There
are at least two hypotheses or, rather, legends, explaining how jazz snuck into
Tomaszów Mazowiecki and how the jazz bug infected a considerable portion of this
smallish town’s residents. And not just them, actually. One version assumes
that it happened secretly, gradually and, at least in the beginning, almost
imperceptibly. It puts the responsibility on several specific people. The other
one describes a triumphant, festive incursion connected with a certain
increasingly popular festival.

This
year the Love Polish Jazz Festival was held for the eighth time already. Or
maybe only for the eighth time? Not important. What is important, though, is
that over the years the audience has grown from maybe about a hundred people at
the first festival, in 2016, to some eight hundred in September 2024, when patients
with syncopation syndrome flocked to Tomaszów from all over the country. As for
attendance by Polish jazz stars, it was no better and no worse than at previous
festivals. As usual, they were there and they played like mad!

And,
also as usual, the musicians who travelled to this peaceful and usually
slow-living town included bands whose stars have been shining with a magical
light for some decades as well as those that lit up quite recently but have
already won recognition on the global jazz firmament.

Urszula
Dudziak, a vocalist one might call an instrumentalist of the vocal cords,
started her conquest of the world in New York in the 1970s. However, listening
to her festival concert in Tomaszów, you’d never guess it’s already been so
many decades. And, the fact that the owner of one of few such recognizable jazz
vocal sounds has in fact conquered the world was irrefutably confirmed during
the concert.

Everyone
has heard and remembers her voice even if they haven’t caught the jazz bug
yet.  In 1979 she first amazed the world
with the energizing hit tune “Papaya.” That conquest turned out to be lasting.
The piece, filled with optimistic energy, can be heard in every corner of the
world to this day.

Everything
that Dudziak proposed to musical New York’s audiences back in the mid-1970s and
on her first album, produced with another famous Polish jazz musician, Adam
Makowicz, was as groundbreaking as it was beautiful and inspiring. And that’s
not a mixture of qualities you get too often in new trends in the arts these
days. Not even in jazz. Vocals with no text, used purely instrumentally,
processed electronically, including live on stage, have been and are the unique
features of this lady of jazz. The concert in Tomaszów not only roused the
audience, who rewarded the vocalist with a standing ovation. It also proved
that despite all the years that have passed since the release of the Newborn
Light album, in Switzerland in 1972 and in the United States in 1974, Dudziak
consistently sounds phenomenal and simply infects the audience with her energy.

And
speaking of infecting, let’s go back to the question: How did jazz end up in
Tomaszów? Where does the amazing festival audience, still mostly comprising
local residents of a town of fewer than 60,000 people, come from? My brief
investigation during this year’s visit to the town and the LPJF showed that a
large part of the blame goes not to the festival itself but to its initiators.
Who do I mean? Three men: a priest, a drummer, and a jazz expert. All of them
have close ties to the town. The – regrettably – late Rev. Edward Wieczorek
experimented with jazz concerts at his church in Tomaszów at one point. I don’t
know if you realize how unusual such an approach to a site of religious worship
is in Catholic Poland. The second person allegedly to blame for the jazz
epidemic in Tomaszów is jazz drummer Wojciech Lubczyński, whose adventure with
percussion began when he was 13 and involved two sticks and a shoebox, sometime
in the late 1950s or early 1960s. Where? In Tomaszów, of course, which is his
native town and, obviously next to jazz, his great love. The third guilty
party, and probably key to the whole matter, is Krzysztof Balkiewicz, a great
expert on jazz and researcher of Krzysztof Komeda’s legacy. (Komeda is a legend
of Polish jazz, one of the world’s greatest jazz composers. Do you know the
lullaby from Rosemary’s Baby? Yeah, that was him.) And where is
Balkiewicz from? You’ve guessed itl: from Tomaszów.

According
to one believable-sounding story, the key meeting of those three men took place
at the Arkady Gallery (Galeria Arkady), one of the most magical places in
Tomaszów Mazowiecki. However, the meeting was preceded by a jazz concert at St.
Anthony’s Church, organized by Rev. Wieczorek. Musicians from Sweden and Poland
performed. A Tomaszów man played the drums. Yup, it was Lubczyński.

“After
that concert I came up with the idea to hold a jazz festival in Tomaszów,”
Balkiewicz openly takes the blame. “So the three of us met up, discussed the
idea, and then went to the mayor of Tomaszów, Marcin Witko.”

Today
the Municipal Culture Center (MCK) is the festival’s organizer. A group of MCK
employees handles the side of things we’d probably call logistics. Balkiewicz
is the artistic director of the festival.

“I
think up the projects. I do my best to make sure they are premieres or world
premieres,” he briefly outlines his role.

This
original character of many LPJF projects has actually been a unique feature of
all the editions so far. This year EABS (Electro-Acoustic Beat Sessions), a
quintet from Wrocław playing truly futuristic jazz, performed a few recently
discovered early compositions by Komeda. (Who found them? Again, you’ve guessed
it: Balkiewicz, the indefatigable researcher of all things by or about Komeda.)
Of course, the EABS musicians played these never-before-publicly-presented
pieces in their own style, not in the climate of what had been avant-garde jazz
in the 1950s. That was when Komeda wrote them and then hid them away in some
deep drawer. What was the result of the premiere of the EABS experiment? A
standing ovation. Also, loudly voiced wishes, from the festival stage and
unofficially, that the music should make it to the next record released by
EABS.

