Jazz
Dot Time Records · 3 July 2026
Five of the eight pieces on “Identity” are called “Mazurek” and are numbered. The mazurka is a Polish dance in triple metre with displaced accents, and here it serves as raw material for a jazz trio: Michał Ciesielski on piano, Piotr Gierszewski on bass and Adam Golicki on drums. The record came out on 3 July on Dot Time Records, runs fifty-five and a half minutes and is what Confusion Project have made after twelve years as a trio without once bringing their own folk dance into it.
The opening title track is eight minutes fifty-three that start in a minor key and keep layering keyboards until the result has more to do with a film score than with a piano trio; Golicki’s kick drum appears in the final stretch and supplies the one burst of hard rhythmic intensity in the piece. “Mazurek 1”, the one with the video (folk-art animation, with flowers, birds and cut-paper figures), runs two thirty-three and is the brightest of the five. “Now What?”, nine thirty-one, closes the record and is the longest track.
The problem is arithmetic. Four of the five “Mazurek” sit between six forty-three and eight sixteen, and all four work the same idea: the accent of the dance placed under a harmony that widens it. By the third repetition you know what is coming, and “Simplicity”, five forty and wedged between two of those pieces, is what would gain most from having one fewer around it. The series would have held with three.
It is the trio’s fifth studio album, after “How To Steal A Piano?” (2014), “The Future Starts Now” (2016), “Primal” (2018) and “Last” (2021), plus the live “Live at Radio Gdańsk” (2023). “Mazurek 1” and “Identity” came out as singles on 29 May and 19 June.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Aina Torrents