Brazilian Melodies, Polish Style: An Interview with Piotr Baczewski & Magdalena Tejchma

Cruz-Machado-Santana-S30.jpg, default, The 'Back to the Roots' project, Brazil 2023-2024, photo: courtesy of the Muzyk Zakorzeniona Foundation

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How does one find Polish traditional music in the middle of a Brazilian jungle? Piotr Baczewski and Magda Tejchma from the Muzyka Zakorzeniona Foundation documented and digitised the musical traditions of the Polish diaspora from Paraná and Santa Catarina, Brazil.

Natalia Sajewicz: Let’s start by talking about the Polish diaspora in Brazil. Its members are mostly descendants of Poles who emigrated to Brazil in the late 19th century in search of a better life and who cultivated land.

Magdalena Tejchma: The diaspora lives in small villages that are still quite remote today. Most of its members work on the land. For generations, Portuguese wasn’t particularly useful to them. A couple of words were enough to communicate while shopping in a nearby town. After Portuguese became mandatory in schools, Polish slowly began to be diluted. The generation born in the 50s and 60s speaks very well; the people born in the 70s are a bit less fluent; and the generation born in the 80s and 90s definitely knows Polish the least.

MT: Well, if a Polish popstar went to play a stadium concert there, it wouldn’t sell out.

PB: John Paul II was very important in the context of Polish identity in Brazil. During his 1980 pilgrimage to Curitiba, the Polish diaspora became more visible and consolidated. The open-air museum we’ve mentioned earlier was opened to commemorate the Pope’s visit.

NS: The Polish community in Paraná and Santa Catarina was isolated both culturally and geographically, which is why they preserved the music traditions so well. How did the families transmit Polish culture to younger generations? I was really surprised to learn they often didn’t remember which village the family originally came from.

MT: We were shocked too! We thought that if being Polish was so important to them, then clearly a specific place of origin would be vital. However, we must remember that most of the people who came to southern Brazil were peasants. The notion of a region didn’t really exist – people had a sense ‘we are us, and we are from here’. And where that ‘here’ was – that is a secondary matter. Another factor is the loss of Polish documents and the fact that a large part of the 19th-century emigrants were illiterate.

Until the time of the nationalisation campaign in Brazil, national minorities were isolated – they had their own schools where their languages were used. The presidency of Getulio Vargas marked a moment of change. He issued a decree that made it mandatory for schools to use Portuguese. National schools of minorities were subsequently closed.

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The 'Back to the Roots' project, Brazil 2023-2024, photo: courtesy of the Muzyk Zakorzeniona Foundation

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NS: How do you even find traditional Polish musicians in rural Brazil?

MT: The whole story started some years before the trip. Piotr met Lucas Antunes do Santos, a leader of a local folklore band from Mallet.

PB: The folklore band ‘Mazury’ from Mallet was awarded the Oskar Kolberg Prize in 2018, and Lucas came to Poland to attend the ceremony. I was also there to support a band I knew. That’s how I met Lucas – in the golden room of the Royal Castle in Warsaw. A few years on, Lucas unexpectedly contacted me with an idea to co-organise a Polish music festival in Brazil. He said we should come to Paraná (a state in southern Brazil where Mallet is located) and told us about elderly traditional musicians.

MT: It all seemed rather abstract.

PB: We didn’t know what to expect. We only knew about the music of the Polish diaspora in Brazil from the record “Polacy w Brazylii i Argentynie” (“Poles in Brazil and Argentina”) released by the Polish radio in 1998. There were virtually no recordings available online.

MT: There were only some travel blogs from the region. Anyway, we decided to go and see for ourselves.

PB: Lucas sent us videos to encourage us – an old guy dressed in a suit shredding on a violin, someone playing a drum in the background…

MT: It is worth noting that a student group from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań did visit the Polish diaspora in 2009, but their recordings weren’t publicly available. Ethnolinguists also visited the region to conduct research.

We finally made it to Brazil in 2023. Our field research in Poland really helped us find the musicians and record them.

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The 'Back to the Roots' project, Brazil 2023-2024, photo: courtesy of the Muzyk Zakorzeniona Foundation

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NS: What does this practice entail?

MT: Firstly, have a local guide and a driver. Then explore and keep asking questions, very persistently.

PB: Our group included musicians who play Polish traditional music – Mateusz Kowalski, Kazik Nitkiewicz, Asia Skowrońska, and Marysia Stępień. It really helps form a relationship and get people to open up. Imagine – suddenly, a group of Poles starts playing Polish music in the middle of a Brazilian jungle, 20 kilometres from the closest town. It’s a great way to start things off. People were moved, and we began to gain their trust.

