Paweł Brodowski: Today we’re meeting Jan Ptaszyn Wróblewski. He witnessed the birth and co-created the movement that became known as Polish Jazz. As a sax player and composer, Ptaszyn worked with the best and most distinguished. Later he went on to become a band leader himself. On top of that, he is the voice that introduced the amazing jazz music from Poland and abroad to many generations of Polish listeners.
So let’s get to it. Jan Ptaszyn Wróblewski, coming up on Rebel Spirits!
When Ptaszyn Wróblewski was beginning his career, jazz was outlawed in Poland. The Second World War had just ended but Ptaszyn’s homeland continued to be deprived of autonomy. As a result of the Yalta Conference, the country was virtually incorporated into the Soviet Union and fell behind the Iron Curtain. At that time, no one was sure what this would mean for Polish musicians, let alone for Polish society.
It went like this: the first three years, let’s say, were just a warm-up before Stalinism really got going and everything got banned. But before that happened, we even had some independent record labels. Muza, Melodie, for example…
But then, the screw was tightened and there came a moment when we realised that we couldn’t buy records anymore. There was only one record label, a state corporation, and this state corporation wouldn’t issue jazz or anything remotely jazz-related.
Stalinism meant not only the end of civic freedoms, independent media and provocative literature. The censorship apparatus also reached instrumental music, even though it was not explicitly political. Jazz became a hallmark of hateful Western imperialism. This American genre could too easily confuse the newly-created socialist community. The ban on jazz meant all music had to be put under control.
Jan Ptaszyn Wróblewski: Weird things started to happen at the radio, quite suddenly: strange new people, a peculiar new playlist…And to top it off, the so-called social realist agenda started being enforced and music hit rock bottom. You couldn’t listen to it for very long.
PB: At the same time, a counter-movement emerged to drive a wedge between Polish musicians.
JPW: You could say that later, when jazz came out in the open and newer trends took root, that the entire older generation of musicians was rejected, very unjustly.But they had a different outlook, this new generation, when they finally came into their own. They wanted a revolution and were stubborn. The elder musicians, they towered over us in technique, skill, practically everything except, perhaps, a sense of jazz.
PB: But before this revolution broke out on the musical scene, the youth of Poland have already fallen in love with jazz – even if this was still a forbidden love. Some tried to smuggle records from Western countries. Many gathered in private apartments to listen to rare and hard-won copies. Why did jazz become so popular behind the Iron Curtain? Ptaszyn has a simple explanation.
JPW: Precisely because it was forbidden music. Forbid Poles anything and they will have found a passion to keep them going from morning till night. That’s how it went. Every one of us had listened to it for a few years.
There were no records… that’s the most important thing we often forget: that until the year 1990 there were no Western records in Poland. None, zilch. If you wanted a record you had to travel West and bring it home yourself.
So Conover supplied us with everything we needed.
Music playing: “Voice of America Jazz Hour” intro
PB: The authorities always tried to block Willis Conover’s radio show “The Voice of America Jazz Hour” but it still reached a considerable audience in Poland. It was a school of music but also… of English. Conover spoke slowly with his gentle baritone. He was making sure his words were clear whatever country they reached – especially in the Eastern Bloc, where his broadcast attracted over 30 million regular listeners...
JPW: Everyone who was interested in jazz listened to Conover. He had enormous authority.
His radio program was being jammed, hell knows how, but the signal couldn’t be blocked completely and you could rest easy that every day at the same time and at the same frequency you would get an hour of jazz, and before that an hour of popular music. As for that, some people took to it, others didn’t, as you please, but the jazz hour afterward - that was top class. All the latest hits, as well as classic recordings. Willis served up the whole gamut, the entire spectrum, whatever that may have been. He didn’t comment much - he just presented the music. Perhaps that was for the best; that way we could make up our own minds. That was what we did: every day, if only you had the time, you sat by a receiver and listened. Over time, this amounted to a vast volume of music. We listened to it for a good few years.
PB: And then Khrushchev’s Thaw came to the entire Bloc. Records were still banned but now bands could play! It was official: the so-called catacomb period had come to an end, and Conover’s followers entered the scene with instruments in their hands.
JPW: Let’s remember that everything looked very different to us at the time. None of us had any hope that anything would ever change in geopolitics. After all, the carve-up was approved by both the East and the West. We couldn’t imagine that we would ever be allowed to play jazz in Poland, to say nothing of any other political changes. All the same, the power of jazz is such that, when you’re on stage, nobody can tell you what to play. You’re there, all by yourself, completely free; whether it’s politically free or musically free, it doesn’t matter. To me, musical freedom was the one that mattered. I had no political ideas at the time.
PB: It’s at this point we have to highlight the role of Leopold Tyrmand, a Polish writer and jazz promoter. He organized concerts and hosted the first jazz broadcasts on Polish radio. These were, still overseen by the regime, but now there was a little more room for artistic freedom.
