My review of the tremendous 2013 Jazztopad Festival, with everyone from Charles Lloyd to Michiyo Yagi and more, today @ All About Jazz.

It's always a treat to be invited somewhere new, especially somewhere with a strong jazz scene that remains, for the most part, hidden from the rest of the world. But when the country is Poland and the city Wrocĺaw, there are even greater treats awaiting, as a young festival that has, in just 10 short years, not only established itself as a premiere jazz destination within its own country, but garnered an international reputation that has slowly but surely focused the eyes of the jazz world on the country and its not insignificant collection of stellar musicians.

Ask most people to name some Polish musicians and the same small group is usually the answer, with Tomasz Stanko, Krzysztof Komeda, Michal Urbaniak, Marcin Wasilewski and Zbigniew Seifert amongst them. With its difficult history, Poland has been a strategic location that has seen numerous invasions, the most recent being the Soviet invasion of 1944, resulting in the country being renamed the People's Republic of Poland, in 1952, which it remained until 1989, when Soviet rule was overthrown in and the country became a democracy. The result is that, for much of the period that jazz was both emerging and becoming a very personal means of expression in other countries around the world, the same thing was happening in Poland, with jazz in many ways representing a very different kind of revolution...but only a few musicians garnering attention outside the country.

Continue reading here....