Seifert Night, XJAZZ! Festival in Berlin
The Seifert Night project has taken shape and developed over the last several years. Originally it was designed to promote Seifert Competition prize winners abroad. Its organiser, the Zbigniew Seifert Foundation, invited young musicians to play individual concerts. This grew with time into a much larger-scale umbrella project called Seifert Night, promoting not just the music of Zbigniew Seifert and the Competition winners, but the Polish jazz scene at large.
Seifert Night was first held in October 2021 during the Belgrade Jazz Festival in Serbia. The Berlin audience will have a chance to celebrate another such event during the famous XJAZZ! Festival.
XJAZZ!, inaugurated in 2014, is one of the most spectacular events in the European jazz scene, focusing on presenting innovative forms of improvised music, but also open to ethnic, alternative, and contemporary classical music genres. The Festival’s artistic director, trumpeter Sebastian Studnitzky, has for years been involved in musical cooperation between Poland and Germany. The festival events, held in the clubs and concert halls of the Kreuzberg district, attract tens of thousands of listeners every year. 75 bands and over 200 musicians from all over the world will perform at Berlin’s XJAZZ! this year. In cooperation with the Zbigniew Seifert Foundation and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, the Festival’s organisers have also invited two excellent Polish artists: EABS from Wrocław and the singer Monika Borzym. The latter soloist will join forces with harmonica player Kacper Smoliński and a group of German musicians.
The Wrocław-based EABS band took the Polish jazz scene by storm when in 2017 they released their phenomenal CD “Repetitions. Letters to Krzysztof Komeda” dedicated to the music of the latter jazz legend. The effect proved equally delightful as their brilliant reinterpretations of Komeda’s music. The Berlin concert, held on 5th May at 9.30 p.m. at Prince Charles Club, will promote this most recent project.
The band’s line-up will be as follows:
Marek Pędziwiatr – piano, synthesisers and vocals;
Marcin Rak – drums;
Paweł Stachowiak – bass guitar, moog;
Olaf Węgier – tenor sax;
Jakub Kurek – trumpet
EABS: XJAZZ! FESTIVAL - Tickets (dgbrt.de)
On the same evening Berlin’s XJAZZ! will also feature Polish jazz singer Monika Borzym, whose music career began with a highly acclaimed appearance at Warsaw’s Jazz Jamboree festival, followed by her being signed up by Sony Music for her debut album. Combining charisma with a sense of humour, this artist is an excellent example of a musician of the new generation smoothly fusing jazz with other genres. She has already had the opportunity to collaborate with such jazz stars as Randy Brecker, Gil Goldstein, Aaron Parks, Chris Potter, and John Scofield.
During the concert dedicated to the memory of Zbigniew Seifert, Monika Borzym will be accompanied by harmonica virtuoso Kacper Smoliński, hailed as a new hope of Polish jazz, as well as by a group of excellent German musicians:
Sebastian Studnitzky – trumpet,
Rainer Böhn – piano,
Markus Pichler – bass guitar,
Peter Gall – drums.
The concert, held at Orania jazz club, starts at 7.30 p.m.
Monika Borzym & Friends feat. Kacper Smoliński: XJAZZ! FESTIVAL - Tickets (dgbrt.de)
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“A project co-financed from the funds of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.”
The Adam Mickiewicz Institute is a national institution of culture whose mission it is to build lasting relations with foreign partners with a view to presenting Polish culture and initiating international cultural exchange. The Institute has implemented cultural projects in 70 countries on 6 continents, including the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Israel, Germany, Turkey, the United States, Canada, Australia, Morocco, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, China, Japan, and Korea. The Institute’s 38 strategic programmes have reached 60 million viewers to date. The Adam Mickiewicz Institute is an organisation of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
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