Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea
The fate of jazz and jazz education in Poland in the second half of the 20th Century 

First, a bit of historical information. It seems that the development of Polish jazz has been marked by the political events, the jazz people themselves, the visits of American jazz stars and with them, Western fashion. In Poland, it was not until well into the 1920s that jazz started to seep through, at first, just as a music and dance fad from the States. Next, jazz aficionados began to bring over hit records from across the Atlantic. At the end of the decade, those were joined by the first talkies, like The Jazz Singer, featuring the dancer and vocalist Al Jolson, Jerome Kern's Show Boat, and The King Of Jazz, starring Paul Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra. Next, jazz sheet music followed the movies. By that time, Europe had already been toasting famous visitors from the American jazz scene. They would stay on in Paris, Berlin, or Geneva, yet failed to arrive in this neck of woods. All we had here were American revues, few and far between, which were, nonetheless, the first direct contacts with musicians who played swing standards.

The Nazi persecutions in the 1930s forced Polish musicians of Jewish extraction to return from Germany en masse. They soon shared their musical experience with fellow musicians. Consequently, bands of revue theater in Warsaw or Cracow began to include cornets, saxophones and even started to give themselves names with the word "jazz" included. It was the trumpeter and band leader Ady Rosner who first achieved local fame, having been a noted jazzman far away from home already1. Polish musical films started featuring actors who sang rhythmical fox trots, and mad Charleston reigned supreme on the dance floor. In 1937, Warsaw's YMCA began to attract young musicians and jazz aficionados to get them to try and relish the new kind of music. The war and occupation, however, put this new interest on hold. The Polish jazz scene suffered many losses.

After the Germans' defeat, the musical life in ruined Poland began to regenerate. It was military bands that now provided dance bands with musicians. The year 1946 (when I was born) saw the founding of the Polish Radio Dance Orchestra, the first local classical big band. Clubs and restaurants in Cracow, Warsaw, Lodz and Poznan began featuring dance bands made up of musicians who had survived the war. The Radio Dance Orchestra and other similar ensembles used to record American swing standards, often with their titles changed. However, it was music utterly sight-read, notated and devoid of improvisation and characteristic swing pulse.

The first self-styled Polish jazz musicians were the members of the group Melomani (Music Lovers), which was founded in 1951. Years later, the pianist and musicologist Andrzej Trzaskowski called the founding of the Melomani the beginning of conscious playing of jazz in Poland2. Before the group entered the scene, jazz was a secondary phenomenon and did not function as art. In the first chaotic periods of the development of Polish jazz, all kinds of American dance music was hidden underneath the jazz label. The beginning of the Cold War divided the world and culture into the "socialist" one and that of the "Western, rotten imperialism". After the Polish Culture Congress in 1949 in Lagow, the officially accepted doctrine for art and culture was "social realism", according to which, practically all of Western culture was forbidden and regarded to as so called "reactionary formalism" and jazz considered to be "the rotten product of treacherous American imperialism". I assure you that the names applied to jazz were even more elaborate as can be seen in many of the texts of the time3. Soon, the polish YMCA was disbanded, jazz clubs were shut down and jazz was forbidden, forced underground and played only by a handful of enthusiasts. They could only meet in private get-togethers, at dancing parties in some restaurants, gyms or other hot spots with makeshift facilities for dancing, like underground garages of various institutions. We now sarcastically compare this period of the early '50s to that of the first Christians, who were forced to seek refuge from the persecutions in the catacombs.

The first Sopot Jazz Festival, which took place in August 1956 is regarded as the key event in the history of Polish jazz. It represented the culmination of the first, chaotic period in the development of Polish jazz. It marked the full emergence of jazz from the underground and the music's first official recognition on a major scale. It ended the "catacomb era" and launched the "time of frenzy"4. Jazz came out of the catacombs and immediately became recognized as a symbol of freedom and liberation from boredom and obscurantism, as well as a chance for contact, solidarity and unity with the rest of the world. This was an authentic explosion of energy and joy, often frenetic, that we remember nostalgically even now, at a time when we miss even more the burst of the youthful energy of that generation.

