Son of Janusz Kaczmarski, painter and art critic, who for many years was the Board President of the Association of Polish Artists and Designers and Anna Trojanowska-Kaczmarska, painter, educator and art historian. With an unfailing sense of irony of history, the bard himself said the following about his birth:
As far as I know, it was about love. It was like that – grandpa wanted to see if he could get Mom to study in Paris, but Mom followed Dad to Leningrad first, then to Kyiv. And since it was the end of Stalinism, in 1955, 1956, they saw with their own eyes what this dream system looks like, how it works. And – as they say – it opened their eyes. There, too, I was begotten, to be precise, during a storm in the Black Sea, during my parents' trip on the ship named ‘Rossija’– formerly ‘Adolf Hitler’.
The future bard went to Warsaw's renowned 15th Narcyza Żmichowska High School. Then, in 1980, he graduated from Polish Philology Studies at the University of Warsaw, with a master's thesis on the topic of Enlightenment period literature under Prof. Zdzisław Libera. Its title was The Figure of Stanisław August Poniatowski in the Occasional Poetry of His Era. One could say that this intellectual formation clearly influenced Kaczmarski's work. His songs often incorporate allegory (a sign or story that speaks of something on a literal level, but their true, 'hidden' meaning is different), which was popular during the Enlightenment. The masterpiece in this respect is the Ballad of Katyń – a series of contradictory comparisons telling what a grave is not in the Smolensk forest.
Kaczmarski’s propensity for telling a story about the present through historical, mostly antique, allusions also has its roots in the Enlightenment (though not exclusively, as this was also being done in earlier eras). Finally, the singer himself said that the collapse of the First Republic of Poland, which took place in that epoch, is for him a fundamental historiosophical point of reference. It is worth adding that, according to family tradition, the poet's distant relative was Jakub Jasiński, an Enlightenment writer, soldier and revolutionary.
Parallel to his studies, Kaczmarski began his musical career. His debut was in 1976 (during the Warsaw Song Fair), although the lyrics of some songs were written much earlier. The author of Mury (The Walls) was associated with Jan Pietrzak’s cabaret Pod Egidą – Ballada o Przedszkolu (Ballad about Kindergarten) was created as a cabaret piece, although stylistically it was closer to Wojciech Młynarki’s songs. The 1970s also marks the beginning of Kaczmarski's long-lasting and fruitful cooperation with Przemysław Gintrowski and Zbigniew Łapiński. Their first joint programme – Mury – was established in 1979; then there was also Muzeum and Raj (Paradise).
In 1979, Kaczmarski received an award at the Student Song Festival in Kraków for his song Obława (Wolf Hunt), and in 1981, the journalists' award at the Opole Festival for Epitaph for Vladimir Vysotsky, still one of his most appreciated songs. The Russian singer was, in fact, a very respected figure by Kaczmarski. The author of Obława – written at the age of 17 and directly inspired by Vysotsky's The Wolfhunt – also used his master's idea when writing the song Czołg (Tank) and translated several of his songs to Polish. Vysotsky's concert in Poland in 1974 has always been an important and often-recalled memory for Kaczmarski.
When martial law was imposed in Poland on 13th December 1981, Kaczmarski was on a concert tour in France. He decided to not return to the country at that time. Later on, he lived mainly from his performances, devoting part of his profits to supporting the underground Solidarity movement. In 1984, he started working in Munich for Radio Free Europe. He became a member of the editorial office of the Polish Radio which was a part of this radio station, hosted the programme Kwadrans z Kaczmarskim (15 Minutes with Kaczmarski) and wrote political commentaries for the main news service. He worked there until 1994 when the Polish section of the radio was closed down (the main mission of the radio is to broadcast programmes to non-democratic countries, and Poland had been democratic for several years).
Since 1990, Kaczmarski often visited and performed in Poland. His first concert tour in nine years with Zbigniew Łapiński resulted in the album Live, which in 2001 gained the Gold Record status, which at that time meant the sale of over 50,000 copies. The Kaczmarski-Gintrowski-Łapiński Trio has also collaborated on the albums Wojna Postu z Karnawałem (The War between Carnival and Lent, 1993) and Sarmatia (1994).
He created the libretto for the blues-opera Kuglarze i Wisielcy (Jugglers and Hangmen), based on the motifs of Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs; the piece, with music by Jerzy Satanowski, was performed in Poznań’s Nowy Theatre.
In 1995, Kaczmarski, together with his second wife Ewa (who helped him recover from alcohol addiction when they were in Munich) and his then nine-year-old daughter Patrycja, settled in Australia, near Perth. This event is referenced in the song 1789 and the album Dwie Skały (Two Rocks), created already on the new continent, the title of which refers to a geological formation located near Perth. This time however, emigration, despite the considerable geographical distance, did not close the way to performances in Poland.
