could only draw against these unheard of Poles, the manager who had led England to world cup glory only 7 years earlier lost his job and many would argue that English international football has been in semi decline ever since........
ReplyDeleteThose Poles may have been unheard of and unknown in '73 but how they charmed me the following year as they were one game away from making the final. They played great, flowing, attacking football and to this day I still recall some of those magical names and their cavalier football, Tomaszewski, the giant keeper who made an art form of saving penalties in the rain, Gorgon, the huge centre back of whom almost nothing passed, Deyna the captain with a left foot so deadly, who strutted around like he owned Germany and Kasperczak, his midfield partner whose name I always thought was brilliant ( I thought he was called Casper Jack ! ) and those free scoring forwards, Domarski (he who broke English hearts with his goal in '73), Gadocha, the flying winger, Lato, who ended up as the tournament's top scorer and Szarmach who was not far behind and who was supposed to be 23 but who had this old man moustache. What a team !
I grew to love those Poles because of this and I half kept an ear open and eye out for that country in the news (football tended to alert me to the existence of countries and cities when I was a kid, far more than school ever did ) but they rarely were, till 1982 or thereabouts when the communist government cracked down on the trade union Solidarity and threw their leading lights in jail. It was events like that that brought that nation more to my attention but though I picked up on much of the recent Polish history ( out of domination from the Nazis straight into domination by the Soviets ! ), Polish music always eluded me. And nowadays in much of England, Eastern Europeans in general and Poles in particular are picking up alot of flak for the ills of the country, much the way Black people used to from the 50s to the 90s ( the irony is that Black people are often the fiercest critics of the new immigrants...) but I personally find them to be hard working and lovely people, pretty much like everyone else.
I did try to check out the music of a Polish jazz violinist called Michael Urbaniak but it was too avant garde and screechy for me in those far off days ( though he has some great classical/jazz/rap fusions, currently on his website). So this particular album came as a pleasant surprize because as far as I know, Poland hasn't exactly set seizmographs ringing and raging in terms of music and innovation. The more I've followed Heavenly grooves and the Ancient star song, the greater and clearer the picture and history of christian popular music has become. I love loads of the stuff that has been featured on the two sites and I increasingly marvel at the new LPs from the mid to late 60s that keep getting unearthed. Just when I'm revising the history as it appears, then another album comes along that necessitates further revision !! Whether I regard them as good or not, from a historical perspective, is irrelevant. It's a bit like saying that Uruguay's win in the first ever world cup in 1930 was no great achievement because very few of the world's great powers in soccer took part. It's irrelevant - they were the first winners ! Yeah, I've found some of those early Jesus albums in the rock/pop vein to be pretty ropey, but happilly that is not the case with Msza Beatowa. It is a genuinely startling piece of music both for where it came from and for the time, if it really is january 1968 ( the month and year I started school, incidentally). I'm joyous of the fact that something so artistically fresh came from Poland in the 60s. It's ahead of much of what both American and British Jesus rockers and artists were coining at that time. The term psychedelic is often banded around as a badge of hip, artistic, heavyweight authenticity but it's also sometimes a little misleading. But not here. Some of this is genuine christian psychedelia and truly inventive to boot. It's kind of what I expected the Berets "Mass for Peace" to sound like when I first read Ken's review. Even if I hadn't liked it (and I do ! I do !) it would have qualified as a lost christian psych masterpiece. Because I can't speak or read Polish, the stuff on the pages of the link means zilch to me but I'd love to find out more about this record, the cicumstances under which it was recorded and who the people were and if they're still alive and what they're doing now. The woman that composed it all deserves, in my opinion, to be lionized. Psychedelia was pretty much a male bastion as was most of rock, and though Grace Slick from Jefferson airplane springs to mind, not too many women do in psych circles. It strikes me also that this would have been a rather dangerous recording to make in the Eastern bloc, whether the parishoners were happy and approving or not ! It's also on a par, in some places with both Spooky Tooth's "Ceremony" and Mind Garages' "Electric Liturgy", brilliant albums of masses by rock groups that weren't christians. You know, maybe mankind really is incurably religious....
This post goes back over 3 years...Some interesting stuff and certainly with enough psychedelic sounds but also straighter Beat.
ReplyDeletePlease note that before this and the Electric Prunes well known album, there was an album by an Italian band called BARRITAS, that released a Beat Mass album in 1966, they even got round to do an English version of it under the name the Berets.
They came from Sardinia and I think it's a great record (the Italian version!) you can google for it...