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• Laureaci konkursu "Fonograficzny Debiut Roku" - Ziółek Kwartet
  

  • Ziółek Kwartet
    Grzegorz Ziółek – lider – fortepian
    Marcin Elszkowski – trąbka
    Piotr Narajowski – kontrabas
    Miłosz Berdzik – perkusja

  Zwycięzcy wszystkich najważniejszych konkursów jazzowych w Polsce.
  Ich muzyka łączy w sobie nieposkromioną energię z wyrafinowaną estetyką formy, a całość dopełniona jest tajemniczą aurą i słowiańskim duchem.
  Zespół powstał z inicjatywy pianisty i kompozytora Grzegorza Ziółka.
  Zaprosił on do współpracy przedstawicieli młodego pokolenia muzyków z różnych regionów Polski: grającego na trąbce Marcina Elszkowskiego, kontrabasistę Piotra Narajowskiego oraz perkusistę Miłosza Berdzika. W 2020 roku zespół zdobył Grand Prix Jazz Juniors, a także I miejsce na Blue Note Poznań Competition. Rok później, artyści ponownie sięgnęli po Grand Prix na Indywidualność Jazzową 57. Jazzu nad Odrą. W roku 2022 zespół został wyróżniony grantem Narodowego Instytutu Muzyki i Tańca w ramach 11. Jazzowego Debiutu Fonograficznego.
  Każdy z muzyków ma na koncie liczne osiągnięcia zarówno indywidualne jak i grupowe oraz występy na najbardziej prestiżowych festiwalach jazzowych w Polsce i za granicą, w tym m.in.: Warsaw Summer Jazz Days, Jazz nad Odrą, Umbria Jazz, Copenhagen Jazz Days.

• Cécile McLorin Salvant
  

  • Cécile McLorin Salvant – voice
    Alexa Tarantino – piccolo/flute/alto flute 
    Glenn Zaleski – piano
    Yasushi Nakamura : bass
    Keita Ogawa – percussions
    Marvin Sewell – guitar 

  The ghosts playing the lead roles in Cécile McLorin Salvant’s rhapsodic Ghost Song are not the Hollywood kind. They’re closer temperamentally to the fleeting, elusive presences Emily Dickenson famously celebrated in verse:

  One need not be a chamber to be haunted.

  One need not be a house.

  The brain has corridors surpassing material place.

  Ghost Song, Salvant’s Nonesuch debut, explores the (many) ways people can be haunted—by lingering memories, roads not taken, ghosts real and imagined. Its intense, disquietingly evocative songs follow living souls as they confront torments of absence—some characters lament loved ones gone too soon, others are troubled by the remnants of vanished romance, others are paralyzed by the sense of time galloping past.

  It is a breathtaking, fully realized conceptual work from an artist whose trajectory has moved at warp speed. Born in Miami, Florida in 1989, Salvant studied piano beginning at age five, sang in a children’s choir at eight, and then began classical voice lessons. She pursued dual tracks as an undergraduate in France (her mother is French, her father Haitian) —studying French law at one university while attending the Darius Milhaud Conservatory studying baroque music and jazz. Though at the time she didn’t intend to sing professionally, she entered the Thelonious Monk competition in 2010 and won it.

   

  That led to a string of five acclaimed releases, each one more daring than the previous. Yet nothing Salvant has done can quite prepare listeners for the visceral intensity, concise yet prismatic writing, and genre-obliterating atmospheres of Ghost Song. The work draws on the tools this vocalist, composer, multiple Grammy winner, and MacArthur Fellow has utilized in the past, but in new and harrowing ways. It is, in the least glib sense possible, the rare departure that is also an arrival.

  Ghost Song situates Salvant’s image-rich originals alongside radical reimaginings of songs by Kate Bush, Gregory Porter, Sting, Harold Arlen, and Kurt Weill. Each of the pieces describes a different type of engagement with unquiet spirits, and each dwells within a detailed, highly specific musical atmosphere. The stylistic range is astonishing: Brooding minor-key torch songs sit next to argumentative Sondheim-style music theater dialogs sit next to ancient folk melodies sit next to invitingly spacious (and harmonically complex) jazz meditations.