In 2001, Jacek Kaczmarski celebrated 25 years of creative work, which he commemorated with the album Dwadzieścia (5) Lat Później (Twenty (5) Years Later), the title of which was at also a reference to the 20th anniversary of the Solidarity movement. A year later, in March 2002, he was diagnosed with advanced oesophageal cancer. Kaczmarski decided to undergo expensive and complicated therapy in Austria, hoping to avoid surgery that would permanently damage his vocal cords. Numerous fundraising concerts were organised at that time. Unfortunately, the effort was unsuccessful – despite the promising initial effects after two years of fighting the disease, Kaczmarski died in one of the hospitals in Gdańsk on 10th April 2004.
In the field of guitar, Kaczmarski was self-taught, which led him to develop an unusual technique. It resulted from holding the guitar in reverse – despite the fact that the artist was not left-handed. Usually, left-handed guitarists reverse the arrangement of strings on the neck so that the low strings are at the bottom, the same as in the case of a right-handed player holding the instrument in the ‘proper’ way. Kaczmarski did not do this, which is why he needed to play chords differently than it is usually done. The musician himself claimed that over time he noticed that it helps him to give a specific sound to bass chords.
Another interesting fact is admitting to being influenced by pianist techniques, particularly in the case of his song Obława:
I wanted to convey the impression of chase and chaos, hence the rhythm. As far as the level of difficulty of this technique is concerned, being able to play the piano, where you need to have a loose wrist, undoubtedly helped me. This rhythm cannot be played for too long with a stiffened hand.
Apart from these technical peculiarities, Kaczmarski remained a traditionalist in the field of music. He said:
I try to be faithful to one principle: when composing music, I rely on classical patterns. I do not use jazz, blues, rock or pop standards. Unless it has some kind of purpose. But that happens rarely.
He did not shy away from musical quotations and stylisations. For example, Z Pasa Słuckiego Pożytek is in the melody of a polonaise.
In the lyrics of Kaczmarski's songs, two issues immediately attract attention: the sophisticated irony and the ability to re-tell texts of culture in such a way that they still arouse the listener's interest or even express new, unknown content. For example, the song Lalka, a summary of Bolesław Prus's novel The Doll, in which a simple refrain (‘Rzecki dreams of Bonaparte / Wokulski loves Isabella’) provides a slightly different comment to the same verse with each iteration. However, Kaczmarski achieved true mastery in writing about paintings. He created an entire programme entitled Muzeum devoted to descriptions of works of art (or so-called ekphrasis), prepared together with Przemysław Gintrowski and Zbigniew Łapiński.
References to paintings appear in Kaczmarski's work very often. It is enough to recall Zatruta Studnia (The Poisoned Well) referring to a series of paintings by Jacek Malczewski, the ironic Szulerzy inspired by Caravaggio's The Cardsharps, where fraudsters and the deceived unexpectedly change places, or Ambassadors, faithfully reflecting the idea of Hans Holbein, whose painting deals with passing, or the whole Muzeum programme. Less widely known – apart from Rublov – are the songs based on Andrei Tarkovsky's films: Stalker and The Sacrifice.
Another distinctive feature of Kaczmarski is the incredible ability to stylise. It is evidenced by such pieces as Epitaph for Bruno Jasieńki, with the lyrics imitating the rhythm characteristic for the poet (a 7+7 fourteener intertwined with a thirteen-syllable with a male, accented clause), but also the surprising, avant-garde metaphors and neologisms of the pre-war futurist: ‘And I breathe in London's flu-genic fumes / And I taste Paris' moulded roquefort’. In general, a frequent writing strategy for Kaczmarski was the so-called lyric of role, that is, speaking on someone else's behalf, for example in the songs Luter, Jan Kochanowski or the daring Sen Katarzyny (Katarzyna’s Dream) – but also in lyrics modelled on the picked up stories of ordinary people. This method was perfectly summed up by Joanna Boss:
The author often [...] gives voice to animals, characters from paintings, literary characters, simple people who, by describing themselves or the situation they find themselves in, at the same time draw the not-necessarily-conscious image of the reality of which they are part of.
Kaczmarski's stylising skills made it very easy for him to invoke history and culture, to speak about the past in a voice as close to the past as possible and, at the same time, a voice that is contemporary. However, perfect imitation did not mean full acceptance – on the contrary, such lyrics expressed as much affirmation as doubts. A perfect example is the piece Z XVI-wiecznym Portretem Trumiennym Rozmowa (A Conversation with a 16th-Century Coffin Portrait), which at first gave the impression of being a conservative manifesto, but over time presented an increasingly nuanced vision of our historical burden. In other cases, the conversation about the past becomes a reminder of a nightmare and our complicity for it. Prof. Jerzy Jedlicki called this strategy ‘heartfrightening’, which is a particularly good way to describe the series of songs referring to Henryk Sienkiewicz's Trilogy and expressing doubts about the attitudes of its characters.