Compositions
by Komeda were also played in Tomaszów (yes, for the first time in new
arrangements) by the quartet of master accordionist Jarosław Bester. This was a
true feast not only for fans of the Bester Quartet’s inimitable sound. The
dynamic but also warm, mature sound conjured up associations with the Balkans
as well as a klezmer vibe, not without reason. The Bester Quartet is another
incarnation of The Cracow Klezmer Band. Among other things, the enormous
attractiveness of the arrangements they play lies in a fusion of experiences,
the effect of many years of experimenting with klezmer sounds and works on one
hand and what we very generally call jazz on the other. And that original,
riveting sound of the Bester Quartet filled in the compositions written by
Komeda, an icon of Polish jazz. Also in this case, the result was applause that
the LPJF audience stood up to offer the musicians. And there were more wishes,
expressed unofficially, that a new record with those arrangements should be produced.

Rediscovering
Komeda’s music has been a watermark of consecutive LPJF editions. No wonder,
then, that this year Komeda’s songs were also interpreted at the festival (only
instrumentally!) by the Piotr Schmidt Sextet with guest musician Mino Cinelu, a
world jazz star. He is just as comfortable with drumsticks as with a guitar,
flute or bandoneon (a type of concertina, often confused with the accordion). This
is a musician who has performed with Miles Davis as well as Weather Report,
Herbie Hancock, Cassandra Wilson, and Al Di Meola. There’s no end to the list
of stars he has collaborated with! And, I probably don’t have to say this, but…
yes, this time there was another standing ovation in Tomaszów.

But
let’s go back to the investigation into the jazz epidemic in the town. I came
upon an interesting clue when I got to have a conversation at the Arkady Gallery.
My interlocutor was someone in the know, namely Mariusz Sobański, the gallery’s
owner. Mariusz isn’t just a businessman, he’s more of a good spirit of
Tomaszów, only very much alive, given that spirits usually aren’t. His Arkady
Gallery is an actual gallery, it presents art. At the same time, though, it’s a
popular coffee shop, a place for meetings and conversations. Add to this a
small basement that has served as a jazz club for many years, and you get the
picture about Mariusz. He’s definitely another person to blame for the jazz bug
epidemic in Tomaszów!

The
interior of the Arkady Gallery with its charming atmosphere is the result of a
very successful conversion of a building that dates back to the first half of
the 19th century. It originally housed the town butcheries and other grocery
stores. The walls filled with presented paintings show through as an
unplastered brick structure. Wherever possible, there are tables and chairs
from a period that was especially kind to emerging Polish jazz, i.e. the turn
of the 1950s and 1960s. A drum set from the same period stands on an improvised
stage at the back.

There
is no question: Many clues in my investigation lead to this place. I became
even more convinced of this when Mariusz reminded me about a legendary Polish
jazz and rock photographer. Marek Karewicz spent his postwar childhood in… yes,
you’ve guessed again: in Tomaszów. And later, just a little later, in the
1960s, he became one of the most famous – not only in Poland – music photographers.
He designed countless sleeves for records, including jazz ones, released in
Poland. Among other things, he was also the official photographer of Miles
Davis’ last concert tour and Ray Charles’ European tour. In 1967 he was the
exclusive photographer for the concert of The Rolling Stones, a watershed for
the Polish rock scene. That he was also a photographer for all the greatest
jazz festivals and concerts in Poland goes without saying.

Apparently
like everyone infected with the town’s special atmosphere, he returned to
Tomaszów after many years, first with his famous photography exhibition This
Is Jazz, in spring 1998. Six months later he came to meet up with his
childhood friends. Among them were singer and composer Bogusław Mec, movie
director Arkadiusz Drabiński, and jazz trombonist Marek Michalak.

“They’ve
come here in great numbers, from around the world and from Poland, all of them
originally from Tomaszów. They played improvised jam sessions at the 6×9 Club,”
Mariusz recalls, referring to that small jazz basement at the Arkady Gallery.

After
talking to Mariusz, I realized that the roots of the flourishing jazz scene in
Tomaszów went much deeper than I thought. The Love Polish Jazz Festival is one
of the flowers – the most luxuriant, but not the only one. Jazz actually came
to stay for good in Tomaszów with the return of Karewicz, and got
systematically infectious at smaller and larger sessions in the jazz basement
of Mariusz’s club, at church concerts, and at jazz parades held in Tomaszów all
the time. Today the bug is being spread ferociously by the LPJF, but also by
the Volbórka Jazz Festival that Mariusz has been organizing in Tomaszów for a
few years now. Another attraction are the jazz workshops held every year just
before the LPJF concerts, drawing in people from all over Poland, not limited
to young musicians wanting to get a closer look at how jazz professionals work.

As
you can see, many are to blame for spreading jazz in Tomaszów. Over time, the
number of intentional carriers of the jazz bug, who absorb and pass it around
left and right, has been growing as well. They include Dariusz Kwapisiewicz, a
local photographer who has been so successfully infected with jazz and the LPJF
that no edition of the festival could do without him. Obviously, he takes
pictures of the musicians – after all, he’s a professional photographer. However,
Dariusz is so good at it that he has already won a number of awards at
prestigious international photography competitions. His picture of Richard Bona
at the 2022 LPJF won second prize in the Jazz World Photo competition in Prague
in 2023 and made it to the finals of the JJA Jazz Award Photo of the Year in
the United States. The list of prestigious nominations and prizes to his credit
is much longer.

“I’m
not sure what gives me more joy during the festival: photographing the
musicians or listening to them,” says Dariusz, who also supports the LPJF with
promotion and graphics.

I’m
pretty sure that my investigation in search of those guilty of spreading the
jazz bug in Tomaszów Mazowiecki only brushed the tip of the iceberg. The
effects of the wonderful epidemic that they have induced set this town apart
from all others, even those that have their own jazz festivals. And that group
is sizable. Because, you might not have realized it yet, but Poland is the land
of jazz.

Text
and photos: Julis Simo (www.JulisSimo.com)