How Janek Gwizdala Rescued Long-Lost Recordings to Create His New Album, “Found”
Janek Gwizdala has returned with a new album called Found, which has unknowingly been 13 years in the making. The bassist shared the story of its creation in an email, explaining that in 2012, he booked two days at Bunker Studio in Brooklyn. Each day had a different lineup with Jojo Mayer and Justin Vasquez on day one and John Ellis and Mark Guiliana on day two. Gwizdala was joined on both days by Tim Miller and Dan Axtell.
“We played completely improvised music for two solid days and recorded enough material to make 4 or 5 albums. I always thought I HAD to choose just one album’s worth of ‘the best’ bits to put out the record, but later realized there should be no reason the rest of the session shouldn’t see the light of day. But by that time, I thought both the audio and video files were long gone,” he wrote. “Amazingly, a few months back, I managed to fire up an old drive that hadn’t worked in years, and found all the sessions sitting on it! I sent some of the stuff down to Juan Pablo in Buenos Aires, and we set about adding it to our workflow, our mission basically, of trying to consistently put out music throughout the year every year.”
The first album that came out of the sessions was It Only Happens Once, which had a rough cut of a documentary on YouTube on the process. Now, Gwizdala says, he’s gotten all of the video files and will be making a finished cut later this year. He’s also begun the process of putting out videos of songs from the new album. Check out “Running Cut” from Found:
Found is streaming now on all platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, and more.
Found Track Listing:
- Found
- Count Elmsley
- Running Cut
- The Poison
- The Antidote
- Straighter Lines
- Parallel Worlds
In his time with No Treble, Kevin has met hundreds of amazing bassists and interviewed icons like Jack Casady, Victor Wooten, Les Claypool, Marcus Miller, and more. He's a gigging bassist performing jazz in Northern Virginia and bluegrass with The Plate Scrapers up and down the East Coast. Kevin appreciates all genres of music, from R&B to metal and everything in between. Connect with Kevin on Facebook and check his performance schedule on his website.