Due to Kaczmarski's public image as a bard, the humorous aspect of his works is often forgotten. Yet, for example, he had daring performances of Stanisław Staszewski's songs (the same ones that later appeared on Kazik's Tata Kazika (Kazik’s Dad) album), parodying Bob Dylan's voice in an otherwise profound ballad about the artist's alienation or his own lyrics with a large dose of comedy. Among them one should mention the ballad Czaty Śmielowskie, as well as several other pieces also included on the album Pochwała Łotrostwa (In Praise of Villainy).
Despite this sense of humour and irony, Kaczmarski was fundamentally opposed to an optimistic reading of his songs. Mury (1978), sung to the melody of L'estaca by the Catalan poet Lluís Llach (which was treated as a protest against General Franco's dictatorship), was considered the unofficial anthem of the Solidarity movement, but the author himself consistently clung to a different interpretation.
I wrote ‘Mury’ in 1978 as a piece about distrust of all mass movements. I heard a recording by Lluís Llach and a singing crowd of many thousands, and I imagined the situation – as an egoist and a man who values individualism in life – that someone creates something very beautiful, because it is beautiful music, a beautiful song, and then he is deprived of this work of his, because people intercept it. The work simply ceases to be the property of the artist and this is what Mury is about. And this ballad turned out to be prophetic for itself, because the same exact thing happened to it.
In the face of a colloquial, optimistic understanding of the ballad, its author made two important polemic gestures. The first one was a melancholic song known as Mury ‘87 or Podwórko (Backyard). It started with words: ‘How do you pull the teeth of the bars from the walls here, / When the brick and mortar is covered in rust? / How to bury the old world with rotting rubble, / When there are no means to erect a new one?’. In the chorus, graves replaced the walls. During concerts the artist often provoked the audience, playing a dynamic introduction to Mury only to perform Podwórko afterwards. The second gesture was the change of the last verses after the fall of communism in Poland, when Kaczmarski started to sing in the present instead of in the past tense: ‘And the walls are growing, growing, growing / The chain is dangling at the feet’. Let the following statement be a testimony to a broader, more general understanding of such parable songs as Mury or Obława:
These are not really anti-communist songs. Like most of Vysotsky's songs, they are songs that call for freedom and dignity of the individual. Communism does not have a monopoly on systems that persecute the individual.
One field of Kaczmarski’s work, which still remains underestimated, is his novels. The first one – Self-Portrait with a Scumbag – aroused a lot of interest in its time. It presents the Polish opposition in a distorted mirror. The titular scumbag is Daniel Błowski, a student and a friend of Kaczmarski’s counterpart in the novel, who is in love with the same girl as him and at the same time cooperates with the Security Service and the communist authorities. Kaczmarski himself is also far from ideal – there is even a subplot about his alcoholism (based on the artist’s own experiences). In the unpleasant, mortuary character of the world presented in the book, the author saw an attempt to restore the balance that most stories about those times lack:
I was only trying to level out this image, which was mythologised in books written after 1989: Us, heroes of the underground, us emigrants organised help for Poland, we influenced Western public opinion, and so on. It is all true, but in the human dimension, it looked a little different.
Kaczmarski's novels usually made intensive use of autobiographical motifs: Beach for Dogs is the aftermath of his stay in Australia, Of Angels Another Time returns to the subject of addiction, this time placing it against the background of the changes in Poland in 1989, Drink of the Anankas is, on the other hand a collection of memories from his time working for Radio Free Europe combined with a fantastic novel about legendary people living somewhere behind the Ural Mountains. Additionally, the book includes a homosexual theme.
Kaczmarski’s work received many responses from other artists. I will limit myself to just a few examples. Kaczmarski's music played an important role in the film The Last Bell directed by Magdalena Łazarkiewicz based on a script by Włodzimierz Bolecki (1989). In 2007, the reggae band Habakuk together with special guests (among them Muniek Staszczyk and Patrycja Kaczmarska) recorded an album A Ty Siej... on which thirteen of Kaczmarski's songs were covered. The same band also recorded a cover of Mury sung in the melody of Bob Marley’s Get Up, Stand Up.
The effects of Kaczmarski's fame as a singer were often ambiguous when it came to the literary reception of his works. As Krzysztof Gajda, the author of a doctoral thesis devoted to this artist, writes:
Jacek Kaczmarski has made a name for himself in Polish post-war culture as a songwriter and song composer. This choice of genre has meant that, despite the enormous popularity of his work [...], it has not yet become the subject of more extensive literary analyses.
Thankfully, the situation has been changing in recent years, as evidenced by the numerous masters’ theses listed on the artist’s Wikipedia entry. It is, therefore, to be hoped that Kaczmarski's place in literature will finally be properly recognised.
A Polish website dedicated to the work of Jacek Kaczmarski can be found at www.kaczmarski.art.pl.
Originally written in Polish by Paweł Kozioł, March 2011, translated to English by PG, November 2020
Works
Discography:
- Mury, 1979
- Raj, 1980
- Muzeum, 1981
- Krzyk, 1981
- Strącanie Aniołów, Sweden 1982
- Carmagnole, Germany 1982
- Chicago – Live, USA 1983.
- Litania, Australia 1986.
- Kosmopolak, Munich 1987.
- Dzieci Hioba, Munich 1989.
- Głupi Jasio, Munich 1990.
- Live '90, 1990 (recording of the first concert tour after return to Poland).
- Mury w Muzeum Raju, 1991 (a programme which includes songs from the albums Mury, Raj and Muzeum).
- Bankiet, 1992.
- Wojna Postu z Karnawałem, 1992.
- Sarmatia, 1993.
- Szukamy Stajenki, 1993 (carols and pastorals).
- Pochwała Łotrostwa, 1995.
- Między Nami, 1997.
- Koncert '97, 1997 (two concert albums).
- Dwie Skały, 1999 (recorded after emigration to Australia).
- Dwadzieścia (5) Lat Później, 2000 (album commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Solidarity movement and the 25th anniversary of Kaczmarski’s public activity)
- Mimochodem, 2001.
- Złota kolekcja: Źródło, 2003 (compilation).
- Złota kolekcja: Pokolenie, 2003 (compilation).
- Syn Marnotrawny, 2004 (22 albums released in digital format).
- Świadectwo, 2005.
- Suplement, 2006 (seven albums with previously unreleased songs and poems, read by Andrzej Seweryn).
- Mała Arka Noego, 2007 (eight albums: two previously unreleaed programmes and auditions Kwadranse Jacka Kaczmarskiego from Radio Free Europe).
- Arka Noego, 22nd March 2007 (thirty seven albums: Syn Marnotrawny, Suplement and Mała Arka Noego).
- Trasa Koncertowa '97 parts 1&2, 2008 (re-release of the Koncert '97 albums with the order of the songs corrected).
- Scena to Dziwna, 2008, (five DVDs with video content, mostly concerts from the years 1980-2001).
Poetry (selection excluding numerous unauthorized tomes, songbooks and collections):
- Wiersze i Piosenki, Literary Institute, Paris 1983.
- Mój Zodiak, Independent Polish Agency, Lund 1985.
- 30 Wierszy i Piosenek, Panda Press, London 1987.
- Rozbite Oddziały, Noir Sur Blanc, Montricher 1988.
- A Śpiewak Także Był Sam, Volumen Publishing House, Warsaw 1998 (preface by Stanisław Stabro).
- Biblioteka Bardów – Jacek Kaczmarski, Twój Styl, Warsaw 2000.
- Ale Źródło Wciąż Bije..., Wydawnictwo Marabut, Warsaw 2002.
- Tunel, Tower Press, Gdańsk 2004 (preface by Krzysztof Gajda).
Prose:
- Autoportret z Kanalią, Wydawnictwo Wodnika, Warsaw 1994.
- Plaża dla Psów, Muza SA, Warsaw 1998.
- O Aniołach Innym Razem, Oficyna Wydawnicza Volumen, Warsaw 1999.
- Życie do Góry Nogami, Świat Książki – Bertelsmann Media, Warsaw 1996 (with daughter Patrycja Volny).
- Napój Ananków, Twój Styl, Warsaw 2000.
Interviews:
- Pożegnanie Barda, interview by Grażyna Preder, Nitrotest, Koszalin 1995.
- Za Dużo Czerwonego, interview by Jolanta Piątek, Radio Wrocław 2001, printed in Odra literary magazine, nr 12 (481)/2001, 1(482)/2002, 2(483)/2002, 3(484)/2002.
Articles:
- Krzysztof Gajda, Jacek Kaczmarski w Świecie Tekstów, Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, Poznań 2003 (based on a doctoral thesis).
- Krzysztof Gajda, To Moja Droga, Wydawnictwo Dolnośląskie, Wrocław 2009 (biography).
- Karolina Sykulska, Jacek Kaczmarski – Szkic do Portretu, [in:] Bardowie, edited by Jadwiga Sawicka and Ewa Paczoska, Łódź 2001.
- Karolina Sykulska, Na Marginesie »Wysockich« Piosenek Jacka Kaczmarskiego, [in:] Społeczny i Kulturowy Aspekt Twórczości Włodzimierza Wysockiego, materials from an International Science Conference, Białystok 2001.