JPW: Jazz didn’t begin to spread for good until proper events started happening. This was, first and foremost, Tyrmand’s doing: he organized several magnificent concerts in Warsaw and they had a huge impact; others followed and eventually mass events started appearing; the so-called jazz tournaments in which, let’s say, Melomani competed with Wichary’s band, and the audience chose the winner by applause. Venues were vast and the crush was immense. I suspect that many came out of snobbery… that forbidden fruit, again; no longer forbidden but it retained that attractive aura.
Music playing. Band: Komeda Sextet, Composition: Memory of Bach
PB: During this period of relative freedom, an important spot appeared on Poland’s jazz map – the Sopot Jazz Festival. This was where the standard of excellence in music was defined. The festival featured the best Polish musicians and many international guests. Sopot was also the place where Ptaszyn met people who influenced his future career and the history of Polish jazz.
JPW: This festival is now legendary… I am not so sure why… because mass events had taken place before. But Sopot set a clear boundary between jazz and popular music. Though there were some poor choices even there, of course. Who was there? Well, Melomani, for sure… good God… Kurylewicz, certainly: Kurylewicz was there.
PB: Ptaszyn would soon collaborate with Andrzej Kurylewicz. This composer and multi-instrumentalist was rightly called one of jazz’s pioneers in Poland. But before that Ptaszyn would be one of the founding members of another remarkable Polish jazz band.
And Komeda’s sextet, newly formed, was there too.
It was the first band which didn’t offer traditional jazz. Komeda said trad didn’t interest him, he’d only play modern and because of this, I remember, Tyrmand I think it was, announced to the audience that the next act would be for the connoisseurs, so obviously that guaranteed the success of their performance: who wouldn’t want to be a connoisseur. There were crowds there… still coming not so much to see names, stars, but just because it was a jazz festival… It was incredible, even for those times of the Thaw. Crowds would come from all over Poland, hitchhiking, god knows how they all came. And when they came, the crowd couldn’t fit into any of the halls so all sorts of things were happening, including the now-legendary parade. Everyone came up with what they could, some brought in huge trucks for bands to perform on during the parade. And Komeda’s sextet traveled with this notorious coffin on which were written the names of all the hits which weren’t jazz but which aspired to be jazz.
PB: The coffin was a vibraphone case, plastered with obituaries that had the titles of popular hits. For this was a funeral for popular music.
JPW: So this parade attracted not just musicians but also other interested parties, like the infamous Bim-Bom am-dram troupe, four people carrying four large letters and occasionally changing places, rearranging the letters into different words. Sometimes the letters formed the word DUPA, which means ass, pardon my French, and this caused a national scandal, literally all over Poland. All the jazz haters, and there was no lack of them, raised the alarm - what hooligans! what outrage! Because of all this, the authorities would no longer allow jazz events to be called a ‘festival’. So, to get around this, Tyrmand coined the phrase Jazz Jamboree, when he created a new student event in Warsaw. And Jazz Jamboree it remained.
PB: Jazz in Poland was thriving in this period. Everyone knew and cherished the famous American players - but no one thought it possible to visit the capital of jazz, let alone play with the best! Once again, however, Ptaszyn’s story takes an unexpected turn. The beginning of 1958 was a breakthrough moment. George Wein – the famous American impresario and the founder of the iconic Newport Jazz Festival – travelled across Europe in search of young talents to join his jazz orchestra. That summer, he arrived in Poland.
Music playing: The International Youth Jazz Band – Newport Jazz Festival 1958
JPW: It was unthinkable, in those times. I’ve no idea by what miracle it happened.
It was a regular audition, perfectly legal. George Wein, Marshall Brown, not just in Poland but also in Czechoslovakia, they travelled where they could.
PB: In Poland, they auditioned around 30 musicians, but they chose only one – Ptaszyn Wróblewski.
JPW: The actual journey was a challenge of its own… getting the passport, say. But the real problem was that I was the only member of the orchestra who needed a separate visa for each Western country we visited. I had problems with moving around from day one; we had a meeting in Brussels, and I had no legal right to leave the plane.
PB: But after many setbacks and obstacles, Wróblewski eventually found himself in the USA.
JPW: Let’s be clear: up till then you only heard about American stars every now and then, getting hold of someone’s photo was cause for celebration, and there simply weren’t any records at all. So here we land in New York and there at the airport, Gerry Mulligan greets us with his quartet, and Benny Goodman is there, to boot. I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t believe it was all real.
PB: There he was, this young fellow from behind the Iron Curtain, who barely had access to American records. Before, he could never have even dreamed of flying to the US. At that time, such cases were extremely rare. They concerned distinguished scientists, sportspeople, or dissidents, who often never came back. But a 22-year-old sax player? That was unheard of. And yet, there he was: a member of an American International jazz big band. They even played with Louis Armstrong one night.
