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Andrzej Trzaskowski

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Born March 23, 1933 in Kraków, died September 16, 1998 in Warszawa. Polish jazz pianist and composer. From a Polish noble family, he began on piano aged four and took formal lessons from the age of seven. After coming into contact with the communist authorities as a teenager for distributing "anti-Soviet propaganda", and been held in custody for about three weeks, he was a musicology student at Jagiellonian University in Kraków from 1952 to 1957 when he completed his masters degree on the music of . A member of Melomany from 1954, the group performed at the 1956 Jazz Festival in Sopot. After moving to Warsaw permanently, his regular group , debuted at the Jazz Jamboree'59) and continued appearing there until 1962; at the 1960 event performed with them. After a United States tour in 1962, it became an eponymously named quintet, thought safer, and performed elsewhere in Europe (not only communist countries) during 1963 and 1964 and, for two years from 1965, worked with them. By now, Trzaskowski had begun to move away from bop towards free jazz, describing himself in an interview as a "dodecaphonist", an adopter of the twelve-tone row method of musical composition. He was artistic director of Jazz Workshops in Hamburg from 1965 to 1970, and remained active as a jazz pianist until 1974. A film composer for around seventy motion pictures, he directed from 1974 to 1991 and was also a music critic.