9 minute read
IN THE LAND OF POLISH JAZZ
There is a joke that jazz fans in Poland sometimes tell each other. Jazzmen probably do, too. It goes like this: A jazzman meets a fellow jazzman.
“How are things?” he asks his friend. “Good, quite good! I recently released an album,” comes the answer. “Yeah, I know,” replies the asker. The dialogue continues even more briskly. “Really?” “Yeah, I’ve listened to it.” “You’ve listened to it?” “Well, I bought it.” “Oh, so it was you!”
The author of this anecdote definitely has a sharp tongue. One might say he exaggerates reality. Very much so in fact. Because, judging by the number of jazz festivals alone, jazz is an extremely popular and sought-after dish in Poland.
Some sources say that before the pandemic, about 150 such festivals were held in Poland every year. One would expect that now there might be far fewer of them, not all of them having survived the long period of isolation. Nothing could be further from the truth! Adam Baruch, one of the most attentive observers of Polish as well as world jazz, a music critic and creator of many respected jazz projects, estimates that Polish jazz events with the term “festival” in their names would add up to more than 300 annually. That gives, more or less, an average of six per week! And even if one were to assume that the actual number is closer to 120, as advocated by Krzysztof Balkiewicz, creator and artistic director of the Love Polish Jazz Festival, 10 jazz festivals a month still make for quite a crowd.
The Love Polish Jazz Festival, or LPJF for short, which annually attracts many jazz fans to the small town of Tomaszów Mazowiecki, is a perfect example of the “jazz in Poland” phenomenon. After all, the success enjoyed by jazz festivals and concerts in Warsaw, Wrocław, Kraków, the Tri-City and several other large cities is easily explained. Meanwhile, a large part of the events in question, perhaps even most of them, take place in much smaller towns.
This year, the jazz festival in Tomaszów Mazowiecki, a town with a population of about 60,000, lasted three days, between September 15 and 17. Three concerts were held each day. Jazz musicians of such class as the world-famous pianist Adam Makowicz, Aga Zaryan who is considered one of the best Polish jazz vocalists, pianist Włodek Pawlik’s trio, and another excellent Polish pianist, Maciej Tubis, came to town. The audience, which responded enthusiastically at the concerts, could also admire performances by the extremely talented violinist Adam Bałdych, already well-known internationally. He performed with his quintet. The festival concluded with a concert by a star of the Polish pop scene, singer Justyna Steczkowska, who sang jazz arrangements this time.
The galaxy of stars was supplemented daily by younger talented musicians. On the first day it was the local TM Brass Orchestra conducted by Kamil Wrona. The orchestra’s lineup included students from schools in Tomaszów Mazowiecki. On the following day, young-generation jazz flamenco guitarist Maciej Smoluch delighted the audi- ence with his virtuosity on the brilliantly lit stage of the Ice Arena in Tomaszów. He is, in a sense, the discovery of last year’s festival. At the LPJF 2022, his excellent playing was pointed out in backstairs comments by Richard Bona, the star of last year’s edition of this excellent jazz project. He asked the young guitarist to submit a musical demo. This year, Smoluch’s excellent playing and compositions were spoken of in the highest terms by maestro Adam Makowicz, who believes that the young musician has an incredible sense of the spirit of Argentine guitar music and presents an extraordinary quality of playing.
The third day of this year’s LPJF was embellished by a trio of musicians who are very young but already play a great standard of music: the Funky Bomba Trio Collective Project. They wowed the audience!
According to Baruch, the quality of musical preparation and incredible concentration of talent distinguishes jazz in Poland from other countries in a very positive way. When I asked him about the reason for the extraordinary popularity of jazz in Poland, which I truly consider a phenomenon, he told me first about his young years, the 1950s and 1960s. Back then, he lived in Poland with his parents. It turns out that hundreds of intellectuals, artists and musicians passed through their apartment at the time. In those days in Poland, a country ruled by the Moscow-controlled Polish communists, jazz was a kind of safety valve. The communist authorities tolerated it at small venues, in artistic basements in Kraków or Warsaw. Young intellectuals and artists, thirsty for free access to the highest culture, looking westward rather than eastward, eagerly took advantage of this bit of tolerance. So they played wherever they could, including private homes. Big events, however, were out of the question, at least as long as Joseph Stalin, the terror of the entire Communist bloc of Central and Eastern Europe, was alive. When the bloody dictator finally departed this world in 1953, the first jazz festival appeared in Poland seemingly “out of nowhere.” It was the autumn of 1954. The only day off on which Polish jazzmen could play together in the gym of a school in Kraków was the traditional holiday of the dead, celebrated on November 1. Its name, “Zaduszki,” also became the name of a jazz tradition that is still cultivated in Poland today. Jazz Zaduszki is held every year in November in many Polish cities.
