Sokołowsko Jazz meets Punkt Festival

The Contemporary Art Foundation In Situ, the organisers of Sanatorium Dźwięku (Zuzanna Fogtt and Gerard Lebik) and the Norwegian Punkt Festival (Jan Bang and Erik Honoré) invite you to the first edition of Sokołowsko Jazz, which will take place on 8-10 September in Sokołowsko with a continuation next March. 

"Three years ago I was invited by Zuzanna Fogtt and the In Situ Foundation to curate a one-day celebration dedicated to Tomasz Stanko. When I first came to Sokołowsko, I thought it was the Polish equivalent of the town of Cicely in Alaska. It is an imaginary portrayal of the village in the famous TV show 'Northern Exposure from the early 1990s. It is a tiny place filled with exceptional people who are very serious and passionate about art. With a very satisfactory turnout for the event I curated, despite pandemic constraints, the idea of creating a new festival dedicated to improvised music and jazz was born." - says Piotr Turkiewicz, one of the curators of Sokolowsko Jazz. 

The Norwegian scene and the so-called 'sound of the north' as the main force behind European jazz - these are the ideas that inspire the programme of this year's Sokolowsko Jazz, consisting of composition commissions, premiere collaborations between male and female artists, as well as attempts to define one of the pillars of the partner festival PUNKT - the 'art of remix'. The curators of the festival are Piotr Turkiewicz, Martel Ollerenshaw, Erik Honoré and Jan Bang.

A widely acclaimed percussionist with an emphasis mainly on groove, stage creativity and dynamics, Gard Nilssen will present his project Acoustic Unity. The spirit of this ECM release, co-created by Petter Eldh and André Roligheten, is captured in The New York Times review: 'Mr Nilssen and his partners create a decent free-bop hustle, earthy and often swinging'. 

Among the works created for the festival, there will be an exploration of contemporary classical and electronic music by the Lutosławski Quartet (Roksana Kwaśnikowska, Marcin Markowicz, Artur Rozmysłowicz and Maciej Młodawski) - one of the leading string quartets in Poland. Residents of the National Forum of Music will give a premiere performance alongside Norwegian artists Arve Henriksen, Jan Bang and Erik Honoré. 

Representatives of the young Polish jazz scene Andrzej Konieczny, Fryderyk Szulgit, Kacper Krupa and Paweł Stachowiak, who form the acoustic quartet Siema Ziemia, will weave in their collective jazz improvisation and their visions of breakbeat, footwork and juke.

Versatile composer and pianist Joanna Duda will join forces with award-winning violinist, Erlend Apneseth. Thanks to their innovative approach to their instruments and, beyond jazz, to folk and film music, we can expect a tapestry of sounds blurring genre boundaries.

Also on the programme is MOTIF, a Nordic band with 20 years of experience, featuring some of the best musicians on the Norwegian and German jazz scene, including Atle Nymo, Eivind Lønning, Håkon Mjåset Johansen, Håvard Wiik and Ole Morten Vågan.