The writer, journalist and jazz cognoscente Leopold Tyrmand wrote: "... jazz has cemented and become symbolic of the milieus that sprang up spontaneously through natural selection and of their own choice"5. The "catacomb era" was also the time of trials when people's values were put to the test. Out went the musicians who dealt with jazz only superficially, and thats why the musicians of Melomani – who never lost touch with their beloved music – stood ready to lead the jazz movement when the time was ripe. Melomani represented the vanguard of a certain generation, musicians who were totally devoted to playing jazz exclusively for its artistic values. Thanks to their efforts, jazz not only continued to ride the initial wave of enthusiasm, but in the process, stopped being treated as a kind of demonstration or forbidden fruit and became art. The battle then began for jazz's purity, stylistic qualification and the equal rights with so-called "serious music".

The Melomani were bandleader and saxophonist Jerzy Dudus Matuszkiewicz; pianist, trumpeter and composer Andrzej Kurylewicz; pianist and musicologist Andrzej Trzaskowski, a physician by training but a musician by vocation; the great Krzysztof Komeda, and the drummer Witold "Dentox" Sobacinski. Besides them, the other members of this generation are: saxophonist Jan Ptaszyn Wróblewski, pianist Wojciech Karolak, trumpeter Henryk Majewski and a bit younger saxophonist Zbigniew Namyslowski, trumpeter Tomasz Stanko, saxophonist Janusz Muniak, saxophonist and violinist Michal Urbaniak, pianist Adam Makowicz, vocalist Urszula Dudziak and many others.

What characterized the second half of the '50s and '60s was the openness to all novelties reaching Poland from the west. Lets assume as a working axiom the following statement: jazz in Poland emerged first and foremost as a fad. It was a fad before it became something more durable, that is style. This didn't happen until the '60s, after people had caught up with the jazz mainstream, overcome their technical limitations and liberated themselves from the slavish imitation of American jazz. It began to function as art when the search for individual means of expression started – mainly through the artistic efforts of Krzysztof Komeda, Zbigniew Namyslowski and in the late '60s, the Tomasz Stanko Quintet.

In referring to a fad, I don't mean only the music but rather a certain attitude in different situations. It has to do with the often talked about jazz ideology, way of life, etc. If we assume that the feeling of harmony with some fashion gives a man the kind of self-assurance religion cannot guarantee, then in this light, the jazz craze in Poland in the '50s takes on entirely different colors than those usually ascribed to it. After all, those crowds who filled Sopot in 1956 would soon desert jazz for rock music and likewise, most of the jazz musicians themselves would also soon forsake the music to pursue other professions. There is no doubt about it that the jazz fad in Poland became the vanguard of change in Polish culture. The 1956 Sopot festival thus represented a turning point. It ended a certain type of customs and tradition in our culture and opened up new horizons. Jazz – the grave digger who helps to usher in a new order and style.

Fashion is sometimes regarded as an unappreciated power. Perhaps jazz had, still has and will have, this power in Polish music and culture. For amidst the chaos, din and plethora of musical phenomena in the 20th Century, jazz continues to be the guiding light for many musicians. Jazz has freed many people (not only musicians) from the straightjacket of the past reality. It has come about with the change of generations. It has been a fortunate solution in Poland with jazz becoming an element of the new style. Nevertheless, we still cannot free ourselves from the fear that in the rush towards novelty, jazz, too, will join the list of yesterday's fashionable knick-knacks, which we give life to for a short while only to cast aside the next day and proceed to create new forms.

Some questions remain. Has fashion been the driving force behind changes in Polish jazz over the years? Is fashion a positive factor? Is this phenomenon only characteristic of Poland, or can it be found in other countries? Is conforming to the current fashionable style the basic guarantee of popularity? Does a jazz musician have to popular? In this paper, answering these questions cannot be my concern. I want to explain what jazz education was like during the first period of crystallization of Polish jazz. Of course, there were no jazz schools, no teaching materials or educational aids and practically no contact with musicians from abroad6. The only way to learn jazz was to completely devote oneself to listening to completely worn out old records acquired from some foreign sources (like the library in the American Embassy in Warsaw) or to listen to the foreign radio stations such as Voice Of America, whose jazz program director, Willis Conover is often referred to in our country as the father of Polish Jazz. Indeed, Willis Conover's program – Jazz Hour – had been a real school of jazz for years.