JPW: We were the International Newport Band, that was our official name. We weren’t anything to write home about because Europe was too far behind the Americans and the big band skills of most band members were wanting. But the colossal success of this endeavor worked in the opposite direction: the visitors learned a lot from American musicians and took it home and had an enormous impact in Europe. So, not so much what we presented in the States, but rather what we brought back from the States.
PB: The most prominent figures in the jazz world, became fully present before Ptaszyn’s eyes. He listened. He watched. And he absorbed.
JPW: It was a shock. A total shock. Obviously, New York City. I remember reaching for a newspaper to see where I could listen to something and discovered that, on that day alone, there were some 300 jazz gigs in New York City. Whosoever we wanted… We tried to listen to something every evening and a large part of these evenings was taken up by Miles Davis, who played in Harlem with his phenomenal sextet.
PB: After a few weeks of intensive rehearsals and performances with the International Newport Youth Band, when he immersed himself in the life of the capital of jazz, Ptaszyn had to come back to communist Poland. Back home, he funnelled the American spirit into the local jazz scene. He started to play with those whom he would later describe as the most important Polish musicians.
JPW: With the great trinity: Trzaskowski, Komeda, Kurylewicz.
Music playing. Artist: Kurylewicz Quintet Album: Go Right composition: One Step Nearer You
PB: All of them met in 1958, when Ptaszyn joined the band Jazz Believers. A few years later, Ptaszyn would play a significant role in bringing about the recording of the first real Polish jazz album, or rather a whole series, titled – quite tellingly – Polish Jazz.
JPW: Gosh, the Polish Jazz record series has a strange history and I’m afraid I have to take some responsibility for it. It began with me and Komeda travelling to Sweden and Denmark, where we recorded for Metronome Records. They later sent us the album. So we had this beautiful specimen with an album cover. Our jazz records were normally released without proper album covers, in makeshift sleeves. There was no way you’d have an album with a cover that said “Andrzej Kurylewicz”. It just said “Jazz”. But inside, you got Andrzej Kurylewicz.
So I ran to Polskie Nagrania with our Swedish album in my hand and showed it to them and said look, foreigners can record us and publish us and even make money, and here we’re smothered into nothingness. Also, I don’t know whether there had ever been an LP by a single musician. I don’t think so. It was all compilations. So I got the right to record the first LP which would come with its own album cover.
PB: The Polish Jazz series, initiated in 1965 and continued to this day, was a true breakthrough for the Polish musical scene. These were the first jazz records officially released in Poland. They had a distinctive cover, band name, and list of musicians. They were recorded entirely by one band which had at least a partial influence on the recorded repertoire.
JPW: I played with Kurylewicz at the time, so we spoke and that’s how the album “Go Right” came to be. After “Go Right”, which sold well, Polskie Nagrania decided, why not do a whole series? And indeed, the subsequent albums bore the mark of the Polish Jazz series and major jazz record production had begun in Poland for the first time.
PB: This change in publishing practices was a huge step forward. But Polish Jazz is more than just the name of this magnificent series. A whole artistic movement is said to have been conceived under this slogan.
JPW: Polish jazz acquired a distinct identity in Europe. We didn’t necessarily see it but they did, and somehow Stańko was seen as the classic example of Polish jazz. The same happened with Namysłowski but then, Namysłowski drew on Polish folk in spades, quite consciously. Also, definitely… Komeda also belonged to this style which became known as Polish jazz… so something like that definitely exists, but that’s normal. Everyone has something inside that comes up through generations, traditions, god knows what… and when you play jazz you play yourself, so something has to come to the surface.
PB: And to top it all – there was also the Polish Jazz Quartet, where Ptaszyn himself was the leader. One may easily get confused. The Polish Jazz Quartet – with Ptaszyn on tenor sax, Wojciech Karolak on piano, Andrzej Dąbrowski on drums, and different bass players – was active until 1966. They created their own pieces but mostly played American compositions known from Conover’s broadcast.
JPW: Ellington’s Don't Get Around Much Anymore, Coltrane’s Greensleeves definitely and also probably My Favorite Things, and Coltrane and Davis’s Walking.
PB: This could not have been further from the approach of Krzystof Komeda, who also played with Ptaszyn in the 1960s. Komeda searched for a way to surpass standards – to mix jazz with more local music traditions.
JPW: The drive to search constantly, that was what Krzysztof rammed into our heads, very methodically.
Not to play historic jazz, jazz from records we knew, but our own jazz…
To play our own way… he applied this not just to improvisation but also to arrangement. Which is extremely clear to see. Krzysztof couldn’t just take a swing tune and play it like Benny Goodman, no. He had to come up with a way to do it differently.