Subsequent jazz projects gathered a rapidly growing audience the following year and beyond. The monthly magazine Jazz was born, as well as subsequent festivals to which musicians from outside Poland began to come.
Okay, but that was 70 years ago. So I asked Baruch what this had to do with the popularity and prestige that jazz enjoys in Poland today. And why there is such a high standard of so many musicians. Also, where does the ambition of many cities to have their own festival and their own brand of jazz come from?
From his answers I drew the conclusion that the history of jazz in Poland can be compared to a train that is accelerating slowly but steadily. New carriages are gradually added, the weight and speed grow, and it would be increasingly difficult to stop this train. The carriages in question are successive successful jazz projects, festivals, including international ones. They also include schools of jazz music, which first emerged with the permission of the communist authorities. They still operate today, developing in many Polish cities. They educate hundreds of musicians annually and at the highest level, including many brilliant ones. The biggest and most numerous carriages are, of course, filled by successive generations of audiences who want to listen to jazz and, last but not least, consider it an important Polish contribution to the development of high Western culture.
Something that people can and should be proud of. And something that connected those generations with the world from which the Poles of the time were separated by the Iron Curtain.
Well, yes. That would explain the Polish enthusiasm for jazz festivals, and for jazz in general. Also as a brand, which, after all, has been built in Poland for a long time. Here, surely, Poles should not have any complexes. As Krzysztof Balkiewicz reminds me, the first jazz festival in the United States, the one in Newport, the oldest one, dates back to the spring of 1954. The first Polish one, the November one, also from 1954, born in Kraków, is only half a year younger.
Balkiewicz is not only the originator, but also the creator of the Love Polish Jazz Festival from start to finish. He has previously organized other jazz projects, including in Łódź. But he comes from Tomaszów Mazowiecki, one of the county towns in the province of which Łódź is the capital. He had a dream and the courage to undertake its fulfillment. The dream was well received by Tomaszów, both its authorities and residents, with everyone accepting the project. Today it is certainly endorsed by both audiences and officials. This is the impression I got from this year’s seventh edition of the event, to which audiences from Tomaszów come in large numbers and celebrate jazz evenings so enjoyably. And the listeners always, as far as I know, include the town’s mayor, Marcin Witko, a politician but also a musician, a graduate of the Academy of Music in Łódź.
There is no doubt that a festival of this quality is an invaluable treasure for the city, an attraction and great prestige. It encourages not only tourists, but probably also potential investors, business, to take an interest in this town to which jazz stars come every year. And thanks to the jazz projects initiated here and the recordings made, special showpieces are created: great new jazz albums, such as, for example, the concert version of My Sweet European Homeland, a composition by the titan of Polish and European jazz, Krzysztof Komeda, recorded during the Love Polish Jazz Festival in 2016 by the sextet led by Jan Ptaszyn Wróblewski, also an icon of Polish jazz. It was released in the prestigious Polish Jazz series, as vol. 80. The Polskie Nagranie Muza publishing house continues the tradition of this series dating back to 1965. The catalog of another, much younger and smaller record publisher active in the Polish jazz market, ForTune, includes two CDs of music recorded during the Love Polish Jazz Festival concerts, namely Ulf Johansson Werre Trio: Two Hearts and Bernard Maseli Septet: Good Vibes of Milian And this is just some of the proof that Tomaszów Mazowiecki lies not only in Łódzkie Province, but also in the land of Polish jazz.
Text and photos by Julis Simo (www.JulisSimo.com)
