Włodek Pawlik is the only Polish winner of the Grammy award in the category of jazz, received in 2014 for the album Night In Calisia (Best Large Jazz Ensemble). He is a graduate of the Fryderyk Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw (now: Fryderyk Chopin University of Music), where he studied the piano with B. Hesse-Bukowska. He also studied jazz at the Hochschule für Musik in Hamburg. Having obtained a doctorate at his alma meter, he has been conducting lectures on improvisation since 2007.
He has recorded 30 albums. Apart from jazz, his artistic output includes film soundtracks, orchestral works, ballet music, operas, and vocal forms.He is the author of soundtracks for a number of acclaimed films, such as Wrony (Crows) and Pora umierać (Time To Die) by Dorota Kędzierzawska; Rewers (Reverse) by Borys Lankosz, awarded a Złoty Lew (Golden Lion) at the 34th Gdynia Polish Film Festival and an Orzeł (Eagle) by the Polish Film Academy in 2010, both for the Best Original Score of the Year, as well as Peter Greenaway’s Nightwatching and Within the Whirlwind by Marleen Gorris.
He is a laureate of the Grand Prix of the International Jazz Contest in Dunkirk, France, and the second prize at the International Jazz Composition Contest in Monaco, among others. He has appeared at such renowned jazz festivals as North Sea in The Hague (1998), European Jazz Festival in Athens (2006), or Kaunas Jazz Festival (2015), to mention just a few.
Throughout the 1990s he performed regularly with the Western Jazz Quartet, a faculty jazz ensemble based at Western Michigan University. The collaboration was marked by numerous concerts around the globe and three CDs: Live at Jazz Club Aquarium, featuring the drummer Billy Hart, Turtles (1995), recorded with Randy Brecker, which was enthusiastically reviewed in Down Beat (the most prestigious American jazz magazine), and Waning Moon (2000). In 2002 he had a successful tour of Australia that was hailed by the The Age daily as the musical event of the year in the country.
In in 2005 Włodek Pawlik won a Fryderyk, the award of the Polish phonographic industry, for his Misterium Stabat Mater for improvising piano and Gregorian choir as well as an annual award of TVP Kultura (Polish national broadcaster’s culture channel) for this trio album Anhelli in 2006. In 2008 the artist composed and recorded the jazz-suite Tykocin along with Randy Brecker, which was re-released in the USA by Summit Records. The record was met with a rave reception in the USA and earned him the title of Jazz Composer of the Year 2009 from the Los Angeles-based Jazz Station. Later that year his Grand Piano, a 2CD album containing solo piano improvisations was released, followed by Struny na Ziemi (Strings in the Earth) in 2011, featuring Pawlik's original music composed to poems by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, which was named the Jazz Album of the Year by the Polish dailies Rzeczpospolita and Gazeta Wyborcza. In 2013 the album Wieczorem (In the Evening) with music set to the poetry of Józef Czechowicz was released. In 2014 the artist composed Freedom, a piece for choir, orchestra and jazz trio, commissioned by the President of Poland Bronisław Komorowski and performed on 4 June 2014 at the Royal Square in Warsaw as part of the celebrations of the Polish Freedom Day attended by many heads of state, including the President of the United States, Barack Obama. In 2016 Pawlik released an album with his original works for orchestra under the title 4 Works 4 Orchestra.
He has given clinics and master classes at the Eastman School of Music, Western Michigan University, Cincinnati College of Music, at the IAJE Jazz Conference in Los Angeles (1999) and at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels.
Most important honours and distinctions include the Order of Polonia Restituta, the Freedom of the City of Kalisz, Coryphaeus of Polish Music (Personality of the Year), Fryderyk (The Jazz Artist of the Year 2014), and Angel of Jazz awarded at the 2015 Bielska Zadymka Jazzowa Festival.
(photo by Marek Bałata)