PB: In a similar spirit, Ptaszyn launched one of the largest initiatives on the Polish scene. The Polish Radio Jazz Studio Orchestra formed in 1969. Ptaszyn created a kind of all-star big band. This orchestra produced a myriad of remarkable recordings and toured across Poland and Europe.
JPW: I can’t offer a clear-cut definition of the music we played as the Jazz Studio Orchestra. All experiments were welcome, so it could be Tomasz Stańko’s free jazz, Włodzimierz Nahorny’s piano-bar ballads, Zbigniew Namysłowski’s typical tangles. Any composer and arranger in Poland who had something interesting to say was there, all the way to Wojciech Karolak, and Jan Jarczyk later, when he returned… too many to count and each had their own character, but we listened to each other and learned from each other… well, a very nice mélange, there.
PB: Like Komeda’s work, this stood in sharp contrast to the adherence to jazz standards by the Polish Jazz Quartet in the early 1960s. The orchestra continued through the 1970s, developing a previously unknown, eclectic style. Indeed, it was a truly unique phenomenon.
JPW: There was a point when the Jazz Studio Orchestra was more than a big band: we had, at times, six saxophones, double rhythm sections, two drum sets, two basses. And whenever something fresh appeared on the horizon, we had to have it.
PB: A year after creating the orchestra, Ptaszyn embraced yet another new role. It echoed Willis Conover, the “Godfather of Polish jazz”. The man who had inspired the first generations of Polish jazzmen. Ptaszyn started hosting his own 45-minute radio show titled 45 Minutes of Jazz. And like Conover’s broadcast in the 1950s and 1960s, it became a source of knowledge and inspiration for successive generations.
JPW: Initially we each had a subject, or slant, so Andrzej Dąbrowski had singers, Jan Borkowski had news, and I had so-called problems, in practice the widest arena to cover. But this changed over time, especially when my teammates began dropping off...
PB: The show is still on air – and alongside Conover’s, which ran for over 40 years until 1996, Ptaszyn’s became one of the longest-running jazz shows in the world with the same host. Over the decades, Ptaszyn followed and commented on the development of Polish and foreign jazz. Wrapped up in this history, politics continued to loom over the sheer interest in jazz.
JPW: We had censorship, so we had to record each program at least a week before broadcast, to give the censors time to make sure everything was above board. Then censorship went away and initially not much changed but the general trend, which affected the “Three Quarters” program, was to move to live broadcasts.
PB: But before censorship collapsed in 1989, it was severely tightened up throughout the 1980s. Because of growing anti-regime strikes, the authorities introduced Martial Law in Poland. It drastically restricted everyday life. There was a curfew and tanks appeared on the streets. Once again, concerts were cancelled or musicians refused to play. Looking for a way to make a living, musicians went to ports and boarded cruise ships. After the golden age of the last two decades, there was a drought for Polish recording and concert life.
JPW: Cruise ship gigs were the direct result of martial law and the cultural drought that followed in its wake… The Polish jazz community was blockaded, nobody travelled. If you travelled, it meant that the regime let you out and you were seen as one of their collaborators. Culture lay in ruin, there was nothing to do. Life was hard, politically and economically, there was a boycott of state events in the community… There was nothing else for it, so I decided to take a cruise ship gig to help out financially. At the time it was a very lucrative job, getting paid in dollars. And I got to see a bit of the world. It wasn’t something I had thought about initially but with hindsight, it was the greatest silver lining of this experience. Over the course of two years, I think, I went on two or three… three four-month cruises.
PB: Fortunately for Poland, Martial Law marked the beginning of the end for the communist regime. Six years after it ended, a bloodless revolution ended Soviet dependency. It brought in democracy, open borders and a free market. The American jazz that had been the origin, the music that had influenced Polish jazz, had soon become.... its main competition.
JPW: In the early nineties, it was very difficult to get your music released. Despite the arrival of the compact disc, Poland was suddenly flooded by a whole world, an entire history of jazz recordings. Nobody cared much about Polish jazz.
If I had a choice to buy Namysłowski, whom I’d heard 50 times, or Miles Davis’s best record which I’d never had, well, it wasn’t a hard choice. It was a rocky ride, the nineties. It only started to settle afterwards, mainly through concerts: people recognised the unique aura of a jazz gig. But even here we got flooded with visiting American stars.
PB: But what remains unchanged through all these years is Ptaszyn’s 45 Minutes of Jazz, still broadcast every Monday at 9pm.
And Ptaszyn records new albums to this day.
… Most recently you issued a box set of archival recordings…
JPW: That’s no longer the most recent. My latest is, surprisingly, a very good effort, if I say so myself. An album released by GAD Records, a continuation of “Flyin’ Lady”, in a quartet with Marek Bliziński.
PB: Oh, I’m not familiar with that. Is it out yet?
JPW: If I have one on me, I’ll give it to you straight away. I think it’s one of my best.