/// about ///
Greetings fellow Auditory Adventurer …
Nicholas Krolak here … bassist/composer : city-dweller/nature lover …
Describing your own music is a strange ritual. The second you name it, it begins to harden
My roots reach into jazz … its lineage, its defiance, its devotion to listening. I carry deep respect for that tradition, but what I make doesn’t stay in one place long enough to live under a single word
After a concert once, someone said, “You don’t play jazz — you play Eco-Jazz”
I smiled … I loved it !
Not because it’s official … because it felt alive
Sometimes my music is spacious and wind-worn
Sometimes it hums like late-night city streets
Sometimes it leans into texture, or silence, or a melody that refuses to resolve …
Improvisation is a current running underneath … Concept is the landscape … Vibe is the compass
I’m less interested in genre than in movement
Less interested in categories than in curiosity
I follow what feels honest
The rest can be named later … or not at all …
/// Does that work for you ? ///
If not, here's another way I can describe my music … it's kind of my 'elevator pitch' … When asked to describe my sound … sometimes I'll say something like …
'Charles Mingus meets Radiohead' or 'Wayne Shorter mixed with Sigur Ros' … that usually gets the job done.
/// Or, if you prefer … ///
here is a quote from one of my favorite music critics of all time that really hits the nail on the head !
“a different kind of songwriter—perhaps a different kind of musician altogether. He’s like the bass-playing, modern embodiment of Walt Whitman. And, just as Whitman used his prose poems, Krolak uses his music to celebrate and also reconcile the competing and contradictory nature of the two worlds he straddles: the natural and the urban."
Matt Silver - WRTI
Either way, I think of making, performing, and listening to music as an adventure in sound … one that I hope you will join me on …
Sincerely,
Nicholas Krolak (KRL)
