Marcin Halat, Maciej Garbowski

When I think about this album, my mind travels back nearly three decades to a time when Marcin and I were taking our first steps in jazz. It was the mid-1990s, a period of high school experiments, early improvisations, and long evenings filled with musical exploration. I remember how much joy we found in discovering new sounds, emotions, and the endless possibilities that jazz offered. It was the beginning of a journey that would later become our passion and way of life.

Over the years, our paths crossed and diverged, only to eventually bring us back to playing together. The Dialogues is an album that has been maturing within us for a long time. It’s a project where we sought to capture our years of experience, artistic closeness, and readiness for dialogue—a conversation without words, navigating between improvisation and silence. While recording this album, we searched for a space where the sound of the violin and double bass could meet as equals—without rivalry, without divisions, but in a conversation marked by mutual respect. Our encounters in The Dialogues are inspired not only by jazz but also by our experiences with contemporary and classical music. We draw from the openness we discovered in our earlier recordings under the Owl banner, where Marcin, Krzysztof Gradziuk on drums, and I created musical landscapes full of subtlety, silence, and space. Those moments brought us invaluable experiences and taught us to treat every sound with care and full awareness.

In The Dialogues, we explore similar territories—silence, breath, reflection—in the intimate setting of a duo. I believe we have succeeded in capturing the essence of musical dialogue. Every encounter with Marcin’s violin feels like a conversation with a friend you understand without words, where every phrase and every sound carries meaning and adds something unique.