Andrzej Trzaskowski

Andrzej Trzaskowski (23 March 1933 – 16 September 1998) was a Polish jazz composer and musicologist. Between 1959 and 1990, he composed the music and/or conducted the score for some thirty films.

A native of Kraków, Trzaskowski learned to play the piano as a child and, in 1951, at the age of eighteen, helped to form Melomani, one of the first Polish swing and bop groups. Between 1952 and 1957 he studied musicology at the city's Jagiellonian University, took private lessons in composition and contemporary music theory and was active at the experimental studio of Polish radio.

In 1958 he played and recorded with the Jazz Believers, a quintet which 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 United States in 1962. As the leader of small groups, he performed and recorded with American musicians visiting Poland, such as Stan Getz in 1960 and Ted Curson in 1965-66. Many leading Polish musicians, including Zbigniew Namysłowski, Tomasz Stanko and Michał Urbaniak, played with his groups early in their careers.

Starting in 1964, Trzaskowski began to incorporate avant-garde techniques in his work. In the late 1960s he worked regularly in West Germany for the Hamburg-based public radio and television broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk, writing more than 20 compositions and participating in workshops. From 1975 onward, he led an orchestra for Polish radio and television.

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