DJ Margaret Toucher will play after the concert

Musicians
Noumassan Dembelé – kora, vocal, Sebastian Pikula – guitar, Jacek Mazurkiewicz – bas, Anna Patynek – percussion, Wojtek Sobura – percussion

PPA production: Michał Litwiniec

The group leader is Noumassan Dembelé, a virtuoso of the kora, the 21-stringed African harp. He comes from Burkina Faso but lives in Warsaw and actively participates in the capital’s musical life. A descendant of a family of griots – folk poets and singers – he is blessed by fate with a beautiful voice and literary talent, which enable him to create original songs in the Bambara language.

This time, however, there will be less singing and more dancing, plus some exciting improvisations by all the members of the Faso Tamala group.
It is a stylish project in terms of its formula (a fusion of West African rhythms and textures with American jazz) and also very Polish because, apart from its charismatic leader, it is made up entirely of Poles who are fascinated by the internationalist idea and cosmopolitan formula of Afrobeat.

DJ Marcepan will play after the concert

Musicians
Bartosz Weber, Miłosz Pękala

PPA production: Michał Litwiniec

With pulsating electronica, the duo MIR illustrates Stanisław Lem’s “Solaris”, a masterpiece of global science fiction about human weakness in life on Earth and helplessness in space.
The music is as cold as the Baltic Sea near Hel in February and as mysterious as the hot cytoplasmic ocean that Lem’s protagonist tries to understand. Miłosz Pękala plays drums and percussion instruments (acoustic and digital), and Bartosz Weber plays guitar and sampler. They combine the accessible form of the eighties synthesisers with the virtuosity of jazz club improvisation.

“I don’t want to say that this is doomsday music,” says Polityka’s Bartek Chaciński. ‘It is too cheerful for that. It is like one of these stories that should have positive associations but are dark instead – as with the band’s name and its Russian origin. It had to be a sign of peace and became a symbol of a particular vision of order. And the fact that today we are still looking back for a vision of the future does not help the mood, either”.

fot. Michał Murawski

DJ Dotyk Dźwiękiem will play after the concert

Musicians
Mateusz Niwiński – violin, Jan Emil Młynarski – percussion, Piotr Zabrodzki – piano, synthesizers, Piotr Domagalski – podge

PPA production: Michał Litwiniec

Almost half a century ago, the late Zbigniew Namysłowski proved that kujawiak could go funky*. What happened later in the field of Polish jazz, fertilised by folklore, would be worth books and tribute festivals – but it is still fertile soil waiting for a new sowing.

The Oberkas Travel supergroup – dear viewer/listener, if you are actively interested in music, you know at least 75 percent of its line-up – presents itself as follows:
Driven by their fascination with the traditional old melodies of Central Poland, the musicians have tried to find points of contact between the so-called mazurka rhythms present in the indigenous music of the Polish countryside and the rhythmic world of the West African coast and contemporary American jazz. Based on the so-called oberek rhythms from Radom, Przysucha and Opoczno, the quartet creates a unique blend of improvisation, the dance mysticism of the indigenous oberek, the contemporary sound of jazz and the traditional violin music of Mateusz Niwiński, adopted from the late, greatest rural fiddlers of Central Poland born at the beginning of the 20th century – Józef Zaraś, Józef Kędzierski, Marian Bujak and the Gac brothers.

* Zbigniew Namysłowski Quintet “Kujaviak Goes Funky”, Polskie Nagrania, 1975.

fot. Arek Blomka

Musicians
Piotr Damasiewicz – trumpet, harmonium, vocal, Zbigniew Kozera – double bass, guimbri, Paweł Szpura – percussion

PPA production: Michał Litwiniec

Piotr Damasiewicz, known to his friends as “Damaś”: a seeker of the roots and a friend of the wind; you won’t find anyone who can remember if he ever played a jazz standard.
“Into the Roots”: music inspired by the cultures of Sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, Scandinavia and the Żywiec region, accessible and upbeat in its way, clearing the mind and inspiring the imagination.

Damaś – a free spirit but also the leader of many bands, which he directs with almost businesslike agility – mostly lets his partners play and have fun.
You don’t like to guess the melody? Don’t worry, that’s not that kind of jazz – it’s all about the rhythm, held evenly by the bass and drums, over (and under) which the trumpet, and sometimes the leader himself, playfully sings, proclaiming the apotheosis of music’s origins as a ritual and thanksgiving for life.

fot. Grzegorz Masłowski

DJ Romek Rege will play after the concert

Musicians
Jacek Bieleński – guitar, vocal, Ziut Gralak – bas, Przemek Greger – giuitar, Kuba Sojka – drums

PPA production: Michał Litwiniec

Thanks to the football anthem “Życiem jest ŁKS”, Jacek Bieleński is known to the whole of Łódź, and thanks to “Dentysta sadysta”, performed by Maryla Rodowicz dressed as a cosmic punk, to the whole of Poland. Of course, they wouldn’t know it (after all, who pays attention to the author of the lyrics and the idea of the masquerade?).
These are, however, almost incidental episodes in the life and work of the author, screenwriter, businessman and musician.

