Times changed, and so did jazz. The era of big bands, like the Titanic, sank into the waters of oblivion during the years of World War II, and jazz became what we know it as today – more intimate and complex. Many soldiers from Anders’ Army, returning to Poland after the war, brought jazz records back with them from Western Europe. Yet the chief populariser and champion of jazz in post-war Poland was a writer. The name of this man to this day evokes a sacred awe in the soul of every Polish jazz fan. He was called Leopold Tyrmand.
Tyrmand’s life – ladies’ man and fashionista, rebel and hipster – resembles an adventure novel. At the end of the 1930s, he was studying in Paris when he first heard jazz. At the outbreak of World War II, he happened to be in Soviet-occupied Vilnius and even managed to do work there as a journalist for the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. He then wandered around Europe, pretending to be a Frenchman to hide his Jewish descent. He worked as a bartender in Frankfurt, got a job as a sailor on a merchant ship to escape to neutral Sweden, but he was detained and sent to a concentration camp in Norway.
Having returned to Poland after the war, Tyrmand worked as a journalist and began to write short stories. His breakthrough moment came in 1955 when the Czytelnik publishing house released his novel Zły (published in English as The Man with White Eyes) – a thrilling detective story and simultaneously an intriguing panorama of what life in Warsaw was like at the beginning of the 1950s. Tyrmand became not only a literary celebrity, but also a style icon, shocking respectable citizens with his tight pants, bright neckties and colourful socks with red, green, orange and black stripes – at the time, this clothing style was a real provocation for the communist regime. Tyrmand rightly considered life in Poland under the communist regime to be bland, but stylish shoes alone were not enough to bust up this mire. A more powerful tool was required, and this dynamite was jazz, which Tyrmand adored.
The first jazz jam session organised by Tyrmand took place in Warsaw as early as May 1947 – the handbill promised listeners music in the styles of ‘hot jazz’, ‘swing’ and ‘boogie-woogie’. At the time, however, jazz was still an underground, semi-forbidden genre. This all changed in the mid-1950s with the onset of Gomułka’s ‘thaw’, a period of greater freedom after the deaths of Stalin and Poland’s own version, Bolesław Bierut. Having felt the winds of change, writers began to hold regular jazz concerts in Warsaw, concocting original names for them such as ‘Jazz Souls’, ‘Cold and Hot’, ‘A Séance with Jam’. Soon this avalanche was unstoppable – the capital was literally pulsing with jazz.