Only a few of the best and most stubborn Polish musicians managed to achieve their goal of a future in jazz. Among them were Krzysztof Komeda, Zbigniew Namyslowski, Jan Ptaszyn Wróblewski, Michal Urbaniak, Urszula Dudziak, Adam Makowicz, Wojciech Karolak, Henryk Majewski and Tomasz Stanko, in other words, a group of which any super-organized jazz education organization in the world could be proud of. But we can speak about the beginnings of organized (formal and informal) jazz education in Poland only at the beginning of the 1970s. This was preceded by sporadically organized and short lasted "jazz schools", for example the Al Thomys-Leslaw Lic school in Cracow (1965). The monthly Jazz, first issued in February 1956, became printing theoretical materials and scores, but among the musicians the apprentice system dominated – there was the leader and then the sideman. Young jazzmen developed alongside more famous and recognized figures. The leaders then were Krzysztof Komeda, Andrzej Trzaskowski, Zbigniew Namyslowski, Jan Ptaszyn Wróblewski – Tomasz Stanko (modern jazz), and Henryk "Papa" Majewski (older styles of jazz) while the sidemen included Janusz Muniak, Janusz Stefanski, Tomasz Szukalski, Zbigniew Seiferd, Bronislaw Suchanek, Adam Makowicz, Jarek Smietana, Darek Oleszkiewicz and myself, among others. The leader-sideman arrangement is still used, but of course, it cannot replace a well thought-out program of jazz education at a time when jazz has ceased being the domain of struggling artists and has become instead a professional industry requiring experienced sidemen, clubs, festivals, recordings, contests and so forth.

Let us return again to the times when Poland was still an exotic country for the West, a white spot, as it were, on the jazz map of the world. In the '60s, we could observe the nascence of the professional jazz scene. The clubs then formed the federation of Polish jazz clubs, later to be transformed into the Polish Jazz Federation, and finally into the Polish Jazz Society, which is still alive and well. Jan Byrczek, a bassist of Cracow shelved his instrument and, for a number of years, ran the Polish jazz life, the International Jazz Federation and the Jazz Forum magazine to boot. On the evening of September 18, 1958, Leopold Tyrmand emceed the first night of the new Jazz Jamboree festival in Warsaw. Nobody could imagine then that the festival would endure for more than 40 years and become one of the oldest jazz festivals in Europe. Jazz entered the Philharmonic Hall and also the movies. Krzysztof Komeda started writing scores for countless Roman Polanski films including the famous Rosemary's Baby7. The leading figures of Polish jazz joined the artistic elites in this country. The '60s saw debuts of groups whose leaders were soon to make great careers worldwide (ie. Michal Urbaniak, Urszula Dudziak, Adam Makowicz, to name but a few).

In the late '60s, the first faculty of popular music in Poland, later to include jazz, found its home at the Music Academy in Katowice. This is the only regular jazz department on the college level to function during all this time. In the early '70s, the newly formed Polish Jazz Society created a special office of school systems, and in 1971 in Chodziez, a small town 80km north of Poznan, the music workshop was founded. This year marks the 32nd anniversary of the Chodziez Workshop, and what was once treated as an experiment, has now become the basis and center of the system of jazz education in Poland. For many years, I have been the coordinator of this system, as well as the director of the Chodziez Workshop.

As is well known, jazz in Poland is acknowledged to be a hybrid style in music and an alternative one as well. Adapting harmonic concepts of the late Romantic composers and utilizing other classical devices in composition and improvisation, the jazz musicians combined folk, pop and classical elements to produce a new hybrid musical idiom. In Poland, jazz has always played the dual role of folk and art music. At the beginning of organized jazz education in Poland, the real challenge for jazz educators was what we may now call "nursing a formidable hybrid." The concept of jazz as a hybrid has influenced the system of jazz education in Poland. Our jazz educators decided to choose alternative music pedagogy because their motivation, teaching strategies and individual approaches to teaching and learning jazz improvisation were all different from traditional methods. What then, were the motivations for jazz musicians in Poland? Was jazz an alternative counter-culture or a protest against the established musical tradition?

Reflecting on the alternative nature of jazz gives rise to another interpretation of the development of jazz in Poland. While the phenomenon of jazz as a fashion is something essentially distinct and new in relation to the traditional Polish music culture, if we regard jazz as a folk form, then it might be possible to place it in our tradition of Romanticism and the idea of national music. To make this point clear, lets remember that since Chopin, the national element has become something sacred in Polish music. Even today, with the most sophisticated artistic excesses of theavant-gardee, it is difficult to imagine a Polish musician who would be completely indifferent to this national element (after all, even a determined negation is but a demonstration of its absence). Nevertheless, I would like to put forth a rather risky thesis: the roots of Polish jazz should be sought in the ostentatious gesture of Romanticism carried over into the latter half of the 20th Century.

In jazz, the demonstration of Romanticism is given without sentimentality and pathos (It is often said that the Romantic stance is like blues). The key factors have been a revolt against the established order, a drive towards freedom, a desire for an intense life as well as self-realization and self-assurance in creation. The manifestation of Romantic tradition in Polish jazz, in fact was not only a protest against the authoritarian forms of academic classicism in music and musical education but also an exploitation of the Polish folk music. No Polish jazzmen restricted themselves to their own national style but folk and national elements were exploited with great frequency, as they were useful in creating the authentic Polish style in jazz. In the development of jazz in Poland there were two main sources of impulses for musicians: the general American model of jazz and the national model of Chopin, including Polish folk tradition as well.

The folk music model became particularly significant in the music of Zbigniew NamysLowski. He went on forming his successive jazz ensembles and writing pieces permeated with the specific native "Polish note". Consequently, critics were at logger-heads over the authenticity of the phenomenon of " Polish jazz". Another distinctive trait of the Polish jazz scene are the projects inspired by the music of Frederic Chopin and other great Polish composers – Karol Szymanowski, Mieczyslaw Karlowicz and Witold Lutoslawski. The folk music model became particularly significant from 1949 to 1955, especially after the infamous congress in Lagow, which introduced the official doctrine of social realism in culture. It was based on the conviction that using folklore as a source for compositional inspiration could build a spiritual bridge between the artistic elite and the mass audience. However, as a result of this, Polish composers, as well as other creative artists only became isolated from the changes taking place in Western art. Perhaps only the jazz musicians, in their "catacombs" escaped this isolation. No wonder that the liberalization of 1956 – which allowed composers to step out from under the folklore umbrella – enlivened Polish music. Since then, all kinds of instructions and suggestions from "above" were treated by the musicians as a necessary evil. Nevertheless, since the early 1960s there were many attempts at using and adapting folk elements in jazz, involving almost every jazz musician. Folk elements can easily blend in with jazz and Polish folk melodies can give an individual feature to the cosmopolitan face of Polish jazz.

It is true that jazz is open to all sorts of influences; the only elements it does not tolerate are those it cannot adapt. From the examples of Kuyaviak Goes Funky, by Zbigniew Namyslowski, many pieces by Michal Urbaniak and Chopin projects by Andrzej Jagodzinski, Leszek Mozdzer and Wlodzimierz Nahorny, we see that jazz, Polish folk music and great Romantic tradition have found a common meeting ground and are mutually adaptable. Space does not allow for a detailed enumeration of all the individual features of Polish style in jazz; however, one has to free oneself of certain intellectual prejudices and dogmas set forth by the codifiers of the "Polish School of Jazz" (for example, the presence of folk scales and quotations from folklore do not guarantee the "Polishness" of a particular jazz piece). We shall never know exactly what and how much the Polish jazzmen took directly from the popular folk tradition and how much they invented, but it does not matter – their originality is revealed as much in what they selected as in what they imagined. The folk melodies and great Romantic tradition gave them the possibility of exploring new musical domains and of developing individual language and style. In the past and the present, Polish jazz musicians used to face a dilemma: the highest measure is not whether you have caught up with the West ("American jazz") but whether you have caught up with yourself, here and now, in this country.