MT: It is much easier for musicians we want to record to open up when they encounter other musicians. They can sing something together, play a melody or two. Very often, Piotr and I didn’t have to ask the diaspora members to share the music with us. The impulse was enough for them to recognise they were amongst their own.

PB: The recording process was often exciting and unusual – it’s an impromptu concert at a front porch.

MT: Very often, the situation opened up reservoirs of memory that hadn’t been accessed for a long time.

While recording in Poland, we also learnt that it’s essential to come back. Sometimes it seems like a person doesn’t remember any more songs, and then the next day they keep on singing more. This is especially true for older people, who have both good and bad days.

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The 'Back to the Roots' project, Brazil 2023-2024, photo: courtesy of the Muzyk Zakorzeniona Foundation

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NS: I was expecting to hear influences of Brazilian music in the recordings. The Szymanek brothers are one interesting example. They adapted the gaucho genre to write their own songs in Polish, but this seems to be an isolated case. Have I overlooked the influences?

MT: It’s not so simple – you have to know both musical cultures (Polish traditional music and Brazilian music) really well in order to dissect some things. For instance, the Błaszczyk family band consisted of two violins, a basolia, and a drum. I only realised that some of the melodies they were playing were Brazilian when I listened to our recordings. Feliciano Błaszczyk, the violin player, said he was going to play a song from the local genre, venerão, then proceeded in an absolutely Polish style.

PB: This shows a vital feature of traditional music – it’s not just the text and melody, but the way you think about the music and play. Rhythm, [akcentowanie], phrasing, emission, style – it’s a complicated mosaic. It turns out you can play a Brazilian melody in a Polish style.

MT: As for the Szymanek brothers you’ve asked about, there’s a story that begs to be told. I wrote an article about the Polish diaspora in Brazil for the British Songlines magazine, the most important world music periodical. The editor in chief proposed to release a song by the Szymanek Brothers on the CD added to the magazine in the feature ‘Top of the world’. That’s how the duo, who spent the majority of their lives in a remote village, reached musical heights.

NS: Where did these musicians know Brazilian music from?

MT: From the radio, visits to nearby markets while selling their produce, and school, after the nationalisation campaign in the late 1930s.

PB: They also played at different weddings and had contact with other immigrant groups – Ukrainians, Italians, Germans. In Mallet, there’s a wedding tradition of dancing with korovais – wedding bread, in Polish known mostly as kołacz – held above the head.

MT: Most Polish emigrants came from Galicia, a historical region spanning what is now southeastern Poland and western Ukraine. Korovais (or kołacze) were popular throughout the region, but in Mallet, we learned that the dance was a Ukrainian tradition. As it was very attractive, the rest of the community decided to adopt it.

PB: At weddings, Polish melodies are sung in Portuguese, and the cultures mix. The distinction between Poles and Ukrainians is not clear-cut – many emigrants came to Brazil when neither Poland nor Ukraine existed on the map.

MT: That’s true, but we have to mention that religious affiliation was an important identity factor – whether you were a Roman Catholic or an Eastern Orthodox. 40 years ago, mixed marriages were rare in Mallet. Now they’re common – both Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Brazilian.

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The 'Back to the Roots' project, Brazil 2023-2024, photo: courtesy of the Muzyk Zakorzeniona Foundation

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NS: Have you encountered any interesting instruments? In your radio show, Magda, one of the musicians mentioned a fiddle made from local wood.

PB: Unfortunately, we don’t have a luthier or a wood expert on our team, so we weren’t able to tell whether the instruments we saw were made in Brazil or brought from Poland. We came across fiddles, basolias, cimbaloms and frame drums.

MT: The basolia was definitely our most sensational find. Let’s shortly explain why it was so special. The basolia is an archaic string instrument, shaped like a primitive cello. It was played mostly in central Poland and served as a rhythmic base. Today, it’s barely used. In the Polish countryside, it’s almost impossible to find anyone who plays it. Only ensembles that reconstruct traditional music of the past use it. Village bands don’t – the basolia went out of fashion, it didn’t go together with the squeezebox.

And here we were, arriving at Mallet and meeting an ensemble made up of fiddle, basolia and drum. It felt completely unreal!

However, the accordion is the most popular instrument, which comes as no surprise – it’s the most popular instrument in all of South America.

NS: What about drums? Brazil is famous for different drums.

MT: Drums didn’t really permeate into Polish music. If there was a drum in an ensemble, it was played in a Polish style.

PB: But the pandeiro was sometimes used.

MT: True, some musicians played the Brazilian pandeiro, but not the Brazilian way, which is using the fingers to produce different pitches. The Polish musicians played it like a tambourine.

PB: In the pictures of old bands that the musicians showed us, there were a lot of clarinet players, but we weren’t lucky enough to meet any. However, ensembles of fiddle, basolia and clarinet definitely existed.

