Andrzej
Trzaskowski

Pianist and composer, co-founder of the early modern jazz scene in Kraków.

Andrzej Trzaskowski (1933 to 1998) was a pianist, composer, conductor and musicologist, one of the most important pioneers of modern Polish jazz. From 1952 he was associated with the Kraków band Melomani, one of the first Polish groups to play swing and bebop. He was regarded as a connoisseur and theorist of jazz, and he devoted his master's thesis to Charlie Parker.

In 1959 he founded the band The Wreckers, drawing on the aesthetics of hard bop. In 1962, thanks to a scholarship from the American Department of State, he traveled with the band to the United States as the first Polish jazz group to perform in the USA. Leading Polish musicians passed through his ensembles, including Tomasz Stańko, Janusz Muniak and Michał Urbaniak.

From the mid-1960s Trzaskowski increasingly boldly reached for avant-garde techniques, combining jazz with dodecaphony, serialism and controlled aleatorism. In the 1970s and 1980s he directed the orchestra of Studio S-1 of Polish Radio and Television. His work, valued for its intellectual discipline and innovation, belongs to the foundations of modern Polish jazz.