Aga Derlak remembers her fascination with music as a young child. And once she began learning piano, she would lose hours in flowing through improvised journeys at the keyboard. This passion led her to gaining a place on the year-long Berklee Global Jazz Institute program. And in this interview, she discusses the impact that has had on many levels of her life. The founder of the project, pianist Danilo Perez, who is part of the incredible Wayne Shorter quartet was a particular influence and...

In Marek Pędziwiatr there is a connection between the past and the present. The history of jazz and the African American musicians, who created it, and Polish innovators from Chopin through Krzysztof Komeda and Niemen. Marek is a hub, a central force pulling his golden threads of jazz, hip-hop, classical music, avant-garde, and Slavic folk. But his interest in weaving these genres together is driven by the human experience.  Marek is an award-winning musician and composer now based in...

To describe Joanna Duda as simply a pianist doesn't capture the extraordinary dimensions of the music she produces. Whether touching a broken keyboard, using the sound of a rewinding tape machine, or mixing in field recordings, her innate playfulness allows any instrument to blossom - you get a sense that one of her greatest strengths is to listen attentively to whatever she uses. Joanna is also an incredible editor, cutting and mixing with bold and surprising artfulness. It was a friend of...

In the history of jazz, there haven't been many musicians that give credit to their playing video games. But as a nine-year-old hardcore player, Kuba Więcek developed an affinity with repetitive practice and now feels the need for strategic thinking and fast decision-making has stood him in good stead as a bandleader today. After a pivotal moment as a teenager, which he talks about in the interview, when he improvised on his saxophone for the first time, his 10 hour-a-day, video gaming habit...

Marcin Masecki considers that he has two parents, jazz and classical music. As a pianist, he is steeped in the tradition of learning piano as a young child with all the purity and precision that comes with that. In this interview, you get the sense of how that triggered Marcin’s disruptive streak, and how that has been central to his approach to music. There is reverence and intellectual rebellion. Like many accomplished musicians, there is music in his family. Marcin has spoken of his...

In the very last episode of Stories of The Eastern West as you knew it, we’re taking you to Estonia, 1989. A group of people there made 2 million others hold hands and create a human chain of unprecedented size and significance. The Baltic countries had a truly turbulent 20th century. They went from regaining their independence to losing it to the USSR and becoming subject to a ruthless policy of Russification. Unsurprisingly, they needed something big to jump on the bandwagon of the 1989...

Several years after the war, a strange encounter in the heart of Paris made Zofia Posmysz, a former Auschwitz prisoner, start wondering what it would be like to meet her camp overseer. Posmysz turned her fantasy in a successful radio play in which she explored the unlikely perspective of an oppressor, a Nazi German concentration camp overseer.  The story inspired a prolific young filmmaker Andrzej Munk – a representative of the Polish Film School, a group of filmmakers tackling the experience...

Get to know Piotr Szkopiak, a London-based film and TV director who’s spent a good portion of his life pondering the nature of his identity. Piotr Szkopiak was born in the United Kingdom but into a Polish family. As he grew up, he learned that his parents were ex-prisoners of war who had escaped the USSR but couldn't go back to Poland after the war ended. His mother told him how she had travelled to the UK, and how after the war this is the place that she had to learn to call home.

Nicolaus Copernicus was the orphaned son of a copper merchant . In his book 'On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres' he presented an Earth-shattering new idea – that maybe it wasn't actually at the centre of the universe as everyone believed, but in fact, revolved around the Sun. Although it would take another century until Galileo was able to prove him right, Copernicus's book, published in 1543 in Nuremberg, would mark the beginning of a very real revolution in science.

Vera Chytilová was the most important woman director of the Czechoslovak New Wave. As the first female student of the prestigious FAMU film school, she had to fight in order to do things her own way. During the Prague Spring, she made her most well-known film ‘Daisies’ (1966) – a surrealist pop-art comedy, about two young women who set their minds on creating humorous destruction around them. But soon a massive crackdown on artistic freedom forced her to make the most difficult decisions...

Our hosts Nitzan and Adam will try to unravel some of the most confusing mysteries surrounding a household name in the European sci-fi literature: Stanisław Lem. Why did he choose to abandon his pre-war identity? How on Earth did he foresee the Internet in the 1960s? Is it true that he learned English from a dictionary in a week?