A more permanent – and yet irregularly functioning – creative and social initiative is the band Plastic Bag. Behind this name, which is both abstract and classical, lies a powerful personal experience:
“In 1991, at five in the morning, a colleague called from Australia to say that Jerzy Kosiński had committed suicide by putting a plastic bag over his head. Kosiński was an acquaintance of my parents. I couldn’t sleep. I thought about that bag all night. It became a metaphor for the world”.*

For more than thirty years, the group (you can download their legendary album “Czeska laleczka” for free from the website) has played with the best Polish instrumentalists, accompanying the leader, who did not and still does not have a nightingale’s voice and who was never one to mince words or jokes.
He had suffered some unpleasantness for the bluntness of his songs; ask the local authorities for details. They probably don’t remember what it was about.
Plastic Bag is currently performing as a quartet. Don’t be fooled: they make a lot of noise.

* Jacek Bieleński in an interview with Gazeta Wyborcza, 2016.

fot. Cecylia Gralak

DJ Huj will play after the concert

Musicians
Michał Fetler – alto, baritone and bas saxophone, Rafał Zapała – polivoks, processing, Ksawery Wójciński – double bass, Daniel Karpiński – percussion, Bartłomiej Frank – sound production

PPA production: Michał Litwiniec

First, an ethnographer sent by the Chancellor’s government recorded Wielkopolska musicians at work. On shellac records, surrounded by crackling and humming, these dance trinkets survived two world wars, the return of Wielkopolska to Poland, the agricultural collectivisation and the free market.
Today, these ancient field recordings, extracted from the bottom of a painted chest, work the imagination better than the most powerful artificial intelligence. The folk-jazz-noise-avant-garde-electronic quartet Polmuz – whose name melts the heart of those who wanted to make noise a few decades ago but had nothing to make it with – has transformed centuries-old obereks, mazurkas and polkas into a futuristic mix of folk music, improvisation and ritual trance. Lovingly but unsentimentally, tenderly and uncompromisingly, full of life, even though it is, after all, a dance with ghosts.

fot. Jagoda Chalcińska

DJ Karla will play after the concert

Musicians
Basia Songin – vocal, Wilcze Basy, Sowa, frame drums, looper, Kasia Kapela – vocal, violin, kankles, frame drums, beatbox, Dobromiła Życzyńska – vocal, frame drums

PPA production: Michał Litwiniec

The Lithuanian word sutartines – Lithuanian, so historically and politically, if not linguistically, close – means polyphonic songs that women performed during household chores and rituals.
The Sutari trio draws on many sources, with a predominantly indigenous Polish one. But the voices of Basia, Kasia and Dobromila are exactly like Lithuanian sutartines: they weave together like a braid, a cloth, like sisterly love.

The ensemble – fortunately a permanent phenomenon on the Polish folk scene and our pride at international presentations – performs their own and traditional songs about nature, freedom and femininity. The artists experiment with vocal techniques, rhythms and sounds. They build their instruments (or adapt existing ones) and extract music from everyday objects. Once you hear Sutari, you will fall in love with their intertwined voices, like in the summer sky of Warmia reflected in a black lake.

fot. Iwona Bandzarewicz

DJ Siwy will play after the concert

Musicians
Michał Wandzilak – keyboard instruments, Michał Jan Ciesielski – saxophone, Maciej Sadowski – double bass, Dawid Lipka – trumpet, Tomasz Koper – batteries, percussion, Mariusz Czubaj – heroic saxophone, Marcin Świetlicki – screams

PPA production: Michał Litwiniec

All-Poland Zgniłość is an offshoot of Świetliki from Krakow, and its key figures are poet Marcin Świetlicki and pianist Michał Wandzilak, who are joined in their musical and verbal ambitions by instrumentalists from the Tricity and by Professor Mariusz Czubaj, a Warsaw-based anthropologist and writer who plays the saxophone amateurishly and heroically – as he once put it himself.

Zgniłość describes their musical trajectory as post-post-ironic-post-wave-postyass. As befits a jazz-rock supergroup, the band occasionally records and releases albums, but concerts (or rather happenings) are their thing. Here, everything mixes with everything, with controlled chaos above all, but whatever happens, Świetlicki’s blasé melorecitations will always defend themselves as a genre in their own right. That is, of course, if you don’t die laughing at some point or get hit by a piece of shrapnel during a collective improvisation combined with the smashing of instruments.

fot. Karol Pęcherz