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Polish Tour Journal
Polish Tour Journal; March 2008
The Weather Channel had predicted a bad weather day for the Dallas area for Thursday, March 6.  That was the day my boys and I were scheduled to leave for Warsaw, Poland, and the start of our 10-day jazz concert tour.  Dark clouds had already started filling the sky, and the temperature began to plummet, and according to reports on the Amsterdam airport monitors – Amsterdam was our second stop on the way to Warsaw  - we’d made it out of the DFW area by the skin of our teeth, as 500 flights had been cancelled due to ice and snow that afternoon.  And lots of people on the three legs of our journey to Eastern Europe were intrigued by the three of us, and wondered what it was exactly that we were going to do in Poland, of all places.  We made a lot of new friends along the way, and explained patiently that we were embarking on a 10-day tour of northwestern Poland where jazz is loved and respected, and musicians are treated like royalty.  We even got some orders for CD’s and T-shirts.  Not a bad deal!

After a night of flying across the Atlantic we arrived in Warsaw at 11 the next morning, Friday, a bit tired and hungry, and we were immediately made to feel welcome with the wonderful hospitality and care of our hosts, Joana Chojnacka and Zbigniew Szwajewski, who took us to our hotel and let us sleep for a while and then picked us up a few hours later to treat us to the first of many great Polish dinners.  Our Portuguese saxophonist, Rodrigo Amado (who toured with us in the US during the summer of 2006), had arrived in Warsaw while we were napping, and we caught up with him at the restaurant along with some of our hosts’ personal friends who came along to keep us entertained and happy.  After dinner we were taken to the biggest jazz record shop in Warsaw to let us meet the guy responsible for introducing our music into Poland, Jarek Polit.  After spending some time looking at his store, which is amazing – comparable to the best jazz store in New York, but with a European slant - we drank some coffee and conversed for a while, went for a walk, and ended up as special guests of the management at Tygmont Jazz Club, a few blocks away, where a young Polish jazz group, RGG Trio, held court on stage.  After listening to them for their complete two sets, I was ready to call it a night…although I know that the boys took in some of the nightlife and got out to hobnob with the locals while the old man slept.

Just a quick note here about Poland’s economy:  Poland has changed much in the fourteen years since I was last there.  The country seems to be prospering, especially since they are now part of the European Union, and will soon switch to the strong currency of Europe, the Euro.  With this in mind, we should not have been surprised that our tour manager, Zbig Szwajewski, did not allow us to pay for anything during this tour, even going as far as paying for some the smaller souvenirs we encountered along the way.  If we stopped at a gas station or a store along the way and walked in to get some juice or water, or maybe a snack, he would grab it from us and pay for it.

Saturday morning, I received a wakeup text message from Joana informing me that we would be picked up around noon, at which time we would be taken to our concert venue for a rehearsal and sound check.  I called the rest of  the guys in their rooms, and we all went to breakfast, got ourselves showered and ready to go, and then we were picked up by Zbig and the second driver, Jacek, who had been hired to take Aaron and Rodrigo, along with overflow luggage in his car. Zbig drove Stefan and me along with Aaron’s standup bass in his 4-wheel drive SUV as we zoomed over to the historic Ujazdowski Castle in south-central Warsaw (now a music and art center; it was the home of Polish queen Bona Sforza in 1548, and beginning in 1624 was the home of Polish King Sigmund III Vasa).  Behind the castle is a building which housed the king’s horses, and which is now being extensively renovated while the top floor serves as a concert hall.  The concert crew was already there with the drums and the sound system, and the aforementioned bass, which Aaron was to use during the tour, was delivered and tuned.  While waiting for the sound and recording equipment to be set up, we walked over to the castle proper and sat in the coffee shop and drank coffee, visited the bookstore/gift shop and looked in on the current exhibit, a particularly creative series of large digital collage photos in the main gallery.  The castle itself is beautifully restored, perfect for concerts and installations and exhibits of contemporary art.

Around 3 in the afternoon, the hall and stage were ready for us, and we did sound check and worked on some new compositions while refreshing our playing chops, which were a bit rusty from travel.  By the time we finished, we were famished, and the Castle staff closed off their main banquet room to the public and had a fabulous meal ready for us.  They fed us a huge beautiful Greek salad and some pierogis, which I had eaten before, and which the servers described as “Russian ravioli”.  They look like tiny fried pies and are filled with meat, vegetables, cheese, or lentils and are either fried or boiled.  The ones we ate were delicious…I never thought boiled food would be so good!  The banquet room was elegant, and it was being decorated for a wedding reception, so it was especially sumptuous.

After eating, still suffering from a bit of jetlag, we were taken back to the hotel to nap a bit, and we returned to the concert hall just as the opening group, called Male Instrumenty, began their hour-long set.  It’s a funny name, but it’s pretty innocent, since the name means “small instruments” and refers to the children’s toy instruments played by the group – toy pianos, toy drum sets, children’s flutes and recorders, and so on.  Interestingly, the music sounded like a band of medieval troubadours, and in the ambience of the old castle stables, I could almost imagine an ancient audience sitting around a campfire listening to music from the Middle Ages.  The ghosts of the castle must have been happy that night.

Waiting for our set to begin, we were surrounded by people asking for our autographs and by several photographers, among them the best-known jazz photographer Jan Bebel, whose portraits of Miles Davis have been some of the most lauded in jazz history.  The hall itself was full for our set, maybe 300 people listening and cheering us on enthusiastically.  I wasn’t nervous, but it did take the quartet a few minutes to hit our stride, and once we did, it was beautiful (in my humble opinion), and the audience concurred.  I did very little talking, but I was a bit jokey with them when I did address them, and it relaxed them and us as the hour-and-a-half set flew by quickly.  The applause at the end of the set was awesome, and when the audience began stomping and cheering rhythmically, the way a happy European crowd does, we went back up on stage and played a fast, crazy encore, totally improvised, and the roar of the crowd was deafening when we finished the song.  We bowed to the audience, and I returned to the microphone and said, “Dziekuje bardzo…Dobranoc! (Thank you…Good night!)” and they went crazy, but the ovation died down after a few minutes and we went out into the audience to chat with our newfound fans.  It was a rewarding and lovely end to this first phase of our tour, and I knew I’d have to get some sleep because the real adventure would begin the next day early as we headed for our first concert outside of Warsaw, in the city of Poznan.
Yells at Eels...Amsterdam Airport
Ujazdowski Castle
Aaron hugs his bass onstage at Ujazdowski Castle
Stefan impassioned by the music in Warsaw

 

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