Andrzej
Kurylewicz

Pianist, trumpeter and composer, a figure of the turn of the 1950s, who blended jazz with classical and film music.

Andrzej Kurylewicz (1932 to 2007) was a composer and multi-instrumentalist who played the piano, trumpet and trombone, and also conducted. Educated in the tradition of classical music, he became one of the pioneers of modern jazz in postwar Poland. In 1957 he was the first musician from the Eastern Bloc to win first prize at a jazz festival in Stuttgart.

From 1969 to 1978 he led the Contemporary Music Formation, an ensemble combining modern jazz with the European avant-garde. Kurylewicz consistently pursued two strands of work, the jazz and the classical, over time increasingly reaching for classical and sacred forms.

Wide popularity came to him through film, theatre and television music, including the famous theme to the 1976 series Polskie drogi. Throughout his life he worked in close collaboration with his wife, the singer Wanda Warska, with whom he ran the Kurylewicz Artistic Cellar in Warsaw.