Tomasz Stanko

Trumpeter Tomasz Stanko became legendary in Poland from the 1960s with a free jazz style influenced by American jazzman Ornette Coleman. Playing with several groups, his improvisational and melodic technique was hugely influential across Europe and in the 1990s, recordings released on the ECM label brought him worldwide acclaim. His 2013 release 'Wislawa' with the New York Quartet went to number 17 on Billboard's Jazz Albums Chart and 'December Avenue', also with the New York Quartet, peaked at number six in 2017.

Born in Rzeszów in the south of Poland and raised during the Cold War, he was attracted to jazz when he heard Coleman and other artists such as John Coltrane, Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis on American radio. He performed with pianists Adam Makowicz and Krzysztof Komeda and violinist Zbigniew Seifert in the 1960s, with Krysztof Penderecki and Don Cherry in the '70s and joined the Cecil Taylor big band in the mid-'80s. He played on drummer Edward Vasala's 1976 album 'Satu' and 'Music from Taj Mahal and Carla Caves' in 1980, and in '94 led his own band on 'Matka Joanna'.

His international reputation grew and his 1997 release 'Litania: The Music of Krzysztof Komeda', an homage to the great Polish film music composer with Bernt Rosengren and Joakim Milder on tenor saxophone, Bobo Stenson on piano, Palle Danielsson on bass, Jon Christensen on drums and Terje Rypdal on guitar, was a great success. He maintained a quartet in Poland with pianist Marcin Wasilewski, bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz and drummer Michal Miskiewicz and their 2002 release 'Soul of Things' cemented his status as one of the world's great jazz trumpeters. He composed a suite for the opening of an exhibition at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in 2014, a work which he eventually released as an album, 'POLIN'. He recorded his final album, 'December Avenue', in 2017. He passed away in March 2018 after contracting lung cancer and suspected pneumonia.