Jan Ptaszyn Wróblewski, the doyen of Polish jazz, has passed away
On 7 May 2024, Polish music lost a great man. Jan Ptaszyn Wróblewski – a jazzman with a rich CV, a musical authority for younger artists, active until his last moments – passed away. He was due to give his last concert a few days before his death.
The artist described in his online biography that if there had been no war, Jan Ptaszyn Wróblewski would probably have become heir to the family fortune and lived like a millionaire. After all, he could have become a patron with an excellent practice with his father.
‘He might as well not have been there at all if my father’s car had not escaped at the last moment from a train bound for Wroclaw, and if, a few years later, the gate of the tenement house had not been the only part of the building to withstand the impact of a bomb thrown from a Stuka. After all, a shell from an anti-tank gun had the right to explode in the room of a Warsaw flat, instead of penetrating all the floors and bursting into the cellar,’ he recalled.
All the vicissitudes of life led him towards music, from which his father could not dissuade him. Wróblewski later joked that, according to the rights granted to him by the People’s Government, he should have become a combine harvester or tractor driver after graduating from the Faculty of Agricultural Mechanisation – the only one he was allowed to attend.
‘At home, however, there was a radio with Munich broadcasts and jazz on the speakers. So Ptaszyn became an artist. Against the wishes of his family,’ reads the musician’s biography. His studies at the Faculty of Agricultural Mechanisation at the Poznan University of Technology were replaced by studies within the walls of the State Academy of Music in Krakow. The former seat of the Jagiellon dynasty was the cradle of artists. After all, Krakow breathed a little more freely than other Polish cities.
There, promising young musicians had the opportunity to make their first friends in the art world. Like his contemporaries, Wróblewski sought new forms of expression through jazz. He was not as interested in the crude dance tunes accepted by the socialist top brass as he was in the bold, avant-garde jazz coming from the western side of the Iron Curtain. He wanted to be a professional master of the saxophone and clarinet, not just another hobby musician.
It was during this period of self-discovery that he met Krzysztof Komeda, with whom he would soon go down in the history of Polish music and who gave him the nickname ‘Ptak’, which later became ‘Ptaszyn’. It was on the train that the young jazz enthusiasts first spoke, and they spent hours discussing their musical dreams. Komeda admitted that working with his band at the time, Melomani, was not enough for him. The outstanding pianist wanted to do something of his own. And he could not imagine that ‘something’ without Jan Ptaszyn Wróblewski. ‘I’m telling you now, and when I have everyone together, we’ll get to work,’ he was supposed to say to Komeda, but Wróblewski probably already knew what he would decide.
It wasn’t long before Jan Ptaszyn surprised everyone with his bravura playing at the first edition of the Sopot Jazz Festival in 1956. It was on the Pomeranian stage that Poland first heard of Sekstet Komedy. Jan Ptaszyn Wróblewski was part of the band throughout its existence. While Krzysztof was the soul of the sextet, Jan was its glue, without which they would not have achieved such success. The Komeda sextet went on to tour all over Poland. They repeated their success at the Second Sopot Festival. They also made regular recordings for Poznan Radio.
Wróblewski continued to develop, and the end of Komeda’s band did not mean he slowed down. On the contrary, at the beginning of ’58, for example, Ptaszyn was appointed to the emerging supergroup Jazz Believers (Trzaskowski, Komeda, Kurylewicz, Dyląg, Zylber) and later chosen to represent Poland in the International Newport Band. This jazz orchestra, which brought together musicians from all over the world, went to the United States. Wróblewski thus reached the pinnacle of every Polish musician’s dream at that time. Growing up in a Kalisz household where being a musician was not looked upon favourably, Wróblewski performed on the American stage alongside Louis Amstrong himself!
Ptaszyn then moved back to Poznan, where he organised his own quintet. He recorded his first ‘small’ album for Polskie Nagrania, gave concerts in Grenoble, France, and at Jamboree ’58 Ptaszyn presented the first ever jazz composition based on Polish folklore: ‘Bandoska in blue’. He also gave occasional concerts with Jerzy Matuszkiewicz’s band. Ptaszyn’s last collaboration with Komeda – a trip of several weeks to Stockholm’s Gyllene Cirkeln and Copenhagen’s Montmartre – is considered one of Wróblewski’s most important achievements. The resulting album, Ballet etudes / the music of Komeda (MLP 15132), and the whole trip were a resounding success for Krzysztof Komeda, his music and the band of which Wróblewski was an integral part.
The following decades brought more musical projects, more bands, more successful compositions and hundreds of concerts. Jan Ptaszyn Wróblewski never slowed down, always inspiring new generations of artists. Known as the general of Polish jazz, he was not afraid to experiment with different musical genres, drawing inspiration from rock, funk and popular music. Despite his age, he remained active and continued to entertain people with his music until the very end. On 17 May 2024, he was scheduled to give a concert at the Warsaw Jazz Fort. Unfortunately, life had other plans.
Maciej Bzura
Source: dlaPolonii.pl
