Originally released in 1964 on Decca, Lola by the Zbigniew Namysłowski Modern Jazz Quartet has grown from a cult curiosity into a full‑blown legend. As the original sleeve notes drily observed, “jazz is inevitably associated with the United States”, yet Lola stands as eloquent proof that the music had already become a multilingual, multi‑centred language. Recorded by a young Polish quartet in London, at a time when international travel from behind the Iron Curtain was rare and the exchange of ideas depended on tapes, radio and word of mouth, the album captures the shock of a local perspective suddenly amplified on a global stage.

The quartet itself was a powerhouse unit: Zbigniew Namysłowski on alto saxophone, Włodek (Włodzimierz) Gulgowski on piano, Tadeusz Wójcik on bass and Czesław Bartkowski on drums. Together they move with the assurance of a working band, Namysłowski’s incisive, emotionally charged alto riding over a rhythm section that balances swing with a distinctly European sense of melody and contour. Made up of seven original compositions plus a bold reimagining of the Jerome Kern / Oscar Hammerstein II standard “Ol’ Man River”, the album draws deeply on Polish folklore for its raw material, particularly the asymmetrical rhythms and rugged melodic turns of highlander music. As the new sleeve notes quote, Namysłowski “wanted it to sound different than the so‑called pure jazz”, and he achieves that not by grafting folk motifs on top of an American template, but by letting those motifs reshape the tunes from the inside.​

The sessions took place at Decca Studio No. 3 in West Hampstead in August 1964, produced by Mike Vernon, then at the outset of a career that would later include Fleetwood Mac, John Mayall and David Bowie, and engineered by Vic Smith, who would go on to produce The Jam. They captured the quartet with a clarity and bite that still feels immediate: the grain of Namysłowski’s alto, Gulgowski’s Wynton Kelly‑esque touch and harmonic fluency, Wójcik’s grounding bass and Bartkowski’s sharply articulated drums all occupy their own space while locking into a unified front. More than a technical achievement, the album marked a symbolic breakthrough - the first LP recorded by a Polish jazz group outside the Iron Curtain - and contemporary press reactions in the UK noted both the sophistication of the playing and the vivid difference in its accent.

Heard now, Lola is more than a historical milestone. It’s a fiercely alive document of four musicians testing how far they can bend the emerging post‑bop vocabulary toward their own folk‑steeped instincts, and discovering in the process that “Polish jazz” could be both unmistakably local and fully conversant with the wider modern jazz conversation.