MT: Speaking of interesting bands, we came across a wedding disco polo band near São Mateus do Sul. A dead ringer Polish band, they played all the hits.

PB: The line-up was accordion, guitar and keyboard.

MT: However, disco polo isn’t particularly famous amongst the Polish diaspora. They play some classics, but not Zenek Martyniuk, Boys or Bayer Full (editor’s note: disco polo artists that are very popular in contemporary Poland).

NS: Perhaps Brazilian popular music fulfils people’s needs? It’s incredibly diverse.

MT: That’s true. I noticed that if we were to identify genres that influence how middle-aged and young Poles play, we’d have to mention gaucho and sertanejo; the latter is extremely popular throughout the South of Brazil.

NS: It’s Brazilian country, right?

MT: Yes, Brazilian country-pop. There’s even a subgenre of sertanejo called agronejo, which glorifies the life of a farmer. At face value, it sounds great – the artists sing that their harvester is more expensive than a Ferrari, etc. But there’s a flipside – the genre was supported by the Brazilian far-right. During Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency, a lot of money was spent on supporting farming, but the emphasis was on deregulation, Amazon deforestation, and promoting agribusiness for export.

Nonetheless, in southern Brazil, agronejo is definitely the music of village youth – no wonder the artists sing that being from a village and growing corn are the best ways to win over a girl’s heart.

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The 'Back to the Roots' project, Brazil 2023-2024, photo: courtesy of the Muzyk Zakorzeniona Foundation

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NS: I’d like to ask about Lucas Antunes dos Santos, who invited you into the world of the Polish diaspora. Dos Santos organised a small archive, listing the names of Polish immigrants. Did you come across any other grassroots archives or private museums?

PB: It’s not so simple. Together, the states of Paraná and Santa Catarina are roughly the size of Poland. The villages are far apart and are usually small, so it’s hard to grasp everything and answer this question. We did come across an open-air museum and a library collecting old songbooks in Santana. Polish associations also supported the creation of halls of memory.

MT: As for Lucas’ work, it also has a more pragmatic dimension. Knowing the names of ancestors makes it easier to obtain the Polish Card. The more people have it, the more visible the diaspora is. It also facilitates contact with institutions that could support its members.

Creating archives of Polish presence in Brazil is very important, no doubt. We could see for ourselves that our visit animated and integrated the community – people sent each other the recordings and the interviews I conducted for the Polish radio. They also organise workshops and dances, and we also know people who weave and sew traditional garments.

PB: Our films get a lot of likes from Brazilians on social media.

MT: The audio-visual format is key here. Many members of the Polish diaspora speak and understand Polish very well, but as they were schooled in Portuguese, they can’t read or write in Polish. We often communicated via voice notes.

PB: We are happy to see our films circulating, sometimes reaching 150,000 or 200,000 people. It contributes to the music’s recognition.

Some members of the younger generations see the value of traditional music and take the initiative. One example is the duo of a grandfather and grandson from the Gelchaki (Grzelczak) family. The grandpa plays the fiddle, the grandson plays the accordion. The younger of the two gentlemen had the idea of recording his grandfather’s playing in a professional studio.

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Alexander Gelchaki (Grzelczak) / Alexandre Gelchaki Neto - Komar

Another case in point is a fiddler from Curitiba – his grandson recorded him playing. The recording is a two-hour-long stream of consciousness on solo violin.

NS: How is the archive of your foundation, Muzyka Zakorzeniona, retained?

PB: The projects we’re planning for 2026 are focused on the permanence of our archive. We make sure to store many digital copies in different locations. Our archive is constantly growing, and we’d like copies of all our materials to be available in the Centre of Community Archives. We also release CDs, which sometimes surprises people, but those physical copies really reach different parts of the world.

We want to raise availability and promote traditional music. Whoever learns a traditional song thanks to our recordings starts their own archive in their mind.

It is really frustrating that phonograms – some of them invaluable records of people born in the 19th century – don’t enjoy the same status as tangible cultural heritage. Collections of intangible cultural heritage are dispersed and often stored in unsatisfactory conditions.

As a journalist, I ensure that my recordings are archived at Polish Radio and assigned a catalogue number.

PB: It’s crucial for our foundation to give people access to traditional music and allow them to search for their and their ancestors’ local music. Only then can they make an informed choice on whether they like it or not.

There is no public institution in Poland that is devoted chiefly to the intangible cultural heritage of the Polish diaspora abroad. There is some public funding, but no institution to develop a strategy. There is a lot of incredible Polish traditional music all over the world – in Canada, USA, Argentina, Ukraine, Romania, Slovakia, Lithuania, Hungary… Unfortunately, a great majority of Polish society isn’t aware of its existence.

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