Leszek Możdżer
Leszek Możdżer ( born March 23, 1971 in Gdańsk ) is a Polish jazz pianist and composer. He is regarded in Poland as a talented and commercially successful jazz pianist.
Life and work
Możdżer playing since the age of five and studied piano in Gdansk piano. He graduated in 1996 from. With the jazz he worked since he was eighteen. In 1992 he won in Krakow at the Junior Jazz Festival first prize. He had his first national success as a pianist of Polish Mikołaj Trzaska band Miłość with. Since the mid- 1990s, he is invited by other jazz musicians to play at concerts and CD recordings in their bands. He played with Tomasz Stanko has been already, Michał Urbaniak, Cezary Konrad and Anna Maria Jopek, internationally with Pat Metheny, Lester Bowie, Arthur Blythe and Archie Shepp. His classical training gives him the ability to incorporate the classical music into his jazz improvisation and variations. So his improvisations on tunes by Frédéric Chopin.
He also composed music for the theater and for Polish movies. He wrote the music for the production of the play Psychosis by Sarah Kane by the Polish director Grzegorz Jarzyna at the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus and wrote a musical version of William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream, which had its world premiere in Gdynia on musical theater. Even for the modern dance theater in Poznań, he wrote music.
Since he bassist and bandleader Lars Danielsson met at a concert in Warsaw in 2003, the two continuous joint projects have followed. As a result, among other things, four albums came out of it. The two published CDs in Poland with Israeli percussionist Zohar Fresco reached double platinum status.
As a member of the formation Lars Danielsson - Tarantella Możdżer played together with Mathias Eick (tp ) and John Parricelli ( g) at the Festival Jazz Baltica 2010.