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The listener is immediately struck by the vibrant cocktail of music and experience that had taken Masecki to that point. In his hands, the music that became one of the main pillars of jazz between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries acquired a whole new dimension, personal and inscrutable, but also pulsing, alive and contemporary. Ragtime, as interpreted by Masecki, is no revival music, but a new spirit born from the confluence of his personal creative universe and one of his earliest musical passions. Passion, that's the key word here. Maybe those old pioneers, who created a half-breed syncopated music that fed from its African roots as well as from the old Europe, wouldn't have approved of the rhythmic and harmonic exploration in the tracks of this album. They might have cried in outrage, defending the old tradition and claiming that this thing, whatever it may be, is not ragtime. If there's someone who, beyond any doubt, would have approved and enjoyed Masecki's rags, it's Thelonius Monk, whose spirit flutters all over Ragtime, an album that reveals as many echoes of the ragtime tradition as hints and clues leading to the unmistakably European personality of the Polish pianist. Masecki abducts from its time a somewhat anachronistic music, almost meaningless when removed from that historical context, and gives it a new life in our 2018, where it becomes something unique and valuable. Something resembling past melodies, but different. Something new. Masecki, perhaps the most deserving true heir to Monk's legacy that the old continent has offered us so far, takes the music that fascinated him as a kid to his musical present. And he does so with reverence and admiration, but without concessions: the pianist achieves a perfect communion between the rhythmic roots of original rags, his own personal approach to rhythm, and the setting of lines which meander fluidly over syncopated ostinatos that become effervescent and unpredictable under his fingers.

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