On this day, the stage of Jazz Juniors Festival belonged first and foremost to young musicians, accompanied by a few seasoned jazz personalities. Altogether nine musicians performed in concert: Natalia Kordiak, Marta Wajdzik, Andrzej Święs, Jakub Paulski, Rafał Sarnecki, Alan Wykpisz, Grzegorz Pałka, Mateusz Kołakowski, and Grzegorz Nagórski.
While the festival’s first evening concert had been dedicated to well-known and experienced musicians, during the second one the stage was taken over mostly by the jazz youth, who demonstrated that they had no less interesting things to present. Before they came on the stage, Adam Pierończyk, the Festival’s artistic director, explained to the audience his idea of inviting various musicians to play together instead of one band. The central aim was to create free experimental space, unrestricted by any rules. The 18 invited musicians were divided between two festival concerts. “I encouraged them to meet on the day of their concert, hold several hours of rehearsals, and go out on the stage the same evening. The idea is to create a spontaneous event based mainly on improvisation, which is essential in jazz. It will be creative work taking place in front of our very eyes,” Pierończyk explained, encouraging the musicians to form such line-ups in which they had never played before, if only possible.
As a result, on 3rd October we heard performances by nine artists, who at the final point of the programme joined together as a nonet of colourful personalities. The artists were: vocalist Natalia Kordiak, saxophonist Marta Wajdzik, bassists Adam Święs and Alan Wykpisz, guitarists Jakub Paulski and Rafał Sarnecki, drummer Grzegorz Pałka, pianist Mateusz Kołakowski, and trombonist Grzegorz Nagórski. This unique and rare encounter of different personalities looking for a shared musical language proved a success, judging by the audience’s reactions.
Before the nine musicians joined forces, they had played in six smaller line-ups, starting with an original chamber ensemble, an incredible trio formed by singer Natalia Kordiak accompanied by two double bass players, who involved the audience from the first to the very last bars of their musical narration. Subsequently the performing forces grew larger, with the single exception of the intimate but musically highly varied duo Wykpisz-Kołakowski. The first part of the concert, featuring small line-ups, was definitely more open to experimentation, and penetrated into the fields of new music as well as contemporary classical genres. Later the musicians more and more frequently made use of engaging pre-composed musical outlines and of catchy tunes which served them as points of reference. All the performers perfectly coped with the task of finding their place in the new ‘bands’, which suggests that the experiment was highly successful. Had it not been for the festival’s invitation, we might never see them perform together on one stage. They all demonstrated resourcefulness and the creative potential of such meetings. One of those who attracted the audience’s attention is the sax player Marta Wajdzik, very young but already having the first successes and a debut album to her name. She is a modest but brilliant instrumentalist, gaining more and more recognition at home; she did not leave the Cricoteca audience indifferent, either.
This unpredictable evening was one long and engaging musical journey, mapped out by diversity, stylistic openness to uncharted territories, and the rejection of boundaries in favour of broad musical horizons.
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