Let me give you some insights into the system of jazz education in Poland. I think what makes it special is the relation between formal and informal jazz education. I have to emphasize that this system is an alternative to the traditional school model of jazz, which in our country has not to this point received enough attention. For many years, there was no jazz in the school programs, with the exception of the Department of Popular Music of the Katowice Music Academy, which could accept only 20 students per year, a mere drop in the ocean. Polish Jazz Society organized the three-level system of jazz courses. There were courses for beginners, lasting from one up to six months, which were organized by the national divisions of the Polish Jazz Society. These were usually correspondence courses, with periodic consultations that also included classes and exams at the end. The country-wide, second-grade course lasted three weeks (now 10 days) and the best students from the first grade and musicians selected by juries at the jazz competitions participated. All students also passed an entrance exam. The Chodziez Workshop, for the last 13 years and recently taking place in Pulawy, is this kind of course.

And finally, there were the master courses for distinguished young musicians who worked out special concert programs with well-known Polish and foreign leaders. I would here just like to emphasize the unusual achievement of the Chodziez/Pulawy Workshop. Practically all the well-known musicians who have appeared on the scene in Poland during the last 35 years have been participants of this workshop. In Chodziez/Pulawy one can meet some of the most famous Polish jazzmen, but we also invite foreign guests. For years this workshop was graced by the presence of Bunky Green, Richard Dunscomb, Paul Schmelling, John Repucci, Skip Hadden, Orville Wright, Greg Badolato, Willy Thomas, Don Cherry, Stu Martin, Joe Lee Wilson, Garrison Fewell, Deborah Brown, Judy Niemack, Rachel Gould, Ziggy Busch, Karl Heinz Miklin, Dieter Glawischnig, Simeon Szterew, Bernt Rosengren, Rudolf Dasek, Elly Wright, Alan Ginter and many others. I don't want to get too much into the history of the workshop, its program concepts, directors and staff, not to mention its successes and failures, nor will I mention all the musicians whose successes are a credit to this event (more detailed information you may find in the supplement to this paper).

I would like to conclude my presentation with some thoughts about the future of jazz education in Poland. In this research paper, I have consciously limited myself to these aspects of jazz which have to do with its interpretation as a hybrid and an alternative. In Polish culture, jazz has always existed in between two value systems. It was a situation between the hammer and the anvil. In order to survive, one had to fight. The reason for jazz's survival in Poland is that it accumulated the way of thinking of an entire generation whose most dynamic days came right after World War II. I like to compare jazz to rivers, streams and electricity. For me, playing, teaching and/or listening to jazz is like plugging into the eternal current, like jumping into the carousel of sound whirling around us. I think that teacher and student alike should become aware of the fact that jazz is like a stream that is shaped according to a certain set of its own laws and the laws of fate in the movement of all the elements that it is made up of. And so, theory, II-V-I progression, rhythm changes, scales, harmonic systems, musical styles, idioms, techniques, aesthetic – the whole doubtfully beneficial musical inventory – appears and disappears in this stream, and like it or not, we carry them along on our journey. In Poland, it was and still is the journey "between the devil and the deep blue sea." But now, the year 2004 sees jazz between two (of many?) alternatives. Will jazz become a delicate flower which we will shelter and grow with great care in a few enclaves, or will jazz enter the future like a triumphant synthesis of the present and the past? These are just two of the possibilities of which there may be many more, but it is in this specific case, in order to survive, we must pick one, choose an appropriate strategy, and act!
 

By Janusz Szprot, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey

Published in the Jazz Research Proceedings Yearbook, Vol. 24, 2004