  Salvant conceived Ghost Song during the early period of the pandemic and recorded it in the necessarily patchwork way creative projects happened under lockdown. Doing the work was, she recalls, at once frustrating and therapeutic. But it didn’t prepare her for the challenge she faced when tracking was finished: Figuring out the best way to raise the curtain on a song cycle devoted to ghosting, the emotional needs of ghost presences, and the very nature of communication with spirits.

  One logical choice was a song called “I Lost My Mind”—an incantation in Salvant’s detached robotic voice, with tense vocoder-style interior harmonies enhanced by Aaron Diehl’s careful voicings on pipe organ.

  Salvant liked the full-disclosure honesty of it. “Starting off that way is basically saying ‘Hey, I know this is different.’ Because once you say, ‘I’ve lost my mind,’ it sort of allows you to do whatever. After that, there can be no expectations for what it’s going to be.”

  The song immortalizes a tipping point lockdown moment. Salvant recalls being in her Brooklyn apartment, walking and pacing, at times simply trying to understand her emotional state. “It was one of those nights when I just wanted to scream but could not figure out why. Am I anxious? Or excited? Am I just feeling cooped up? I didn’t even know what the scream was for anymore … Eventually I felt it was OK to just go with the completely crazy thing and not worry if people think you have lost your mind for doing it.”

• Steve Coleman and Five Elements
  

  Steve Coleman and Five Elements, with their soon to be released live performance at the renowned Village Vanguard in New York City, „Mdw Ntr,” finds MacArthur Fellow Steve Coleman exploring new terrain in his use of non-linear performance practices in his music. Featuring his long-running flagship ensemble Five Elements, he utilizes spontaneous and precomposed modules, or motivic cells that can be played in any order, allowing each musician to spontaneously jump forward or backward to different sections – even between compositions – highlighting different strata of the music and reinventing the form in a completely interactive way with each performance. Coleman often composes these modules by envisioning them as chains of tonal dyads that are strung together along rhythmic patterns to create melodic structures; something he sees as an analogue of DNA sequences. The work also reflects his research into the connection between language and music, in particular the early attempts at music notation using shapes and glyphs in ancient Egypt and the structural and functional similarities between spontaneous composition and Mdw Ntr, a transliteration of the writing system usually called hieroglyphics. Coleman’s use of complex rhythmic cycles is a consistent hallmark of his work, and the roiling, surging momentum found here is no exception. Featured prominently is long-time collaborator and spoken word artist, Kokayi, who brings a freewheeling, rhythmically-acute, almost tent revival aesthetic to the proceedings. Together, they continue to push the possibilities for spontaneous composition and improvisation. Composer and alto saxophonist Steve Coleman is widely considered to be among the most influential artists in modern music. He is the recipient of three prestigious awards: a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship and Doris Duke Performing Artist Award; recognition for his influence incorporating a lifetime of research into African diasporic culture and cycles found in nature and astronomy into his musical methods. The pianist and composer Vijay Iyer told the Wall Street Journal that “It’s hard to overstate Steve’s influence. He’s affected more than one generation, as much as anyone since John Coltrane.” He has led his main group Steve Coleman and Five Elements for over 40 years and released 30 albums as a leader. He co-founded M-Base, an influential cooperative in the mid-1980s that is still vital today as the non-profit organization M-Base Concepts, Inc., which provides a supportive environment for musical experimentation and original performance. Coleman’s commitment to mentorship and community has also distinguished his career. He regularly holds weeks-long residencies around the country, conducting workshops, seminars, open rehearsals, performances and collaborations in an effort to reach out to under-served communities and to help energize local music scenes. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (2009–2010) and the Thelonious Monk Institute (2008–2009) and a faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley (2000–2002) where he also conducted research at Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), the Stanford Jazz Workshop (1995–1996), and the Banff School of Fine Arts (1985–1991). He explored the use of interactive computer software in the creation of music at IRCAM in Paris, France where his commissioned work premiered in 1999.