A Jazz Club opened by Fidel Castro lives on amidst Cracow's musical cornucopia. There are clubs and there is a jazz scene, and it helps to be plugged in if you want to catch the best sessions and guest appearances. However, even those starting from scratch won't have to spend too many evening hours sampling the locales before finding a place where the music is being played. 

Jazz might not be what the megamedia want us to listen to this year. They picked up on it in the late 80s, chewed it up in a flurry of films, spat it out and moved on. Yet no system has ever been able to bring jazz to its knees. Even in the worst years of Stalinism, the jazz scene kept going. Roman Polanski remembers how it thrived on a completely private basis in Cracow at the bleakest of times. 

In the exclusive neighborhoods on the hills or in the broad valleys to the west of Cracow stand characteristically boxy but plush private villas erected from the 60s through the 80s. The relatively few people who managed to acquire these modernistic residences under the old system included high communist party officials, greenhouse owners, and jazz musicians. The first category needs no explanation. The greenhouse owners made fortunes in zloty from supplying the wholesale flowers for all those name days and visits to aunts. And the jazzmen? They were good enough to play western festivals, especially of the Dixieland variety, and to keep getting invited back. They lined up gigs in clubs and, failing that, on cruise ships. In those days, you could build a villa in Cracow for $15,000. The jazzmen of Cracow never gained worldwide fame, but they were good enough to remain one of Poland's most reliable  cultural exports.

Robert Buczek's Krakowski przewodnik jazzowy, published in 1997, was written with a historical bent. It consists mostly of profiles tracing the careers of performers who had been active for a decade or more at the time of writing. Many of them are still playing and, from today's perspective, the book provides background on a part of the city's cultural life that is still vital and, as always, in a state of flux.

Some of the artists and groups sketched here have continued to go on from strength to strength in the years since Buczek wrote. For instance, Jaroslaw Smietana remains among the world's elite  guitarists. He built his reputation playing in the Wes Montgomery mode but has never stopped experimenting with new styles. His solos are lectures in musical theory that even the uninitiated can take in and meditate on.

Smietana recently teamed up with the pianist Joachim Mencel, whom Buczek also profiles here, and violinist Nigel Kennedy, Cracow's most spectacular recent cultural import. They played their way across Europe in March, 2003 as a lead-up to an engagement at Ronnie Scott's in London. During most of the year, individually and perhaps even together, they play at sporadic concerts or impromptu jam sessions in Cracow. If you want to catch them, keep a sharp eye on the posters around town or, even better, hang out a little in the clubs and try to pick up on the buzz.

Similarly, if you're alert and lucky, you might catch the Jazz Band Ball Orchestra, whose sweaty and occasionally campy Dixieland still has oomph 42 years after trumpeter Jan Kudyk founded the group. Another name worth watching out for is that of the the intense, classicizing pianist Wojciech Groborz, playing with someone else's group, or his own, or even solo.

The staying power of Cracow jazz stems in large part from the city's excellent music education system, from kindergarten up to the postgraduate level. Buczek's biographical sketches reveal the prevalence of professional training among the players. The universal desire of talented students to start earning money before they earn their degrees accounts for the constant emergence of new artists. And then there is the public that has long supported them, a knowledgeable audience that has been exposed to much good music, and that continues to carry a torch for the experimental, the exotic, and the counter-cultural.

The communists had a habit of opening new "investments" to mark high-profile visits by the heads of "fraternal socialist countries." They rushed to get Warsaw's then-showy Central Train Station ready in time for Leonid Brezhnev to roll into its not-yet-dry concrete caverns in 1977. 

When Fidel Castro came to Cracow in 1972, he didn't open a train station. He opened a jazz club, as Buczek points out--the one at the Pod Jaszczurami student's club on the Rynek, long a venue for jazz concerts. To be precise, what Castro in fact attended was the launching of a student impresario organization to promote the concerts. The fact that it wasn't a train station says something about the difference between Cracow and Warsaw, or almost any other place, even under Soviet hegemony. It might even say something about Fidel. You can just imagine him, three decades younger, stomping his army boots and putting his cigar down to clap at the end of a trombone solo.
 
 

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