My much older sister used to have boyfriends when I was a little boy. And it was her fiancée and future husband who was the founder of Jazz magazine. He was an engineer but he had one of the biggest disc collections in Poland at that time. These were vinyls, not those long plays but the 67 RPM kind, where you had only one track on each side. He had loads of them and it was the most beautiful music for a kid like me, who would never listen to very modern sounds. Instead he had [Duke] Ellington, [Erroll] Garner, [Oscar]Peterson and I listened to them before I could even walk!
This is how Włodzimierz Nahorny recalled his first contact with jazz in an interview conducted by Karolina Kolinek. He studied clarinet at the State Higher School of Music in Sopot. When he was still a student, in 1959 he founded his own band, the Little Four quartet. He started performing with the North Coast Combo the same year, working with the band for 2 years, and was the clarinettist in a traditional jazz group called the Tralabomba Jazz Band. He played with the Baltic Philharmonic orchestra as well. In 1962 he debuted at the Jazz Jamboree festival in Warsaw as a soloist - playing the saxophone in Jan Tomaszewski's big band. From then on, he appeared at the festival many times for almost 15 years, mainly with Andrzej Trzaskowski's sextet (1962-77).
As a pianist, he worked with the bands of Ryszard Kruza and Alojzy Musiał (1963-64). He founded his own trio in 1965, which gave its first performance at the Jazz on the Odra River festival in Wrocław and won first prize, while Nahorny himself won the individual first prize and a special mention for his composition Zbyszek. He won second prize at the International Modern Jazz Competition in Vienna in 1966, and in 1967 at the 6th Amateur Jazz Festival in Vienna, Duke Ellington presented him with the individual first prize and the second prize for his trio. He was twice a prize-winner of the National Festival of Polish Song in Opole - receiving the Minister of Culture and Art's prize in 1972 for the composition Jej portret, and first prize at the Premieres concert in 1973 for Tango z różą w zębach. His work as a pianist, saxophonist, flutist, bass player, and arranger saw him collaborating with musicians such as Andrzej Kurylewicz, Krzysztof Sadowski, Andrzej Trzaskowski, and Jan Ptaszyn Wróblewski, vocalists Marianna Wróblewska and Łucja Prus, the bands Novi Singers and Breakout, and the Polish Radio Jazz Studio. He has performed in many different countries, including Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, Yugoslavia, Norway, Hungary, and the former Czechoslovakia and Soviet Union. In an interview conducted by Konrad Wojciechowski, Nahorny said: