Polish jazz symbol – rock & pop

Tomasz Stanko's trumpet playing was sometimes lyrical and carried by Slavic melancholy, then eruptive and rough again. With its mixture of melancholy, aggressiveness and groove, the Pole has contributed to the development of European jazz. He was one of the pioneers of a new European jazz with his own identity. On Sunday, Tomasz Stanko, the symbolic figure of Polish jazz in Warsaw, died shortly after his 76th birthday

Born on July 11, 1942 in Rzeszow, Tomasz Stanko learned piano and violin earlier, when he studied the trumpet at the Krakow Music Academy. Initially marked by Chet Baker and Miles Davis, then by Don Ellis, he founded his first band with Adam Makowitz in 1962. The following year he met pianist Krzystof Komeda, composer of the first Polanski films and founder of modern jazz Poland. At the end of the decade, Stanko became the initiator of free jazz, which he opened to jazz rock in the following decade, then turned it into funky jazz

After 1989, when communist chains fell into Poland, he belongs to jazz rock Trumpet to some Polish jazz musicians remained faithful to the country. At the end of the century, he teamed up with bloodthirsty musicians from his country and recorded "Soul of Things", a sort of jazz revival. Only in recent years has Stanko lived in New York, where he recorded his latest album "December Avenue" with local musicians. Their dull atmosphere indicated the approaching end, Stanko had been seriously ill for some time

with "Litania" and "Lontano", published on ECM, he left two musical statements of urgency. No sequence of fast and slow pieces, but a music of growth and development with large and wide arcs of tension between free improvisation and noted composition.