2021 marked the 90th anniversary of Krzysztof Komeda’s birth. Born Krzysztof Trzciński, the prominent Polish composer and jazz pianist, was the author of extremely popular jazz standards and film scores. One of the pioneers of modern jazz in Poland, he earned worldwide fame with his soundtracks for 65 movies directed by, among others, Roman Polański, Andrzej Kondratiuk, Jerzy Skolimowski, Henning Carlsen, and Buzz Kulik.
The Polish jazz violinist and composer Zbigniew Seifert was a great innovator, the inventor of an original violin style, still considered today as a model nonpareil. He began his adventure with jazz in another jazz great’s band – the Tomasz Stańko’s Quintet. In the 1970s, he moved to Germany and then settled in the United States, where he signed an exclusive contract with the US Capitol label. In that period, he was the only musician from Poland to achieve such enormous success on the jazz scene. In 1979, when he was just 32 years old, he succumbed to cancer, and his death thwarted what was to be a glowing musical career.
