Andrzej Trzaskowski

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Andrzej Trzaskowski (born 23 March 1933 in Kraków, Poland) was a Polish jazz musician. He played the piano as a child and later studied musicology at university in Kraków (to 1957); he also took private lessons in composition and contemporary music theory and was active at the experimental studio of Polish radio. In 1951 he helped to form Melomani, one of the first Polish swing and bop groups. During 1958 he played and recorded with the Jazz Believers, a quintet that included Wojciech Karolak and Jan Ptaszyn Wróblewski, and worked with another quintet, led by Jerzy Matuszkiewicz. The following year he formed his own hard bop group, the Wreckers, with which he toured the USA in 1962; as the leader of small groups he performed and recorded with American musicians visiting Poland, such as Stan Getz (1960) and Ted Curson (1965-6). Many leading Polish musicians, including Zbigniew Namyslowski, Tomasz Stanko, and Michal Urbaniak, played with his groups early in their careers. Trzaskowski began to incorporate avant-garde techniques in his work from 1964. In the late 1960s he worked regularly for Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Hamburg, West Germany, writing more than 20 compositions and participating in workshops, then from 1975 he led an orchestra for Polish radio and television.

Although an excellent pianist, from the early 1970s he has concentrated more on composition. He has written music for films and theater, two jazz ballets, and Nihil novi, a third-stream work performed by Don Ellis at the International Jazz Jamboree in Warsaw (1962).