This year we have some good stories for you! There's going to be a bit of sci-fi, a pinch of socialist realism, a good portion of astronomy, and some old-fashioned moving testimonies from a region that never sleeps! Stay tuned: the first episode drops September 7th!

Originally starting his musical career playing piano, cello and trombone, Namysłowski became infatuated with the alto saxophone after meeting composer Krzysztof Komeda. Namysłowski gave the instrument a try and hasn’t stopped playing the saxophone ever since. His original experiments mixing jazz and folk quickly caught people’s attention and paved his way to a brilliant international career.

Adam Makowicz grew up in a house where a piano was the centre of the home. His mother had long planned for him to become a classical virtuoso, but a meeting with a musician who introduced him to jazz changed this path completely. Adam packed his bags and left for Kraków, where he moved into a jazz nightclub and immediately became part of the city’s jazz scene. It was here where his thorough classical education and incredible talent led him to create his unique virtuoso style.

“Polish jazz group - 100$ a night”. Displayed on the posters in Michał Urbaniak’s band’s van while playing across Europe in the 60s, this hippy traveling player was soon to become one of the most innovative Polish jazz musicians in history. However, the old continent never felt like enough. Michał always knew at heart that he was a New Yorker, eventually jumping at the first chance he got to move to the world’s jazz capital and signing with the legendary Columbia Records. The rest is history.

It may be hard to believe, but when Jan Ptaszyn Wróblewski started playing music, jazz was censored in Poland. As a result of Stalin’s cultural politics that governed what kinds of art and culture could be consumed in the country. However, these rigid policies only made jazz more appealing, leading many young people across the country, like Ptaszyn, to fall in love with it.

Urszula’s love for unruly musical experiments got her kicked out from music school when she was a young girl. A few years later, she stumbled upon The Voice of America - a radio station meant to bring American culture and censorship-free news to people locked up behind the Iron Curtain. This program is where Urszula heard jazz for the first time. From then on, Urszula started developing her distinctive style of wordless vocalisation that can transport listeners to another dimension.

Five Polish jazz musicians who came of age in the 1950s became mesmerised by the music they heard on the outlawed American radio station Voice of America. You’ll hear how they went from learning to play jazz from worn-out vinyls to becoming icons that continue to inspire the music world today. Hosted by Paweł Brodowski, Rebel Spirits is brought to you by Culture.pl, the flagship brand of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. Coming June 2021. Available wherever you get your podcasts, and on...

Meet Marian Marzyński, a child holocaust survivor who dissects the past with his camera. In 1967, Marian was a popular TV show host and filmmaker in Poland. But then a seemingly faraway military clash sparked an unexpected conflict within the Polish communist party that led its Jewish members to be accused of anti-Polish sentiments.

How a Czech puppeteer and his puppets took on Nazi Germany. In 1938, Hitler's forces marched into Czechoslovakia, a country that had only gained its independence two decades earlier. A puppeteer named Josef Skupa was ready to fight back with the help of Spejbl and Hurvínek – a father son duo of wooden puppets. All three were destined to become household names in the Czech Republic, a country that takes its puppets seriously...

Hear the testimony of one of a handful of people left who experienced the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp through adult eyes. Back in 2019, we got the chance to interview Anastasija Gulej. She was 95 at the time, living a happy life in one of Kyiv's suburbs. If you didn’t know her, you’d never tell be able to tell that she wakes up every day with the horrors of her past. Her past as an Auschwitz-Birkenau inmate.

‘Romania today is possibly the only European country where you can bump into a witch at the supermarket.’ As a child, Clara learned that witches could make anything happen. As a grown-up, she had a few questions about it all and decided to knock on a witch’s door. But interviewing a witch turned out not to be so simple...

In the summer of 1976, the late Polish film director Andrzej Żuławski, responsible for infamous cult classics such as The Devil (1972) and Possession (1981), was given a green light to shoot the most expensive film ever made in Poland. On the Silver Globe was meant to be a massively ambitious science-fiction epic set on the Moon, showing the birth of a new civilisation, and produced without the benefit of modern special effects. But things didn’t quite go to plan.

After the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east in 1939, many thousands of Polish families were deported to Siberian forced labour camps. There they not only faced bitter cold but constant hunger. Then Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, and the families that were now allowed to leave. In many cases, only their children made it all the way to safety in Iran. Polish orphans were scattered around the world and a group of 700 would end up travelling to the small island on the other side...