Polish Jazz Podcasts - the History and the Current Events in Polish Jazz

Zbigniew Seifert (7 June 1946 – 15 February 1979) was a Polish jazz violinist and a visionary of jazz art.

Michał Urbaniak  is a Polish jazz violinist and saxophone player.  Throughout the years of his artistic calling, all elements of his ingenious personality were always there: straight-ahead expression paired with Slavic ingenuousness, musical eclectics, contemporary articulation and the influence of Polish folk music, all flawlessly incorporated into the vocabulary of Black American Jazz.In his compositions, Urbaniak has always attempted to integrate the latest trends of world Jazz with elements of his personal style. He brings together the original, easily recognizable sound of his instrument with current musical conventions.Despite different music genres he has explored,  Urbaniak has always found inspiration in his own folk tradition, and at the same time, in creating homogeneous forms of musical expression in a truly unique jazz art form.

This show is about the intersection between Polish Jazz and politics. More specifically,  it is about how Polish Jazz served as a proxy for a dreams of capitalism,  opportunities, and quest for freedom in an oppressively decade of 1950's in Poland. The podcast tells the story how communist rulers of Poland were trying to suppress all forms of political and artistic freedom; and how  Willis Conover's the Voice of America radio broadcasts,  cosmopolitan underground culture of "bikiniarze", and “Freedom Fighter in Bright Socks” Leopold Tyrmand fought against the regime.

The host of this podcasts series Misia Lerska, interviews her parents and talk with them about their encounters with Polish Jazz. 

Tomasz Stańko is a Jazz trumpeter and composer, one of Europe's most revered jazz musicians. He was born on 11th July 1942, and died on 29th July 2018.  As a jazz trumpeter and composer, Stańko is one of Europe's most original jazz musicians. Stańko's strengths include his distinct tone, a mood in his music often compared to the late 1950s Miles Davis' sound, with a Polish (Slavic) melancholy, which has developed into his trademark characteristic sound.  Stańkoʼs standing in Polish jazz is impossible to overestimate.  He has spent his entire career as a professional jazz trumpeter, and most of that was at a time when Poland was behind the Iron Curtain, making it difficult for outsiders to follow his career. In the the late 20th and early 21st century, Stańko has recorded with an ECM German label, bringing him long overdue international recognition as one of the great individual voices in jazz.  He has recorded around forty albums and composed music for several dozen films and the theatre. 

Krzysztof Komeda (born Krzysztof Trzciński; 27 April 1931 – 23 April 1969)  is the single most important artist in the entire history of Polish Jazz and one of the founding fathers of European Jazz as we know it.  Komeda was an incredible artist, a constantly searching poet and he could find ways of individual expression of jazz inside himself, in Slavic lyricism, and in the traditions of Polish music.  He is widely credited as being one of the founding fathers of a uniquely European style in Jazz composition.

A Little Story of Polish Jazz in the 20th century as told from the perspective of Millennial / Generation Z Polish-American.  Hosted by Misia Lerska. The first podcast in the series of Polish Jazz history,  explores five decades of Polish Jazz and introduces the most important trends and musicians of each era.